- 9
...does it right. Smart, fun and thoroughly enjoyable, it's a model summer diversion that entertains without insulting your intelligence.
—Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times
- 9
...triumphs. It is an excellent example of restrained speculation, something there is very little of in today's slam bang spectacle driven sci-fi.
—Bill Gibron filmcritic.com
- 8
...a solid reboot of the perennially successful franchise.
—Todd McCarthy Hollywood Reporter
- 8
...shown in absorbing, propulsive style...
—Nick Pinkerton Village Voice
- 8
...makes for an impressive, if predictably downbeat prequel to a franchise famous for unhappy endings.
—Peter Debruge Variety
- 8
After all of the feel-good, comic-book heroics of summer, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a surprisingly nasty (in a good way) franchise reboot that comes closer than any prior POTA film to being a full-on horror movie.
—L. Thompson E!
- 7
...stand(s) alone as a satisfying prequel requiring little or no knowledge or nostalgia for the five Planet of the Apes pictures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 7
With top-notch computer-generated images, this sci-fi action thriller revives the series and creates a palpable sense of tension...
—Claudia Puig USA Today
- 7
Bottom line: This is the movie you may have been expecting. No less, no more.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 7
To watch what actor Andy Serkis does as Caesar, the lead ape in this movie, is to witness a kind of miracle.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 7
I kind of enjoyed Rise of the Planet of the Apes despite its evident silliness and the fact that nobody's likely to remember it three weeks from now.
—Andrew O'Hehir Salon
- 7
In a film not short on clever touches, one of the cleverest is the way it makes its human characters increasingly irrelevant as the world they thought was theirs starts to slip through their fingers.
—Keith Phipps Onion AV Club
- 7
...an amusingly cheerful film about the end of humanity that's PETA and critic approved...
—Manohla Dargis New York Times
- 6
... just-okay ... in almost every way...
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 5
From the start, this visually inexpressive, wishy-washy spectacle of weird science run amok dawdles cleanly if banally toward its telegraphed climax; its lack of delicacy and emotional nuance doesn't allow for poignancy, and its caginess is such that it never really functions as a screed against genetic engineering.
—Ed Gonzalez Slant Magazine
- 5
...tolerable if you'll just keep in mind that the original feature was an overachieving B-movie.
—Kyle Smith New York Post
- 4
This is the kind of movie where the characters are always saying things like, ?What are you saying?? Plot points are continually reiterated. Obviously director Rupert Wyatt doesn't think we in the audience are as smart as Caesar [the main monkey in the film].
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor