Quick review of the movie: Good action, suspect mythology service. Quasi-sympathetic apes, no overt bad guys (except the Harry Potter bleached-blonde douche-kid). Good set-up for a theoretical "Battle for the Planet of the Apes." Decent acting, I guess, but some weird casting choices - such as a guy as young as James Franco playing a project-leading scientist over a thirteen-year period, or Brian Cox being wasted as the keeper of the ape-pound, while another too-young guy plays the greedy corporate boss (over that same 13 years).

On to James Franco's moronic scientist. Spoilers abound. At the beginning of the movie, he discovers that his Alzheimer's drug is making a chimp really, really smart. While presenting this to the board and asking to commence human trials, the ape escapes and flees into the conference room where the security guards gun it down. The reaction of everyone else to this flagrant and undeniable proof of the efficacy of the ape's brain enhancement is to shut down the whole project and cancel the research on the drug. IT. MADE. THE. MONKEY. SMART! This is not a serum to make monkeys walk through walls, it simply makes it smart enough to escape containment protocols designed for dumb animals. The theoretically profit-hungry corporation and the theoretically scientifically-minded scientists don't even bother investigating to see what caused the aberrant behavior (to see if maybe their drug drove it insane or something, if it could be fixed or salvaged or sold to dog-fighting facilities). Nope, they just write off a whole line of drug research and butcher all the monkeys involved. Even setting aside the regulatory issues of killing primates in the Bay Area, it still seems awfully premature and over-reacting.

Franco & the monkey handler find a baby in her cage, and realize that was why their genius monkey freaked out and ran away (never mind the fact that being made really smart SHOULD be sufficient to explain any sentient being's flight from a tiny metal cage and shackles). This begs the question of WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SCIENTISTS OVERLOOKED THEIR PRIZE SPECIMAN'S PREGNANCY & BIRTHING?!?!? Since Franco already has an Alzheimers-inflicted father at home, he decides to bring home another semi-sentient creature and takes the baby chimp to raise himself. He sees how smart it is and how fast it learns to talk and whatnot, and gives it the eerily prescient name of a guy who rebelled and imposed a military dictatorship - Caesar.

When the frustrations of taking care of his father overwhelm him, he then steals some of his old drug project from his lab and injects his father, whose Alzheimer's is cured overnight. He never mentions this, or his genius monkey, to anyone until the medicine begins losing efficacy, and then he persuades his boss to restart the project with anecdotal evidence of the effect on his father with details of it's effects increasing intelligence (omitting the detail that those effects were in a stolen monkey). And bam! A whole new research effort is approved, just like that!

Meanwhile, bad stuff is going on with Caesar. Not many details are given regarding his training or raising by Franco & his Indian vet girlfriend and non-Alzheimer's father, but from his adult behavior he seems a bit confused about whether or not he is a person or animal (my cousins had a dog named Caesar, and I have never heard of white people naming each other that, so they went with "animal" in that respect) and what his position exactly should be in society. When he sees a neighbor acting in a hostile manner to his "grandfather" who has suffered an Alzheimer's relapse, Caesar goes berserk and attacks the neighbor, deliberately biting him after stalking and beating him up. While Franco has been doing all sorts of intelligence tests and showering his monkey with love, he has apparently never bothered to teach him right from wrong or prudent behavior in public, or how to handle such crises. Slick parenting there from a guy who tells the ape "I'm your father." When Caesar is taken away and placed in a primate-shelter run by Brian Cox and Draco Malfoy, he seems confused and upset, so plainly the concept of "jail" has never been explained to him. I think my three-year-old nephew could grasp the concept of jail and the fact that he was being sent there for biting someone.

At this point, we can now guess that Franco sucks as a scientist (my monkey was pregnant and had a baby while under my observation? ), as a researcher (absolutely no success or positive performance unless his father is suffering symptoms of whatever he is trying to cure), as a father and as an educator.

Anyway, Caesar has a hard time in ShawshApe Prison, what with the leader of the main monkey-gang beating him up in the yard at exercise time, and the guards abusing him, but he makes friends with the wise old veteran orangutan inmate, and reaches out to befriend the tough gorilla loner in solitary. Eventually, he uses his superior intelligence to fashion a shiv, leave his cell at night, fight his way to dominance in the yard, and obtain illicit favors for his fellow inmates and unite them under his leadership.

