Planet Of The Apes

Best (intentional) misquote of the (2001) movie: "Don't send a man to do a monkey's job."

The old one:: Brutal, ironic, allegorical, beautifully scripted, nicely acted, made on a shoestring, a preachy but intriguing movie with one hell of a punchline.

The new one:: Milquetoast, vapid, formulaic, poorly acted, horribly written. Lavishly funded, beautifully crafted, a forgettable flick with a non-sequitur instead of a payoff. Beautifully crafted? Beautifully photographed, maybe. A film with editing that loose isn't a good example of craft.

The original one:: A novel written by French author Pierre Boule, who also wrote "The bridge over the River Kwai". Which makes it a meditation on the theme: what if you woke up one day to find that the Japanese had in fact won the war in the Pacific?
The musical:: Starring TroyMcClure?, whom you may remember from such films as Locker room towel fight: the blinding of Jerry Driscol, as the human. Includes such classic numbers as Rock me, Dr Zeuss and You'll Never Make a Monkey Out Of Me.
: "I hate every chimp I see, from chimpan-a to chimpan-z"

Essentially, the new movie delivers everything the first did not. And nothing that it did. Don't go expecting the same thing, and you might have an enjoyable kid-flick experience.

I await the sequel, "Planet of the Bonobos". Kind of like BoogieNights? but without the cameras, cocaine, disco, violence & voyerism...

Spoilers follow.

Spoilers below!

It's awful nice to see that MichaelJackson can get movie roles again. What, that wasn't MichaelJackson?

Allowing the humans to talk removed any justification for the sexual tension between Wahlberg and Carter. I mean, come on Mark, the blonde with heroic bosom is over there, leave monkey-gal alone already.

Where the original was science fiction, or close to it, the Burton flick is schlock fantasy. Getting rid of the Bomb rationale removed the fundamental message of the first film. Getting rid of the archaeology scenes removed the fundamental irony of the first film. Instead of the Bomb we have the Pistol. Instead of the attack on religious dogma we have a quick and dirty swipe at genomics. Instead of vaguely physically acceptable relativistic manifest-destiny dilemmas we have yet another cross-time and reverse-time travel franchise. The grand preachy message of the first film has been intentionally diluted to something that will sell more action figures.

Was the Bomb in the first PotA film? I thought that was in one of the sequels (Beneath the Planet of the Apes maybe? They explain the bomb in beneath, but the statue bit is in the first one). It was a little ironic in the new one to see CharltonHeston? describing a handgun as a symbol of ingenuity, power, and cruelty.

Heston was never above unintentional irony. Check out his all-unaware gay scenes in BenHur?. As to the Bomb, well one actually blowed up in Beneath, but it was the essential motivation of the original in that it was the only explanation for mute humans and talking apes.

And how did the apes manage to destroy those two extra moons before the end of the Burton flick? Were BillAndTed? involved somehow?

No no no. I understand your confusion about the moons and the last scene -- it took several trained science fiction users and several hours of pondering to work it out: Stoneface Mark actually goes back to Earth. BUT note that the (real) chimp was in Pod Alpha, and Stoneface Mark was in Pod Delta. So "clearly" what happened is that after he left to go to Earth from the Planet of the "Apes" (see below), Thayd and some female (guess who) got into Pod Beta and went back to somewhere in the 19th Century and spawned a race of earth apes. Clear as the nose... oh, right -- they don't have noses. -- BillTozier

No way do Thade + MichaelJackson + 1 pistol overcome a nation full of warring Americans. No, there's only one possible explanation: Thade hijacks the beta pod, goes way back to the dawn of man, and shoots all the humans. Then he fast-forwards to the 19th century and rules the earth apes for a while. Then BillAndTed? turn up and borrow him for their science experiment... or something ...

Planet of the Horses My ingenious wife points out that the storyline describes how humans and apes arrive on the Planet, but are we expected to believe that the crew of the Oberon included horses? If not, then perhaps they originated on this planet. Maybe they were taken to earth by the time-travelling Thayd... -- BillTozier

Has anyone else noticed that senates in movies, no matter how prominent or influential, are always incompetent and on the verge of dissolution?

An anthropologist reported on NationalPublicRadio that, like recent movies such as Tarzan or MightyJoeYoung?, the movie followed a lot of research into simian behavior. Things like knuckle-walking for speed, or social grooming, or patting another on the shoulder.

The anthropologist also dug how the apes got offended when they were called "monkeys". She said that years of dumb HollyWood inaccuracies produce students unaware that monkeys are a different clade from apes - the former have tails. - A monkey clade would have to include apes. It is somewhat odd, though, that the apes considered themselves closer to monkeys than humans. Most people I know, know the difference.

Good ape body language does not make for a good ape movie. And plainly it's their audience they now mistake for monkeys.

The older movie essentially made a lot of things up or followed assumptions about apes.

The older movie posited intelligence evolving in apes in response to increased mutation rates due to radiation exposure. If they talk there's no particular reason to think their body language would remain unchanged. The newer movie, by suggesting their body language would not change after genetic tinkering, is probably further from this mark.

I respond to your chest-thumping by raising my eyebrows and lowering my eyelids at you.

That was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The only big budget movie I can think that is worse was Soldier with Kurt Russell. It was worse than WaterWorld?, even.

This is only the second film I can remember almost walking out of (the other was Deep Impact). Only waiting for Chuck's cameo kept me in my seat. After the pistol scene unveiled the "plot", I stayed on just through a slightly queazy interest in how they were going to untangle this incoherent mess. I needn't have bothered - they didn't.

The movie is an example of BlowUpYourProblems? ethic.