"No" – Caesar

It's fair to say that nobody really expected anything from Rise of the Planet of the Apes when it was released three years ago. Although the 1968 original had become an indelible piece of pop culture, it was followed by three sequels that were only fitfully entertaining and several spin-offs that succeeded only in cheapening the franchise, including a TV series, a string of TV movies, a cartoon series (featuring a guest appearance by someone called William Apespear) and a spectacularly misjudged Tim Burton remake that ended with Mark Wahlberg staring at a statue of Monkey Abraham Lincoln.

And then this. The greatest indignity of all. A reboot. A know-nothing young upstart wiping everything good away from a perfectly decent film, all in the name of profit. And casting James Franco in it, for crying out loud. Yes, the apes looked impressive, but it was hard to escape the feeling that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was doomed merely to be remembered as an expensive and unnecessary showcase for Weta's motion capture technology. How wrong that feeling was.

"Something horrible has happened" – Linda

In the original franchise, the ape uprising occurred because Cornelius and Zira managed to escape their home planet in a time machine seconds before Charlton Heston nuked it in a tantrum. They went back to the 70s, had a baby, named it Caesar, gave it to a circus and ended up being murdered. Then a virus wiped out all the cats and dogs, forcing Caesar to grow up in a world where apes had become slave-pets for humans. Eventually he organised a violent uprising against the humans, planting the seed of the Planet of the Apes. Which, obviously, is a little bit convoluted.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes simplifies things immeasurably. All the time travel is jettisoned, and the cause of the uprising is boiled down to a potent combination of a wayward Alzheimer's treatment and Draco Malfoy acting like an unbearable twat all the time. If that isn't enough to make you want to destroy humanity, nothing is.

"Careful. Humans don't like smart ape" – Maurice

Unlike the new Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is an almost brilliant film let down by moments of Dark Knight Rises-esque bloat, Rise retains the beautiful economy of the original franchise. In less than 10 minutes the Alzheimer's treatment is explained and goes wrong and James Franco has care of Caesar. Less than 20 and Caesar has developed into a less offensive version of Robin Williams in Jack, watching children play from his window and wishing that he could join them. Skip forward an hour and he's waging all-out species-obliterating war on the humans. It goes along at quite a clip.

And yet, despite the stakes and the technology and all the accelerated storytelling, the heart of the film is John Lithgow's dementia-stricken human character. It's a tender, heartbreaking performance through which the entire narrative flows. Without him, James Franco wouldn't be developing a cure. Without him, Caesar would have never learned about humanity's positive traits. Broadly speaking, you can split Rise of the Planet of the Apes into two halves – the half where John Lithgow is alive, which is all about empathy, and the half where he's dead, which is all about atrophy.

Rise was released around the same time as Project Nim, the gut-wrenching documentary about a chimp raised as a human, and the parallels between the two films have never been clearer. The message of both is clear – a chimpanzee is for life, not just for Christmas. Sure, it might look cute in a red T-shirt, but take your eyes off it for so much as a second and it'll organise a violent resistance to you on a bridge somewhere. Those damn dirty apes.

Notes

• Three years ago, my cinema companion whispered that David Oyelowo was basically playing Johnson from Peep Show. This is something you cannot unsee.

• Koba, the ape-antagonist of the new Planet of the Apes series, is named after one of Joseph Stalin's aliases. He never really stood a chance with a name like that, did he?

• James Franco has notched up 18 film credits in the three years since Rise of the Planet of the Apes was released. None – at least none of his dramatic roles – has even come close to matching it. Wouldn't it be nice if he was better at picking projects?

• Hail Caesar! But who's the screen king of the Planet of the Apes?
• More of Stuart Heritage's film on TV recaps