The pilot wasn’t the one shooting at the Americans, it was Lars, who had been through the entire ordeal. And the pilot saw the husk of the burned Thing, and the wrecked outpost, and probably got quite an earful from lars as the chased down the dog Thing.
The original Planet of the Apes movie sequels (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Battle for Planet of the Apes, Planet of the Apes: Electric Bugaloo, etc etc.) had some ridiculous premises, mercifully, none of which I can recall now.
I just subjected myself to all of them a couple weeks ago because…I… hate myself? I guess?
Anyway, yes. At the end of Beneath PotA, the world was quite literally rendered dead as a cheesy voice over declared. So the next one, Escape, had to take place in old earth times when the original PotA astronauts cam from. Apparently the apes managed to raised Chuckles Heston’s ship from the bottom of a lake, fix it up, and figure out how to fly it all in the short time that Beneath occurred. Then they flew back through the time warp before the world was rendered dead by the mutant telepathic humans’ super nuke. Got it? It all makes perfect sense.
Correct, but the pilot also literally had pulled the pin out of a high explosive grenade and was about to toss it right at the dog who happened to be surrounded by the American scientists at the time. I don’t care how much info you get in 10 minutes, you suddenly don’t try to murder 10 other people with no hesitation. Lars I completely understand because he just went through 12 hours of hell, but the pilot literally has no real motivation besides seeing something strange and then having Lars yell at him. The opening to the original makes it seem like the attack was sudden and these were the last two survivors who knew exactly what was going on.
the Starchild ending of 2001 (which ought to have changed life on Earth considerably) had to be dismissed in order to allow 2010 to occur
Connery has done a few of these massive stinkers over the years; see also “The Avengers” (not the Marvel one, the 1998 one) and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. Still, it pays the bills (or builds the house, as Michael Caine noted with regard to “Jaws III”).
Speaking of which, whichever of the “Jaws” films involved a “voodoo curse” deserves a mention here.
The Matrix ends with Neo able to fly, stop time, pick bullets out of the air, and barely having to exert any effort whatsoever to dispatch enemy agents.
Realizing that giving the protagonist godlike powers kills any narrative tension for a sequel, The Matrix Reloaded dismisses all that in the beginning with Neo commenting that the new enemy agents are “upgrades”.
To me, this is the single most extreme case, as I mentioned in my recent thread “You can’t make a sequel – you killed the character!”
It was already torturing probability when the made the first sequel , Return to the Planet of the Apes. astronaut James Franciscus is sent is an identical ship along the same route as astronaut Chalton Heston.
Wouldntchaknowit, exactly the same thing happens to him – he ends up (unknowingly) on Earth, and his ship crashes, and all his crewmates die.
At the end of the movie, Heston activates a superbomb that blows up the entire earth.
That kind of thing is hard to “walk off. It effectively spoils any potential for a sequel.” as one science fiction writer put it “Don’t blow up the planet – you might want it later.”
But they did make a sequel. Three of them, in fact. To do so, they created most convoluted story possible.
Even though the apes hadn’t yet gotten to that level of technology, or had that much by way of resources (in the first movie, after all, humans raiding their gardens was threatning them with starvation), the apes started a space program. In fact, they re-used the ships that Franciscus and/pr Heston came in (even though one sank in a lake and the other crashed into little bits). Then they sent a crew of three apes in it back along the direction it originally came in.
The ships in the first two movies effectively went forward in time ( Einsteinian time contraction at its best – an actual scientific effect), but for some bizarre reason, having (I’m sure) nothing to do with plot requirements), this time the ship goes backward in time, dropping the apes off in the (then) modern world.
This allows the series to continue. It also relieves the filmmakers of the effort of building more Ape Cities to film in. And they killed off one of the apes right at the start, so you only have to deal with two apes.
I see that snfaulkner already wrote this, but I already wrote it in the other thread.
OK again not a convoluted explanation for the the sequel itself but City Slickers II revealed that Jack Palance’s character who died in the first film has a long lost twin brother solely so Jack Palance could appear in it.
