Joe Neumaier at the New York Daily News gave Rise of the Planet of the Apes its first grade-A 100 rating. Now TIME’s Richard Corliss agrees with another perfect score. Corliss says Rupert Wyatt’s film “deserves to be in the company of the great original Kong. This year’s sixth ‘origins’ story of a fantasy franchise is also the year’s finest action movie.”
No question, the movie is an astounding triumph of visual effects. Again, Serkis is playing a motion-capture monkey — the prime primate, Caesar — and gives a performance so nuanced and powerful it may challenge the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give an Oscar to an actor who is never seen in the film…
The original film was a satire of race relations, in the decade of the Selma marches and Watts riots, with the haughty apes treating their human invaders as inferiors. Rise is a story of emancipation as seen from both sides: the human (sympathetic liberals incapable of stanching an armed revolt) and the simian (we gotta be free).
Even if you don’t buy Rise as a semiprofound social document, the utterly seductive integration of apes and men should slacken your jaw in amazement. We have reached that moment in movie history when the century-long chasm between live action and animation has been closed; Rise is a seamless blend of the two. It marks a major advance over Avatar, for it allows the motion-capture actors and the “real” ones to interact in natural locations — in the wild, so to speak — beyond Avatar’s enclosed fantasyland of the planet Pandora. Technical innovation is sometimes yoked to leaden narratives, but Wyatt and his collaborators made sure to wed their visual strategies to potent themes. The result is a work of high, often thrilling popular art.
UPDATE: Rack up two 90s from the LATimes and WSJournal.