Movies

So about a month ago (or a meager four blog posts ago) I posted how I thought the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a bad idea. While most people agreed with me (as smart, good looking people tend to do) the Adams (otherwise known as the gruesome twosome) basically said I was the biggest fucking idiot they ever had the displeasure of reading, how I was wrong in every way possible, and that I have a small penis.

Anyway, the point of my post was to say that I thought the new movie (which I hadn’t seen at the time) changed what was originally a cautionary tale of man wiping themselves out and apes evolving to take their place, into a more Hollywood tale of humans creating supersmart apes that overthrow them. The gruesome twosome had a field day telling me how ignorant I was and insisted that I was an idiot for not taking the four sequels that came out after Planet of the Apes into consideration.

What they said is true. I didn’t take the four sequels into consideration before writing my post. At the time, I had only seen the original Planet of the Apes (and the Tim Burton remake, but the less said about that, that better) but I still stand by my post in regards to my hesitancy to accept the plot of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I have since watched the four sequels and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and can now speak about each more thoroughly.

I’d just like to start off by saying that this series is amazing. I was totally blown away by the complexity of the series, and the incredible continuity from movie to movie. It was definitely a single story told over a series of movie in the same vein as Star Wars. Do I think they had the entire series planned out when they made the first movie? No. Just like I don’t think George Lucas always knew Anakin built C-3PO or J.K. Rowling knew about the Elder Wand or the Horcruxes. But what they were able to create (especially with the last three movies) was a really cool circular storyline that carried over from movie to movie astonishingly well.

Another thing that struck me about these movies are how freaking dark they are. You haven’t felt gloomy till you’ve seen the ending to Escape from Planet of the Apes. What started off as a fun The Voyage Home-y fish out of water story turned into BAM! BAM! DEATH! DIE! BAM! BAM! BANG! Mama…

But as I’ve said, these movies were fantastic. And now I can talk about how I was wrong (an extremely rare occurrence) in my previous post. Humans didn’t kill themselves off letting apes evolve to take their place over millions of years. The transition from human-dominated to ape-dominated in the original timeline of the first two movies is only a thousand years. The transition becomes even shorter when Cornelius and Zira go back in time and accelerate things by having their evolved child Caesar accelerate matters with his rebellion. And the nuclear war that annihilated humans wasn’t just regular good old fashioned human war, it was more about the humans attempt to stop the apes from taking over.

So there. I was wrong. I still think I have a valid point when just looking at the first movie, and the intentions of the filmmakers at that time, but I will concede that an ape rebellion against the humans was the intent of the original series, and I was wrong to think that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was lame for being about apes rebelling against humans and not humans wiping themselves out.

Now let’s talk about the new movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It was really good. It tells the story of a scientist and his crusade to find a drug that cures Alzheimer’s. In the movie, he experiments on apes and the result is a super smart ape named Caesar who begins the ape rebellion. Overall the story was really good, and the special effects were amazing. I’d even say it even has similar themes to the original series. The original series was very reminiscent of the civil rights movement, while this new movie lost a bit of that and it came across more about animal rights. Not that that’s a bad thing, animal rights is a big issue, it just doesn’t have the same power as civil rights.

I still have some beef with the movie though. As a fan of the original series (yes, I only just saw them a week ago, but as a fanboy I reserve the right to have fanboy rage at the drop of a hat, and I’m reminded of this quote from the Family Guy Star Wars parody:

Chris (Luke Skywalker): You don’t believe in the Force, do you?
Peter (Han Solo): Oh, you mean the thing you just found out about three hours ago and are now judging me for not believing in?

) I can still be upset with this movie for what it does with the timeline. Wait a second, did I just open and close parentheses around a blockquote? Holy shit, my mind has just been blown. Okay, I’m back!

What the hell is this new movie? It’s a reboot, plain and simple. This isn’t a prequel that fits nicely into the framework set up by the original series. It completely contradicts what we know about the ape rebellion in the original series. And frankly, as a newbie fan of the original series, it’s kind of annoying. The Caesar of this movie, is not the Caesar of the original movies. The original movies also didn’t have supersmart gas that turned helped the apes rebel, which is something I’ve always found a bit cheap about the new movie. But like I said before, the new movie is really good. It just doesn’t fit in with the other movies, and it’s obvious that the filmmakers wanted to make a cool action movie and just gave it a Planet of the Apes title.

So in conclusion, the original Planet of the Apes movies are awesome, and I was wrong not to take the entire series into consideration when discussing my beef with the new movie. And yes, the new movie is pretty darn good, but I still stand by the fact that the science experiment gone wrong storyline isn’t as powerful as the intent and message of the first movie and the series that followed.

Oh, and my penis is just right, thank you very much.