A five-second clip of a CG WETA monkey from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5)? That’s it? But this, for me, is a more interesting hybrid-simian than the kind Tim Burton created ten years ago, and way better than the Rodeo Drive monkeys in Franklin J. Schaffner‘s 1968 original.

This is a chimp, obviously. It looks more or less like a “real” one instead of a human wearing an ape suit. The ears are well done and so, especially, are the intelligent eyes. The eyes, in fact, reminded me a little bit of the “Dawn of Man” apes in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey — still the high-water mark in this realm.

Rupert Wyatt‘s sci-fi-adventure, an origin story set in present-day San Francisco, costars James Franco, John Lithgow, Freida Pinto, Andy Serkis and Brian Cox. The generic p.r. paragraph says it’s “a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.”