I think George Lucas deserves some credit where it’s due, and say what you will about the prequels, the opening to Revenge of the Sith, with the dogfight over the planet was pretty awe-inspiring. So when the trailer for Red Tails came out, I was excited to see a Lucasfilm production that focused mainly on one of the strengths he still had.

And I’m pleased to say that he’s still got it. The dogfights in Red Tails look good, give a good sense of whose plane is whose (with the exception of the opening battle), further the plot, and build on each other. You can see the Lucas touch of following one plane during its flight then latching on to another.

In one sequence, a group (squadron?) take down a train, with one pilot taking it head on. Another shows how the under-equipped planes of the heroes are able to fight with lightning-fast German jets.

There was a kind of grandeur to the science-fiction films of the 1960s. Naturally they didn’t have the kinds of special effects that we have now, but they worked on big ideas, from the nature of humanity in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the contemporary fears of overpopulation in Soylent Green to the timeless question of whether apes will be our masters in the original Planet of the Apes.

I can’t think of many (or any for that matter) modern remakes that recapture or even attempt to emulate that grandeur of their bigger-thinking predecessors (however silly their concerns may have been). Instead of big ideas, Rise has a pretty simple story: James Franco is a researcher at a drug company, working on a cure for Alzheimer’s that accelerates the creation of brain tissue.

During a board meeting with the investors, one of his brightest test subjects escapes and crashes the party at exactly the wrong time. The beast is put down, but she’s revealed to have been pregnant, and Franco adopts her son (prophetically named “Caesar” by Franco’s senile father, played by John Lithgow). As the years go by, Franco realizes that the cure injected into the mother has been passed on to Caesar, who’s developed into a Superchimp, exhibiting an uncanny intelligence.