SPOILER WARNING
The end of the movie Planet of The Apes will be discussed.
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I went to see “Planet of the Apes” this weekend. I thought it was a GREAT movie until that ending, which COMPLETELY ruined the whole movie!
What the heck? It broke all the internal logic of the movie. Never mind the fact that Marky Mark piloted a little pod from SATURN all the way to EARTH (those pods get great gas mileage), but then he lands in what appears to be late 20th-century America (not 2029, like the beginning of the movie) and it’s inhabited by apes. Not a culture created by apes, but apes that decided to live EXACTLY THE SAME WAY HUMANS DO, with police cars, helicopters, news crews, etc. With a freakin’ monument to General Thad! Huh?
It almost would’ve been better if, when the police cars pulled up, all the cops where CATS! Planet of the Cats! Marky Mark’s last line could be, “Here we go again!” Then he can do hundreds of sequels: Planet of the Dogs. Planet of the Turtles. Planet of the Guinea Pigs!
I’m sure Dopers could come up with a more satisfying ending.
Don’t read the original novel by Pierre Boulle then. Excepting the reference to Thade, which I also thought was bizarre and totally disbelief-shattering, it was a perfect translation of the original French/Franco-centric ending into an American idiom. In the novel, Ulysee Merou, the astronaut who landed on and then escaped from the Planet of the Apes, finally navigates his way back home with his wife Nova and their infant child. He lands the cutter from his starship at the base of the Eiffel Tower. A truck pulls up. And the driver is an ape.
Okay, technically, there’s a short “wrapper” around Ulysee’s story, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s the ending. With the exception of the inexplicable memorial, Burton’s movie is much more faithful to it than the old films.
Well, if this movie is an attempt to be more faithful to the original novel, I may have to re-evaluate it. Do other elements from this movie, like Pericles’ Messiah-like landing and the space station crash scenario, come from the original novel too?
I can pin down the exact moment POTA started to suck. When the humans are cornered in the ruins of the Oberon, and the apes form up a battle line. They send in the first wave, and Marky Mark blasts them with the ship’s engines. All that was cool, especially the scene from Thade’s POV of ape bodies flying around like leaves. Engine goes off, the ground is littered with ape bodies… and then they start to get up. Oh, COME ON! How effing dumb was that? Then you get the pod, then you get the utterly unbelievable moral capitualtion of the apes, and then you get the crappy ending. It started sooo good. I’m used to Tim Burton movies running out of steam at the end, but this was just ridiculous.
Miller -
I agree, for a gorilla with such strong convictions, Attar sure bailed on his religion fast enough.
Mahaloth -
Hmm . . . so Thade dredged up the sunken pod, and, using the doo-hickey that Limbo had palmed from the other pod, flew it into the past through the electromagnetic storm (shades of “Escape From The Planet of the Apes”), and led the primitive apes of Earth in a revolution, timed so that they would be evolved enough to ruin Marky Mark’s homecoming years later.
Nope. Ulysee and a few other folks are explorers on a starship (a sub-C relativistic one, as I recall), and there’s no real explanation for the parallel development of apes and humans on this distant planet. Mind you, I read the book years and years ago, so I may be forgetting some bits and pieces, but really, the plot was kind of weak in that regard (as far as I can recall).
In general, neither movie is particularly close to the original novel. For example, in the book the apes have a sophisticated technological society. The original movie didn’t show this because of budget constraints; I don’t know what Burton’s excuse is. I’m just gratified that Burton went back to the original source material for his version, however incompletely.