Regarding, Planet of the Apes, despite the ludicrous hoops the sequels had to jump through to continue the storyline, it’s really quite brilliant how they used that necessity to also explain how the world in the original film came about. Outside of the Apes Universe, I can’t think of other films that managed to be both a sequel and a prequel.
The Terminator franchise.
In T2, it’s revealed that Cyberdyne recovered bits of the original T-800 from the first movie, and that technology is used to create SkyNet and the terminators, leading to the events of The Terminator.
The convolutions as the movies and spin-offs continued get worse from there, but the whole franchise keeps looping back on itself to create sequels that are their own prequels.
I should have thought of that. I wonder if Apes influenced the writers at all.
And he ends the movie like Superman: he says he’s going to show these people what you don’t want them to see, which is when he steps out of a phone booth onto a crowded city street, looking up in the sky for a long moment before ostentatiously flying around…
…and you could continue right on with a sequel from that point, but they apparently decided, er, wait, no, that’s not the direction we want; pay no attention to that man in front of the curtain…
If they’d kept it there, it would make sense: there’s a firm timeline, and while Skynet can send robots back in time, it can’t change the past. There was only one timeline, where a robot from the future showed up and ushered its own creation- a stable time loop.
Then the latter movies were like, “screw that!” And time ended up as a total mess.
Not a movie, but I mentioned it in the other thread. This is probably the first case where they came up with a really convoluted explanation for the sequel.
Ayesha, “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”, died in the original H. Rider Haggard novel. Undeniably and reliably dead, having been accelerated aged and burnt up in the Flame of Life. That’s as definite an end as blowing up the entire earth and all your characters in the Planet of the Apes series.
But Haggard wanted to make a sequel anyway, so he had Ayesha reincarnated. And his hero Leo Vincey and his mentor Holly , twenty years later, come to believe this, and spend half the book making an increasingly difficult and desperate journey to locate her. They do, of course, find her, and she really is reincarnated, so the rest of the book isn’t a disappointment.
Arthur Conan Doyle had already brought back the apparently killed Sherlock Holmes, but, as he put it, “no one had pronounced on the remains”, so he could claim that Holmes hadn’t really died, just faked his own death. But Ayesha was seen to be definitely gone, so she’s the first one to start this trend.
There have been lots of movie adaptations of She, but none of the sequel. In 1968 Hammer films did turn out a sequel to their 1966 version of She, called The Vengeance of She. But they didn’t follow the line of the written sequel. They did steal the idea of her being “reincarnated” (since Ursula Andress as the original “She” had been immolated and aged in the Flame of Life in the 1966 film), but it would be more accurate to call it “possession”. And the rest of the plot isn’t the same.
When all else fails and you have irrevocably killed off your main characters in the first movie, you just turn your sequel into a prequel. Which gave us such movie classics as Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, Marley & Me: The Puppy Years, and Easy Rider: The Ride Back.
Eh, that’s not really convoluted and makes sense since the agents are really just computer programming. There are plenty of issues with the Matrix sequels, but this aspect doesn’t really seem to be a problem.
Haggard did the same thing with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. After publishing the sequel Ayesha he published two prequels with her – She and Allan, which gave him a chance to have his two main characters (Ayesha and Allan Quatermain) meet, and Wisdom’s Daughter, which explained how she came to be ruling in the city of Kor in Africa.
For that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle did the same with Holmes. Having killed him off in The Final Problem he really didn’t want to bring him back, so the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles was supposed to be from Watson’s notes, about an adventure that happened before Reichenbach Falls. Eventually, though, popular pressure made him bring Holmes back to the present in The Adventure of the Empty House.
We have to thank poor poor Dr Milo.
Alien: Resurrection. Starring Sigourney Weaver.
Wait, Sigourney Weaver? Didn’t Ripley die at the end of Alien 3?
She’s playing a clone of Ripley.
Didn’t Ripley reverse swan dive into molten something so there was no body left.
There were blood samples taken before she died but after she was impregnated by the Alien Queen, so there’s also Alien DNA in there, which can be used to breed aliens without face huggers, so that’s why there’s more xenomorphs.
Genetics doesn’t work like that. That’s stupid. I’m outta here
Wait, we haven’t even gotten to the new alien queen that has a uterus yet!