Were he alive today, I wonder what Pierre Boulle would have made of the enduring appeal of his novel La Planète de Singes. I doubt he could have predicted that, by his own admission, his unfilmable sci-fi novel would spawn an Oscar winning adaptation in 1968, four sequels between 1970 and 1973, an imaginative but muddled re-boot in 2001, and now this, a second re-boot, once more laden full of content pregnant with possibilities for yet more sequels. I wrote a while back about Hollywood looking too much to its past for inspiration, and indeed there is something wearing about rehashing the same old, albeit fertile, ground; poor Boulle's novel, like many before and after it, has become a cash-cow for the great Hollywood machine. It's sad and its transparent nature as a commodity is embarrassing and ungainly. So what are we left with? Well, as a movie, Rise works surprisingly well. The first thing to say is that, unfortunately, we're still a long way off photorealistic CG characterisation; while intimate close ups of Serkis' Caesar work brilliantly, with every palm-crease and follicle strand being meticulously detailed, long or group shots of the marauding apes lack a feeling of mass and momentum. And it's a shame because there's something endlessly fascinating about the well-trod cautionary tale of Animal and Human. Franco and Pinto don't really do much, Cox is in full-on Rent-a-villain mode, Lithgow does his furrowed brow thing, and Andy Serkis, well when finally the tech's there, I'm sure we'll be talking Oscars once more.