I admit I was a Planet of the Apes fan back in the day. In those years after the first "Star Trek" was cancelled, and before "Star Wars" and the return of "Star Trek".
The franchise still lives. The last movie was underwhelming. Marky-Mark seems to have the opposite level of charisma that Charlton Heston did. The real saving grace of that movie was Paul Giamatti as an orangutan slave trader... played as a drunken Jimmy Stewart.
There's a new one out later this summer. I first heard of it a few years ago billed as a remake of the 4th film, "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes"
There is a longer trailer, and there is one embedded below:
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Someone told me that the CGI was really good in this, but first seeing these trailers today, it doesn't seem so to me. It looks like a version of Jumanji or something. Starting with the baby chimp in the box, it clearly looked fake. The face close ups of Ceasar look a lot more real than the distant shots. So how real do these apes look to you?
For those more literary-minded, check out Pierre Boulle's original Monkey Planet novel which began the whole franchise.
Rock me, Dr. Zaius.
Suomi Summer
7 hours ago
13 comments:
I know shockingly little about the franchise. I remember seeing the original Planet of the Apes, but none of the sequels that I can recall...or at least not in their entirety.
From the trailer, this one looks scary in that SF horror movie way, but the CGI doesn't look particularly impressive.
I saw the previews yesterday while waiting to see X-Men First Class, great movie btw, and my movie gang are planning on seeing it.
It looks very intense and you just can't go wrong with planet of the Apes.
Laura: The sequels have their moments, but don't match the first one. The best of them was "Escape from the Planet of the Apes", which throws the talking chimp couple into the 1970s US.
Leticia: Yes, I want to see the X-Men movie for sure. Maybe this coming week.
It looks like they've tried for an interesting story and concept, and put some original thought into it. If they deliver on that, I can forgive less-than-stellar special effects (not that they look bad, really).
I hardly watch SF movies any more because it seems that all the effort goes into the special effects, and the scripts and stories are an afterthought. This one looks like it might break that pattern, at least a little -- it can be hard to tell from a trailer.
I actually liked the recent re-make; it depicted the apes a lot more realistically than the originals.
James Franco; good
Marky-Mark: bad
As for the last movie/remake, one thing I noticed was that the makeup/design/etc on the female chimp lead just didn't look as good as old Zira from the first movie. But wasn't Giamatti great?
The original, in many ways. was a classic. But, I still have to admit that it bugs me. Chuck Heston (liked the man better in "Touch of Evil"), right - he's on this planet with apes who talk.....ENGLISH!!! I mean, don't you think that maybe he could have figured out that he was back on earth? Did he really need to see the Statue of Liberty? Oh well, at least that babe that he had on horseback was bangin'.
Again about the most recent movie, I remember one reviewer saying that the main chimp character Thade talked like he was in the middle of passing a kidney stone.
At least they got the natural tendencies of the apes more correct in this one: real chimps are often rather violent and murderous (like Thade) and gorillas are gentle giants.
The original movie had a hierarchy that one could easily call racist:
From BlackAmericaWeb:
"...A racial hierarchy. The blonde-haired orangutans are at the top, ruling the roost. Next in line are the chimpanzees, depicted in the films as having brown hair and light-skinned faces. At the bottom are the gorillas, who have black hair and - yes, you guessed right - black-skinned faces.
The orangutans are the smartest. The chimpanzees are rather bright, but clearly no match for the orangutans when it comes to smarts. The gorillas - i.e., black folks, if we are to interpret what the producers are trying to tell us - are ....."
And the most "human" and relatable characters are white-faced chimps, while the black-faced gorillas are all murderous militaristic savages.
All racial issues aside, this is not much in keeping with the biological facts about the great ape species.
The original novel, Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle, also gives real biology short shrift: the gorillas are shown as carnivors, when in fact they are purely vegetarians. Chimps in fact love to eat meat, including other chimps. But not gorillas.
dmarks, if you are an X-Men fan, you'll like it. I just wish they would dress Mystique.
There is something about their faces that I don't care for. Perhaps they look too human around the eyes and show too much human like emotional expression. I guess I want more primate expression and more cunning.
The female chimps in the Burton version weren't very realistic-looking, true. They compromised too much with human standards of attractiveness. Aside from that, the apes did look more realistic than the ones in the original movies.
The "racist" assessment of the original movie seems a bit odd given that the orangutans, while smart (at least in Zaius's case), were also depicted as pompous and rather evil.
It's not surprising that the original doesn't mesh very well with real ape behavior. Not much was known about real apes back then. Modern film-makers don't have that excuse.
The point about the apes speaking English has always bothered me. In Boulle's original novel, where the ape world really was another planet, they did not speak English. he didn't bother to explain who Earthly species such as humans, chimpanzees, etc. came to be on that planet.
The title of Boulle's novel, La Planète des singes, translates exactly, word-for-word, as "The Planet of the Apes". I don't know how this "Monkey Planet" thing got started.
What always bothered me about the Burton version was, how did the horses get there? Did the space station have horses on it too?
I'm getting tired of the endless remakes. I'd love to see new stuff.
Odd, we think of the orangutan as being of a higher order of intelligence..considering that DNA sequence divergence indicates the
chimp followed by the ape
are more humanlike in that respect.
...but orangutans are quite intelligent: one was found reading the Bible and Darwin's Origin of the Species. When asked why, he replied that he was trying to figure out whether he was his brother's keeper...
or his keeper's brother.
(dang, now I got my tongue stuck in my cheek!)
I rank primates strictly according to cuteness; lemurs at the top, humans on the bottom.
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