Meanwhile, trying to make his Alzheimer's drug stronger (it is a virus that cures brains - do I need to go into detail about how damn lucky he is that he didn't end up with zombies? ), Franco does some half-assed tests and follows his pattern of bringing hom illicit samples to try on rapidly regressing dad (since the problem is his immune system developing anti-bodies for the brain-fixing virus, my first thought was immuno-suppressant drugs, rather than an experimental treatment that looks like green smoke the Joker might plan to unleash on Gotham City, but I guess that's why I am neither a genius research scientist, nor the man who turned the planet over to the monkeys). Dad, in his addled state, gently refuses treatment, and Franco acquiesces, because even a guy with late-stage Alzheimer's is more worthy of trust than his own instincts at this point. Now, with Dad out of the way, he no longer gives a rat's ass about curing Alzheimer's and marches into work giving lectures about how dangerous their project is. He give no reason for it, and the only thing the film gives us is some fortune-cookie bromide from his girlfriend about accepting the way things are. The man who ignored the potential in his genius monkey and did un-controlled and non-monitored human trials on his own father, suddenly thinks that the big professional lab with a tendency to shut down entire projects and drug lines over unrelated accidents, is being reckless about all this. The only reason the audience would swallow this, is that we have become conditioned to accepting the evil of corporations that produce sci-fi drugs or technology, particularly the profit-motivated individuals in short haircuts and crisp suits employed by them.

The Planet of the Apes issue arises when Caesar breaks out of monkey-prison and goes to his old house while Franco sleeps, and rummages around in his fridge until he finds the Alzheimer's gas that he never got around to giving Dad. Caesar takes this back to ShawshApe Prison and gasses the cell block. The apes all get smart overnight, break out and rampage through San Francisco to break into the lab, free the other experimentally smart monkeys and trash the place. This leads to a badass showdown between apes and tactically retarded cops on the Golden Gate Bridge as the climax of the film. The main chimp liberated from the lab also shoves Franco's old boss to his death. No reason for this is ever given, nor for that ape's general hostility to the man who never mistreated any apes until they tried to mob him in his own building. But he's a corporate type so its all good.

During the fight scene, Franco evades the police to charge onto the bridge where the monkeys are rampaging trying to get to Caesar to...well, that's never explained. Ask him nicely to give up his leadership of the Aperising and come home to be a house-pet? Request to join the revolution as the first human collaborApetionist? Persuade him to seek a political solution? Anyway, when he does finally meet up with Caesar, he apologizes for the whole scenario. "So sorry I gave you guys increased intelligence, rather than euthanizing you as a baby?" I could understand him going on national TV and apologizing to the rest of his species, but aside from failing to properly teach Caesar not to attack people in order to evade Ape-Jail, he has nothing to apologize to the damn dirty ape for!

Oh, and that drug he almost rammed down his dying father's throat? Turns out a human accidentally gets exposed to it, and dies, but not before spewing blood on another human. The coda at the end of the film suggests this will spread into a world-wide epidemic that will make it possible for this small community of non-speaking apes to eventually dominate the human population. So, not only did he enable the apes to rise, he also invented the means for humans to fall to make way for them! And he never followed up on the guy whose gas mask fell off when gas got out of the hose. What the HELL kind of scientific procedures does he follow? "We want to see what this virus, that ideally, will ultimately be used to help people, does. Therefore, when we plainly see a human become exposed to it, we shall NOT do immediate tests and place him under supervision, we shall NOT follow up when he calls out sick for several days, and the audience will only learn the ramifications of his condition through an expository phone call moments before the character taking the call encounters the Aperising." Yeah, that sounds like a good scientific method.

A final amusing issue - the main ape from the science lab is named Koba, which IIRC, was one of Josef Stalin's aliases during the Russian Revolution. This suggests a none-too-bright future for Caesar apeministration as leader of the smart apes, with the nasty, scarred and homicidal Koba eventually seizing power from Caesar, not unlike Stalin and Trotsky, or better, Napoleon and Snowball in Animal Farm. Of course, this will be well-beyond the concern of the humans who will presumably be living in feral refugee tribes, who, if there is any justice in the world, will carry with them James Franco's skull to use as a portajohn. It will be the best use anyone has put his mind to in the whole run of the franchise.