Pun Salad

A tragic tale of how well-intentioned scientific hubris can lead to … well, see the title.

James Franco plays Will, a scientist working desperately hard for a soulless corporation so he can come up with an Alzheimer's cure for his dad (John Lithgow). He tests it on primates, of course. Results are promising, but early demo goes disastrously wrong, and the company demands the primates be put down. Will, however, saves an exceedingly bright infant chimp, bringing him home, and naming him Caesar. Oh oh.

Things go less than smoothly; an altercation between Will's hothead neighbor and Will's demented father blows up into violence and Caesar gets incarcerated in a primate facility. The keepers put up a humane front for the outside world, and manage to deceive Will, but internally it's a Hobbesian nightmare where the apes are brutalized. Caesar, understandably, plots revolt.

There are a lot of nods to the original classic movie series, some subtle, some not so much. (Will someone say "Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!"? Yup.)

Lots of actors caused the "where have I seen them before" reaction. Fortunately, there's IMDB to provide near-instant relief. Will's hapless lab assistant, Franklin? Oh, yeah: he was Dale, in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. And that sadistic keeper at the primate facility turned out to be Tom Felton, aka Draco Malfoy in eight Harry Potter movies. Is he doomed to play psychotic creeps for the rest of his career?