Another highly-anticipated movie for this year is 20th Century Fox's "Planet of the Apes" prequel, "Rise of the Apes". It is one of those must-see science fiction flicks from the production that created performance capture innovation and made the "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy the new cinema verite of the century.

Directed by noted film director Rupert Wyatt, whose best known for his work "The Escapist", which reaped recognition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Directing this film is a big challenge for Wyatt because this would be his very first CGI film.

Rise of the Apes stars James Franco as a brilliant scientist who makes a breakthrough in ape intelligence with test subject Caesar, played by Andy Serkis. Described as a reality-based cautionary tale, "Rise of the Apes" was written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The film also co-stars Tom Felton, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, and Freida Pinto.

Unlike the "Planet of the Apes" film that starred Mark Walhberg in 2001 the, prequel would not have the talking monkeys. It would primarily dwell on humans that use science to create hyper-intelligent chimpanzees and how it backfires to their tinkering with nature.

The Apes will be created using CGI by the wonderful tram at WETA Digital rather than the traditional costumed actors as we have all seen in the past installments of the franchise. Production has reportedly used certain groundbreaking technologies developed for Avatar and will be rendered, for the first time ever, in the film series with apes that are photo-realistic rather than costumed actors.

Lead star James Franco recently told FlicksAndBits that its the production people, who helped film director Peter Jackson, who actually convinced him to accept the project.

"I'm unabashedly a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings and so I thought, 'Oh, if they are going to be involved in this, it's actually going to be a different kind of acting experience.' I've never acted off of somebody doing performance capture and Andy Serkis is the best at that so it could be interesting," the Reelz Channel report quoted Franco.