Dawn of The Planet of The Apes--seen it (Open spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

It was okay. The humans were just as stupid as the plot needed them to be. Why are they still acting like the apes are just animals when they know that they have human or near-human intelligence? Why is everyone on the verge of panic and rioting at the prospect of losing electric power? Humans got along okay without electricity for most of human history. And why is it Gary Oldman’s fault if they can’t get the hydro station working again? They couldn’t find another place to live, someplace warmer, if the apes happen to be living in those woods? The movie is based on a false conflict.

And yeah, it’s San Francisco, not a rain forest. The city would not be completely overgrown with creeping vegetation in ten years.

And let’s bring along the most fearful, stupid, trigger-happy idiot we can find when we go where there might be apes. After ten years the humans would know how much is at stake in dealing with the apes and would be extremely careful in how they proceed. Let’s not bring the guy who’s prone to panic, shall we? If they’d made a point to not even bring guns with them, the initial conflict wouldn’t have happened.

I did like the “not all humans are the same” aspect. When the apes see the conflict between Caesar and Koba, we get “not all apes are the same, either.”

22

I know, I saw the previews and thought “where did all the fucking monkeys come from?”

There are maybe 300K Chimps & Gorillas left.

There are 7.176 billion humans. Ok a plague wipes out 90%. That leaves 717 million humans. Do the math.

23

But for most of human history, we had in place an infrastructure that did not assume the use of electricity. Turning off all the electricity today would lead to mass starvation.

24

They were living after a plague wiped out most of humanity - mass starvation would not be a problem, for them.

Nothing in the plot made any sense.

They had cars - they are shown constantly driving over to the ape-forest, but needed a hydro dam to generate power to work their radio? That was the major plot-point - the main thing they needed power for according to the movie itself (aside from the pretty lights).

Apparently, not one of them thought to use their car engines to power their radio. As it turns out, they only needed power for a coupla hours to make contact with a military base (setting up the sequel).

25

I got the impression the survivors were treating electricity as a sort of fetish* for Civilization with a capital C: “as long as we have lights, etc., we’ve made some kind of recovery from the dark days after the plague struck.” Keeping up appearances, like the old story of the British coastwatcher/stranded sailor/whatever on an island by himself who makes a point of putting on his shirt and eating at a table off a plate with proper utensils even though he’s alone and eating canned rations. When a rescuer/new strandee mocks him for stuffy ceremoniousness, he responds that it’s his one reminder of Home/Civilisation and helps keep him sane.

As to why stick with San Francisco, practically it’s all the resources left behind after the plague. Not just all the buildings, vehicles, tools, etc. for a population a multiple of the survivor population, but specifically SF was a well-stocked refugee center before the final collapse. Note all the faded FEMA and CDC signage around SF, including on the vehicles they use to go to the dam, and one of the lead humans (Oldman’s character, IIRC) speechifies that the survivors are amply supplied because of FEMA & CDC.

Also, less practically and more emotionally, its the same desire to return to normalcy (living in a big city, not the countryside) as the electricity thing combined with “thus far and no further!” weariness. Almost by definition, you’re never going to be civilized if you’re nomadic. :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=xizor]
Also, since it was implied that the humans didn’t know the apes were there, why were they living in a fortified city? They didn’t even know if any other people were out there. Who were they thinking was going to attack? That bear?
[/QUOTE]
Well, as Oldman’s character said, they spent five years fighting the plague and another five fighting each other. :eek: The fortification was presumably left over from that time.

[QUOTE=Malthus]
And if they did fort up, why store their arms outside the fort?
[/QUOTE]
The survivors didn’t store them there, the last military units in SF did. :slight_smile: The armory was where the Navy (or National Guard, but IIRC it was dock-side and the movie showed a keeled-over warship) put it.

It is a plot hole that they didn’t bring all the weapons inside the fort, but (fanwank!) maybe they didn’t find the armory until after the warring-with-other-survivors stage was over, by which time they considered all of SF theirs and saw no reason to waste effort bringing the contents of the armory en masse into the fort.

