WORTH 12 BUCKS?: "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes" (REVIEW)

Simian summer it is.  

Anyone who has seen James Marsh's thought provoking documentary Project Nim, about a chimp named Nim, will have their viewing experience of Rise of the Planet of the Apes a bit enhanced. And then some.  

After Nim, Rise feels like the more commercial and entertaining version of the life of Nim's relatives, only that in this installment Caesar is the Nim relative who moved to San Francisco.  

Rise is fully aware of our collective psychosis regarding contagion, our race to find a cure to incurable diseases and our burning curiosity regarding genetic engineering. No doubt that this awareness gently guided and inspired writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and director Rupert Wyatt in telling this present day story of science gone mad.

James Franco as a genetic scientist will always be a stretch but when you have speaking apes, I guess suspension of disbelief is the name of the game. Franco is Dr. Will Rodman, whose five years of research at the cool looking facilities (is there any other type?) of the pharmaceutical company Gen-Sys, is about to pay off big time.  

A potential cure to Alzheimer's is in sight but this news may just be too good to be true. When Will is about to close the deal on his research by presenting the latest evidence on a breakthrough with a gene therapy drug called AOZ-112, his world is turned upside down.