Caesar spent his days nestled in soft Corinthian leather.
Render unto Ceaser the salad that is Ceaser.
This trailer played ahead of Super 8. As I watched the first half, I kept thinking “they’re remaking Project X?” which is probably not what they were aiming for.
CAESAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRr!!!
I actually think it’s worse than this. I’ve inveighed against Planet of the Apes series before on this Board, because, no matter how far back you go, or what you cut out, or what alloweances you make, you can’t get rid of the stupid. As much as I admire Rod Serling, even if you made the film as he originally scripted it, it would still have problems. and Serling’s “twistr” wasn’t really all thqat different from the “twist” in Pierre Boulle’s original novel (which, it must be admitted, wasn’t meant to be all that serious. It’s been suggested that Monkey Planet is a better translation of the title than the pretentious Planet of the Apes.)
Serling’s “twist” imagines that they somehow got turned around (or circumnavigated the universe, or took a wormhole, or however you want to retcon it) and ended up on the Earth. They didn’t realize this, despite the fact that the same plants and animals were there and the damned, dirty apes spoke English. (If they’d landed in Chaucer’s England, only a few hundred years difference, they’d have had a MUCH harder time with the language.) They’re also damned lucky that the ship happened to decide to land in a body of water, and they didn’t crash into a mountain, or burn up on re-entry, or skim off into space, or… well, anything that would have been much more likely to happen.
In Boulle’s novel
they actually did end up on a different planet, but one in which the biology was so similar that they had apes just like Earth apes. Then, when they got back in the ship and returned home they found that the apes were in charge on Earth, too. Which kinda explains Serling’s “twist” and the ending of the Tim Burton remake, which in this regard follows the novel more closely (although in nothing else).
None of whixch excuses a series that’s all basically a one-note joke about seeing humans as apes, and vice-versa, with all the satire you can wring out of it. I actually found Beneath the P{lanet of the Apes to be painful to watch when they tried to do this – the youthful “hippie” war protesting chimps against the war-mongering gorillas. I don’t mean that it looks painfully dated now. I mean that it looked painfully dated when it came out.
If you want a story about people being treated as if they were apes by a society of intelligent apes that have taken over from man, with gorillas as warriors, chimps as scientists, and orangutans as administrators, try to dig up a copy of L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller’s 1950 novel Genus Homo. At least he doesn’t require ridiculous space travel. And his apes don’t speak English.
That was my partner’s exact question. We saw the trailer on the weekend, and wondered just where the hell Caesar managed to come up with an army of peers. Up until then, the story seemed plausible. The story seemed to go… you have a lab full of apes, Caesar somehow gives them the same potion that made him intelligent, they escape and then a big fat caption that says “40 years later…” But no! No such caption. Instead the trailer makes it seem as if these top secret scientist have DOZENS of apes that form an army that rampages through a major American city. My partner turned to me and said: “We’re expected to believe that someone has that many apes in one place?” Even if they have some plot point that says “We have a test tube chimpanzee program” I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to think that one facility has that many apes, even if the apes raid every zoo and circus in town to recruit, and that a human army with machine guns, flamethrowers, and gas couldn’t contain them, brilliant strategists apes though they may be.
I’d honestly rather see a movie that spans a couple generations. That could be fascinating, it would be like seeing the post-apocalyptic world of the Terminator movies develop. They should have the first 30 minutes be about the creation and escape of Caesar, then skip ahead 20 years for the ape-human wars, then have the rest of the movie be about the foundation of the ape empire and the loss of humanity.
Edit: It will suck.
They gots helicopter-jumping ability, too.
I admit, the idea of an experimental human-intelligence-boosting experiment first tested on apes works better as a concept than the time-travelling mishmash of the original films, but even the New York City police should be able to put the rebellion down. I had a similar reaction to Jurassic Park (the novel more so than the book) whenever anyone expressed concern about dinosaurs getting to the mainland. Big deal - just announce that there are live dinosaurs in South America and they’ll be rapidly hunted back to extinction.
Jophiel:
Plot borrowed from the Powerpuff Girls movie.
Mojo Jojo: We have lived too long under Man’s thumb! The time has come to oppose that thumb!
Random Ape Extra: Mojo Jojo, you speak the truth. And in a way we’re fortunate to be oppressed by man, given only his thumb can be opposed. I mean, bats, racoons, we’d be even more screwed.
But look at the baby chimp! ISN’T HE SO CUTE? Buy me one, daddy, NO BUY ME TWO! I’ll pout if you don’t buy me the cute baby chimps!
In the fourth Apes movie there was a scene which implied a breeding program for more apes. Caesar has been pretending to be a "typical’ ape when he and several others are tapped to mate with some females. He’s not sure about the propriety of it all, but he sees the hot female chimp bat her eyes and him, shrugs his shoulders, and goes in to take care of business.
On that note, perhaps they should’ve started the movie with a series of increasingly strange incidents involving hiker, hunter, and camper disappearances followed by “terrorist” acts that, upon close examination, appear not have been committed by any human being. Spend about the first third of the movie establishing a creepy and unsettling atmosphere before revealing that apes are the cause. Then you show that some 20 years before in a Bay Area lab there were top-secret genetic experiments on chimps and other apes that greatly increased their intelligence and that these apes escaped and eventually disappeared into the dense forests of Northern California. Now, they’re emerging out of the woods to take on humanity.
But the attacks all happen during the Christmas season, and only residents of San Francisco are targeted and devoured.
Don’t. Just don’t.
Okay. Okay. I’m a crank and can be an aggressive crank.
But it looks kinda fun. Sorry. 
I mean, it looks WORLDS better than the Tim Burton one. I spent five bucks on the used DVD because that was only a dollar more than renting it, but I still only watched it once, retched, and gave it to my BIL as a gag (emphasis on gagging) Christmas present.
that one scene on the trailer got me: an ape looking back at you with a smarter-than-you attitude. people here who say the movie’ll suck will experience that before they die.
But, aren’t we all really awaiting the second coming of Charleton Heston?
Because everyone knows that Yule gibbons ate only, hey, wait a minute, don’t do that, keep away from me, AUGHHHH, help, choke, gurgle,…