No, they were not on earth the whole time. Remember there was a shot at night and there were 2 moons in the sky…is that earth?? Don’t think so.
I have thought more about it, and the sequel will probably involve General Thade digging out the first pod from underwater, realizing that it still has power and somehow piloting it to earth of the past (future past???), where he will lead an uprising of apes to take over. Similar to what Cornelius did in the original movie series.
Come to think of it, that might make a pretty cool movie…(if done right)
I disagree here. The ending was totally contrived and cheesy and took little creativity or real thought. I could see it coming a mile away. When he selected Washington DC as his landing point, I figured he would crash into the White House and an ape would be sitting in the Oval Office, but as soon as he landed near the memorial, I knew some statue would be of an ape.
I could be wrong, but weren’t there two moons in the sky? That would pretty much rule out the “it was Earth the whole time” hypothesis.
And really, had the movie given any indication that it was of the “make you think” variety rather than the “monkeys and explosions” variety, I’d be far more inclined to believe that the ending rewards contemplation. For me, the clues that a movie is of the “make you think” variety include intelligent dialogue, a well-crafted story, and/or fleshed-out characters. None of these things will be found in Planet of the Apes.
Despite what its pretensions may have been, POTA was just a popcorn flick that fell apart at the end.
I went to see it because hubby wanted to - I thought the beginning was stupid and predictable, the middle was so-so, and the ending was stupid.
During the scene where the apes were massing for their march, complete with torches, I leaned over to hubby and sang “Ooo-eee-ooo-ee-OOOO-ooo” (think Wizad of Oz)
My daughter and I had the same reaction about the ending - how amazing that if apes had built DC, they built it exactly the same way that people did.
Personally, I’d have had him crash in NY and the Statue of Liberty would have been an ape…
All I can say is I’m glad we went to the semi-cheap matinee.
What a horrible piece of crap this film was! At the end of it, my buddy looked at me and said, “Did they just cut-up parts of Battlefield Earth and use them to make this movie?” Okay, okay, so it wasn’t as bad as Battlefield Earth, but lord, man, it wasn’t good.
Here’s what I don’t get about the movie:
Why are they training monkeys to fly a spaceship? I mean, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper just to strap the chimp in and let the ship fly itself on autopilot?
What the hell were they all doing out there around Saturn, anyway?
How in hell could that pod ship fly in atmosphere?
If Marky Mark was such a good pilot, how is it that he crashed and the damn chimp was able to land his ship with nary a scratch on it?
When MM set off the ship’s rockets to flambe the ape army (and lets face it, if the ship had been sitting around for a couple of thousand years, how many of the electronics are going to be working on it?), shouldn’t the apes been BBQ’d and not merely stunned?
Right before the big battle at the end, MM finds out that Helena Bonham Carter’s “bodyguard” is an ex-general. Does MM spend his time trying to find out ape military strategy? Nope!
How in the hell did the other tribes find out about MM, if everybody’s in “The Forbidden Zone”? I mean, they ran out of the ape city, and never met any other humans to tell them where they were going, so how did those humans know where MM was?
Some monkeys can swim and I think that any apes intelligent enough to develop their own civilization would figure out how to swim.
If the humans know that the apes can’t swim, why not build their villages out in the middle of a lake? That way you don’t have to worry about raiding parties coming to get you.
If the apes don’t have gunpowder, why aren’t they dropping a load in their drawers when MM fires the flare over their camp?
In part of the movie, the humans indicate to MM that you should never speak in front of an ape, almost as if the apes don’t know that humans can speak, but when MM does speak to the apes, they don’t seem to be surprised about it. Why?
What happened to the line, “Get me the space man.”? It was in all the trailers and I kept waiting to hear them say it in the movie, but they never did.
At the end MM crashes on Earth X number of years into the future, but the vehicles and fashions look surprisingly similar to those on eary 21st Century Earth. Why?
As for the rest of the movie, I think it would have worked better if A) they just made the book as it was written, or B) as headshock said, made the movie using the original script.
Just saw the movie last night, nothing like the original, but still entertaining. I mean c’mon, if not ony for the costumes and the matrix style effects. Nice work there. BTW, didn’t one of the original movies either end or begin the way this one ended? Could’ve sworn…
When my roommate got in tonight I told him that I went to see this movie last night, and he was all excited to hear my impression of it because he is really looking forward to it.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it sucked. But I did tell him that there weren’t too many slow moments. He likes that. He is very forthcoming with what he looks for in a movie. Explosions are generally a big draw for him.
But … that doesn’t cut it for me. Yes, I do like a good action flick - I have red blood, I like to see cars flipping around and guys beating up twenty other guys at a time, but when you find yourself sighing in exasperation every other scene, it kind of loses out.
There were two specific moments, where I wanted to walk out, but I didn’t because the evil marketing corps reeled me in (I had to see what the surprise ending was). The first was when Ari snuck out to see Thade and plead and bargain with him. With nary a transition cut, the next scene shows her talking to Spaceman Leo again. She just traipses out of one camp into the enemy’s camp, and then back and no one cares? No one followed her? How did she get back and forth between the two camps so easily?
And, as mentioned before, Spaceman Leo’s military tactics were highly suspect - I have absolutely no military training and even I knew that. I’ll leave alone the fact that I don’t care how much nuclear power is left in the “batteries”, 1000 year old ruins wouldn’t have the structural capacity to fire rockets.
