“It’s one of my favorite scripts of any I’ve read,” Felton said. “It’s a brilliant script. It’s a prequel to the classic, ‘Planet of the Apes,’ so it explains how the apes came to power and it’s a fantastic story, really.”

“I have to be careful here because they haven’t given me a clearance to divulge the entire plot — as much as I’d like to. I can tell you it’s a great story. I’m amazed, really, that they didn’t do [the original films] in this order and start with this modern-day story. It seems logical to start with this story and then go forward from there. But here we are; they’ve come back and done this interesting story.

"It essentially follows one particular ape. The story follows this one ape as he ends up in a primate facility, a facility where my character works. Needless to say, I’m not that keen on the monkeys at my facility. I’m not the most pleasant person they’ve ever come across in their life. I show this one particular ape that there is a dark side to humans, and I’m not very nice. And that leads to a backlash …”

That ape is Caesar, and (James) Franco plays the empathetic scientist who takes the ape home to spare him from the cruelties of Felton’s character. Caesar is one of the test subjects in a research program aimed at finding treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, but the work has an unexpected effect on him.