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CinemaSins Movie Reviews
It’s prequel time! This is how it all began.
This review contains SPOILERS, although trust me, I”m doing you a favor.
I love the Planet of the Apes movies. When I was a young otter (10) I saw the original awesome Charlton Heston movie at a drive in theater (note for Maid-of-Awesome and other young people*) so not only was the movie AMAZING, but the last scene made a huge impression on me, being on a gigantic screen as it was. Great movie.
The four sequels were awful but fun to watch. Then Tim Burton remade the original in 2001 and (boo! hiss!) REWROTE it (one of the things that has made me NOT like him, after he started out so promisingly…but there were others…) Anyway. He revived the whole idea…and now this.
This movie came out and I was completely indifferent to it. Then I saw previews, and they actually looked pretty good…then I heard from a couple of people that it was actualy a good movie…so I got it from my public library, where <shameless plug> you can check out dvds and blu-rays FOR FREE, folks!</shameless plug>
And worth every penny.
Because after reading about this movie, and seeing the trailers, it SOUNDED like an apocalypse movie, where we would actually see the end of human civilization happen, and see the apes take over and start to build their own society and enslave the humans and get us to where the first movie joins up…but no.
No, that couldn’t happen because that would have made it a GOOD MOVIE. Instead, we see the researchers come up with an injection that makes apes hyper intelligent, it gets into people and causes flu, and at the end of the movie we see that A) the intelligent chimps have gotten loose and have escaped to what looks like Muir Woods, except that I don’t think you can actually see the Golden Gate from there; B) people are starting to go down from the flu, and although it’s not explicitly said in the movie, this is going to wipe out the humans; and C) the Icarus (Charlton Heston’s rocket in the first movie) has taken off and they have lost contact with it.
AND THAT’S IT. They set up all this good stuff, but you don’t actually get to SEE ANY OF IT HAPPEN.
No, What you see is a lot of scenes of people (like James Franco, who is a good actor and deserved better than this movie) interacting with the apes in various ways and the ape who is first injected with the stuff getting smarter and smarter and eventually (and this is where I fell to the floor hooting) TALKING.
So now the reality police show up. Because although I am okay with the injection that makes the apes smarter, apes are not physically built to form human speech. Just not. It would take generations for that to happen, not three days and a stressful situation.
So the movie ended…and I was all, NOOOOOO! Because even though Spider Jerusalem had seen it on my coffee table and warned me, I still watched it, expecting against all hope that it would be pretty good.
Silly me.
Profit from my mistake, True Fan, and do not watch this dog. It’s just not worth your time.
*see, in the old days we would get in our cars and actually drive to a big parking lot with a gigantic outdoor screen to watch movies, just for the fun of it. There was a little speaker box on a pole that you could clip to the inside of your car window if you wanted to close it, but usually we all left them open. You could watch from the car seats, or on the hood, or even bring lawn chairs, and there was a place on one side of the parking lot that sold snacks, or you could bring your own. That’s a drive-in movie theater.
theotterlimits 