Okay, so Leo fires the rockets, blowing the apes all over the place. But they are not dead. Not only are they not dead, but Leo knows they’re not dead, because it is obviously his plan to wait for them to wake up again to fight them hand to hand.
At that point I wanted to stand up and scream, “Are you a friggin’ moron or what? They were all incapacitated two minutes ago. You could’ve strolled out there and smoked them with paring knives. Why the hell did you wait for them to wake up. And if you were going to wait for them to wake up, why fire the god damned rocket in the first place? Aaauuugghhhh!!”
Did anyone else look at the lead female ape - I can never remember character names - and think “Michael Jackson”? Maybe it was just the hair in her face, but I was waiting for her to grab her crotch…
I like the movie right up to the “climatic” battle scene. Others here have pointed out many reasons why this scene simply doesn’t work.
I also felt as if some very important piece of the film was cut. We miss out on some grand realizing moment that the apes must have had. The chimp lands, the apes all worship it as the returning of their god, chimp runs into ruins and suddenly the apes realize that their religion is a lie? Call me confused. The apes didn’t even know what the ruins were and sorry a two sentence paragraph of dialogue from Marky Mark to the big guerrilla would have been unlikely to be belived or understood and even if it had been it didn’t exactly explain everything to the apes.
For some reason, all this discussion reminds me of Mars Attacks. I love that movie, but it didn’t click with a lot of people. PoA seems to be pretty much the same–seems to be a recurring theme with Burton.
I’ve seen the original PoA recently. While it was a bit better, it still had its own plot holes and was generally a whole hell of a lot sillier than Burton’s version (cough "I never knew an ape I didn’t like cough).
This same discussion has been going on over in General Questions. There are a bunch of extra clues on the official web site in the “library” section. The pod that Leo crashes in does get recovered, but it’s Ari who does that. My theory (which can be found in much greater detail in the other thread) is that Thade uses the pod recovered from the water hole to chase Leo, but he ends up on Earth a lot earlier than Leo and organizes an ape revolt. The apes then replace the Lincoln memorial with a Memorial to Thade.
Um, even if an ending to a movie was great (which this ending wasn’t), it won’t make up for bad acting, horrible writing, and plot holes you could drive a semi- through.
Plot holes, weak dialogue, underdeveloped characters, BUT lots of really cool eye candy, and a few moments of sly humor. Welcome to the world of Tim Burton. All his movies have the same features.
The ape revolt in the original series was led by Caesar, the offspring of Cornelius and Zira.
I did the same thing with the friends I was with. I think it was a deliberate parody from Burton.
Did anyone else notice in one of the final shots in the Alpha pod that the readouts identified it as the Delta pod?
I was deeply disappointed in this movie. I had reservations as soon as I heard it announced, and they grew worse when I heard it was a “reimagining” as opposed to a remake. Some of the things I don’t think Burton had much of a choice about. He couldn’t have POTA be Earth, for example, because the big shocker of the original is that it’s Earth. But then he desperately wanted to evoke the original with the “damn dirty human” and Heston “damn you all to hell” cameo. This was the wrong movie to try to have both ways.
Plus, Marky Mark didn’t get nekkid so what was the point of casting him? His acting ability?
The whole thing struck me as a bad Star Trek time travel episode.
I just remembered the other part of the movie that irritated the hell out of me.
Calima. The name of the ruins. The sacred place of the Apes is called Calima.
When Spaceman Leo finds the place and walks into it he sees it prominently displayed on the wall.
CA
LI
MA
This must be the very thing the Apes read to come up with the name of the place. Calima. Makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is that Leo reaches out and casually brushes the dust off it, revealing to actually read “CAUTION: LIVE ANIMALS” thus realizing that it is his old ship.
Yes, it is a clever (or trite, depending on your viewpoint) device. Revealing a mystic sign to be something more mundane, thus casting doubt on a myth (See V-Ger = Voyager, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
But, Great Googly-Moodly, the Apes aren’t capable of removing a little dust from a sign? The sacred ruins should be referred to in their lore as “CAUTION: LIVE ANIMALS” not “CALIMA”.
The ending. (I think the “space storm” put Leo in a parallel universe, a laStar Trek’s “Mirror, Mirror”.)
The Hawaiian locations.
Leo’s commander was played by an actor (Chris Ellis) who also appeared in Apollo 13 and Armageddon as a (guess what?) Mission Control technician (he seems to have a sub-career playing such characters in space movies).
Charlton Heston saying guns prove Man is cruel and untrustworthy.
Stuff I didn’t like:
Spaceman Leo was dull and boring.
Technology thousands of years old that still functioned.
A spacecraft no bigger than a helicopter capable of traveling from Saturn to Earth in a few hours. (That little pod could not have held more than a day’s worth of oxygen.)
Not enough time for the apes to evolve so radically. (Their ancestors were normal-sized; unlike huumans, apes all have legs that are much, much shorter than their arms; also, apes can’t talk because they lack vocal cords and 4-limbed locomotion hinders breath control.)
We aren’t going to be building space stations in orbit around Saturn in a mere 28 years. To fix that, all they would have had to do was set the beginning of the movie in 2129 instead of 2029.
It wasn’t a great movie, but I don’t regret seeing it.