This was addressed in the movie: Nervous Norvis was their dam “expert.” One of the characters mentioned that they need him because “he used to work for the water department” (presumably in the Californian sense of Water-and-Power as one agency). I doubt he was an engineer, but in the decimated population he may be the closest they’ve got. :eek: As to bringing guns, the apes weren’t the only threat in the woods. I’m sure Caesar’s son would have liked to have a gun when he encountered that bear. :slight_smile:

All that said, I agree 100% with

That was a major plot hole. The ten years of torment and trouble :stuck_out_tongue: wouldn’t have wiped out the survivors’ memories of the ape escape :stuck_out_tongue: in the previous movie.
*Fetish in the cargo-cult sense, not the sexual sense. :wink:

26

According to the movie at least, these particular humans simply never heard of the smart apes before, and meeting them was a complete surprise in their initial contact.

I admit that I was wincing as they set up the conflict as ‘we need that particular hydro dam that just happens to be located next to ape-town’. They have quite literally the whole of the North American continent to choose from as far as they know, and they need that particular dam - the one infested with angry, intelligent apes? Could not a more sensible conflict be devised?

27

The reason given in-movie is that they need power to run their radio to contact other survivors.

I know that it was a surviving armoury. The point was that they are shown in the movie having time enough to test each and every gun to make sure it works (this is a major plot point! The gun testers are later killed by the bad ape and their guns stolen to use in the assasination attempt on the ape leader - which, apparently, did not alarm the humans one bit).

They do this because they fear they may need the guns because of the intelligent ape menace - but it simply never occurs to them to just take the guns to their fort.

28

It’s not really my type of movie, so I don’t know if I’m going to see it. But seeing as it’s a “Planet of the Apes” prequel, how do they go about building up suspense when you know the apes are eventually going to win? I’ve seen the commercials with the apes charging in on horses and the humans opening fire, and it seems as though the apes are going to have to be shielded by plot armor. If they lose, then there’s no Planet of the Apes.

29

Yes, one of the reasons. :slight_smile: Another is when Dreyfus (Oldman’s character, just looked it up) makes a speech linking electricity and civilization.
[QUOTE=Dreyfus]
And I want you to know, it’s not just about power! It’s about giving us the hope to rebuild, to reclaim the world we lost!
[/QUOTE]
And while everyone was wildly (like V-J-day level) celebrating the connection of hydro-power, Dreyfus instead looks at his family photos on his dirty-screened iPad, which he probably wasn’t able to use as long as they were rationing electricity.

IMHO, they want electricity for its practical uses, yes, but it’s also deeply symbolic of the civilized world they left behind and are trying to restore. And Dreyfus is clearly not alone in his attitude that no apes are going to stand in the way of that and they’re willing to go to war over it. :eek:

30

I think in the film they said that one in five hundred people survived the simian flu. That leaves only about 14 million worldwide. And some number died in the fighting and chaos after. So the number of remaining people worldwide would be tiny.

31

The estimate of the world’s human population prior to agriculture is in that range - 15 million.

So, until arounf 10,000 years ago, that was the population of humans. Small compared to post-agriculture, and tiny compared to today, but still a robust population.

There is no conceivable way that an ape colony, which we see lived by hunting and gathering, and started from a few dozen individuals, could possibly match those numbers. Unless there is something more, the contest appears very uneven.

32

It still makes no sense IMO, even assuming that they have purely symbolic reasons for wanting electricity. They have all of North America to choose from, and they can only use this particular dam?

33

Especially when their idea of tactics is the frontal charge instead of “guerrilla” warfare.

34

If 1/500 humans survived ten years of disease, famine and fighting, it seems that the last place they would want to hang out is in a (former) major population center, which would be well-stocked with the decaying remains of the other 99.8% (plus they’ve got to have a water access/sewage disposal problem making them subject to viral and bacterial plague).

They can’t produce their own food in an enclosed fortress. If they don’t expect to be fighting other survivors any longer, their next move would not be to re-establish electricity so that they could continue to survive on whatever rations are still left over, it would be to move the population to where food can be grown.

All of that said, they clearly had too much to think about to pay attention to the presence of the apes; if there were few/no encounters over the previous decade (as seems to be implied) I can see the encountering the ape colony being a shock. Someone can correct me if my recollection of the first movie is faulty, the battle with the apes on the bridge would’ve been world-wide news, but I can’t imagine the take-away from that (for those who weren’t there, anyway) was that the apes were super-intelligent. And before there was much of a chance to digest that, everyone in the world begins to die of the simian flu.

As others have said, I don’t see how this leads to a world run by apes, with humans subservient, even in the long run. The remaining humans (as said above, ~14 million world-wide) outnumber the apes (not just the intelligent apes, but all apes) almost 50:1. And non-genetically enhanced apes outnumber Caesar’s tribe by at least 300:1

35

There are a number of excellent points made here, but some not-so-great-ones, too:

Why not just leave SF?

Well, there would be a ton of food available from homes/stores/military bases/etc. Also, the world would be a frightening place. Remember, society has collapsed and anarchy reigns. I would assume warlords, roving bandits, etc would be a threat. I don’t know about you, but I’d want to hang out with a group of like-minded people in a secure location with plenty of food.

And if I had survived 10 year from the total breakdown of society and found a safe place, I’d be pretty reluctant to pick up stakes.

How could a monkey figure out how to work a gun?

Remember, these are super-smart monkeys - about as intelligent as you and me (well, me anyway). If I watched somebody load and fire a gun for a few minutes, I think I could pick it up about as fast as the apes did.

Why were the apes still acting like apes, even when they’re super-smart?

I would argue that it’s their ‘culture’ People around the world do all sorts of crazy ‘uncivilized’ things. To feel comfortable, that’s how they decided to live, even though they’re super-smart.

Why weren’t the weapons part of the ‘fort’? Good question. That’s where I’d want them.

Why so many monkeys?

Ten years of aggressive breeding, I guess. It does seem like a bit of a stretch, but maybe they have more babies than I’d think over ten years.

Why so few humans? Well, if 1/500 people survived the initial outbreak and then there was anarchy and war and supposing the human population spread itself out a bit, I have no problem imagining that that few humans would be in that particular fort.

Power - Why is it so precious?

It does seem like a stretch that they couldn’t operate a radio until they had a hydro power source. Contacting others would be really important and there’s batteries, gas and other ways to generate power that they could have utilized. Doesn’t make sense that power is so precious.

Why test the weapons?

Feels like the plot required it and nothing more. There were apparently hundreds if not thousands of weapons. What does shooting a few off prove?

Anyway, I came out of the movie having enjoyed it, but some of these legit concerns have taken a bit of the steam out of my enthusiasm.

36

Very unlikely. Gorillas breed when about 10 years old, and the gestation period is only two weeks shorter than humans. So, maybe they’d have a number of young teen/tween and lots of kids, but no more mature adults that when they broke out, other than the few babies they carried with them.

More or less, they’d have about the same number as would humans.

37

It isn’t so much ‘how can apes work a gun?’, as “how can apes, just handed an assault rifle that very hour for the first time, become an effective army - so much so that they are able to take a fortified position”.

Humans take awhile to learn how to be effective at using military fire-arms. I would not believe that a random group of people could grab guns and become efficient soldiers instantly - let alone, people who had never even seen a gun before in their lives!

Even assuming that they could, I would not believe that a frenzied frontal assault would work against a fortified position also armed with guns - and this time, by people presumably trained in their use. It would be a slaughter.

38

There are several humorous vids out there of poorly trained militias with guns.

Yes, pretty much every since the repeating rifle this has been a no-go.

And, even at the Battle of New Orleans where the Brit outnumbered the Yanks 2 or 3 to 1, and were much better trained veterans, the frontal assault vs a fortified positions ended up with nearly 10X Brit casualties and a loss.

39

I definitely agree about the power plant being completely nonsensical if you have enough fuel to drive trucks around. Surely generators exist, right? No reason you can’t enough power to run your radios. They only thing that makes sense is that they were VERY low on fuel as well. Even then it seems like scouting for more fuel makes more sense than wasting it driving trucks out to a hydro plant (which happens to be surrounded by super-apes).

The frontal assault of the fort I have less of a problem with. It WAS a slaughter, at least how I saw it. I think it was pretty clear that the apes were going to be completely annihilated until the tank (or whatever it was) showed up. That allowed Koba to commandeer it and have enough fire-power to destroy the front gate. No tank = mountains of dead apes, IMO.

Which, of course, comes full circle back to “Why would you keep your best weapons OUTSIDE your stronghold?”.

40

What was the deal with the tower rigged with C4? How did they know the apes were going to go to the tower? And how did Malcolm survive the kaboom? :confused: