If you need to find me on August 5th, I’ll be here:
*Rise of the Planet of the Apes *teaser trailer
The effects are by WETA and Andy Serkis plays the main ape, Caeser, in the same fashion they did it Gollum and King Kong. No guys in rubber suits, the character is completely digital. Article on the creation of the character here.
It does have a “Project X: The Apes Revenge” feel to it - but so what? It looks incredible. Anyone else jazzed about this?
I just peed my pants in happiness. I wasn’t disappointed with the effects and humanization of apes in the last Apes movie, though.
It’s King Kong meets Rats of NIMH meets Deep Blue Sea.
Corrected trailer link (the one in the OP brings you to the end of the trailer).
And…daaamn. Could be a good one.
Oh HELL yeah! That looks freakin’ AWESOME!
I havent seen the trailer yet, but it has to be better than the one with Marky Mark. I just about wanted to throw my own feces at the screen.
Oh, come on. We have whole armies of men with guns, vehicles and thermal cameras. There’s no way a few hundred smart chimps could breed faster than we could kill them.
And they blew it! The maniacs! Damn them! God Damn them all to hell!
There’s a bit at the beginning, where a sciencey guy is giving some sort of presentation on their new drug. He says something like, “We call it… The Cure.” There’s also a lot of talk about it reversing neural damage, or something like that.
So, extrapolating here, but my guess is that there’s some sort of plague going on that’s killing people, or at least degrading their higher functions. The smart chimps are an unintended side effect of the efforts to find a cure for the disease. By the time the chimps break out, human society is sufficiently weakened from the disease that we can’t fight back. This would explain not only the intelligent apes from the original movie, but also the animalistic humans.
Sure, out in the open, but if they find their way back to the jungles they’ll kick our ass in gorilla warfare
Thanks, I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.
The origins of the Tea Party at last filmed.
You know what would be an awesome soundtrack to this movie?
This.
Yeah, I know, you were already thinking it.
Okay – I have to ask. Why all the fascination with Planet of the Apes?
The original movie was moderately clever. Ground-breaking music, interesting visuals, a LOT of expensive makeup. Plus a touch of nudity, which was new and interesting in 1968. Heavy-handed satire, which was fun. But the story didn’t make a lick of sense, even back then. If you only had the one ape city and bands of humans were threatening their food supply, then those apes were practically at subsistence level, and they wouldn’t have had lots of ape scientists and primate research and a museum, fer cryin’ out loud. I’d love to read Rod Serling’s original screenplay sometime – he apparently had an Ape world that was a mirror of our own, which would’ve made more sense (there had to be a factory cranking out those rifles, somewhere). and the apes speak English, but it takes Heston/Taylor the whole movie to figure out he’s on Earth (which makes no sense, either)?
The only way to enjoy it is to take it as satire (As Pierre Boule’s novel was intended to be) and not probe too deeply, lest the facade crack open. Certainly you don’t want to balance an entire franchise on so unsteady a base.
Only then did, of course, first coming out with the puerile Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with James Franciscus as bargain-basement Heston through most of it. Heston reportedly didn’t want to do it unless he wasn;t in most of it, and the ended the series. So they did, blowing up the world at the end. But it didn’t end the series. Turns out the apes had space travel, even with humans threatening their food supply, and they figured out how to go back in time. Then we had a series of films about the rise of the Ape rebellion and its pre-Terminator time-travel paradoxes. Mad magazine parodied the whole cycle.
But Planet of the Apes also became a Marvel magazine-comic that ran for too many issues. And then it became a TV series. Then, mercifully, it died.
Until Tim Burton resurrected its stinking corpse, as if it was Frankenweenie. His version had much better makeup effects, but still didn’t make a helluva lot of sense. Even Heston came back, despite destroying the world so he wouldn’t have to be in another sequel. We learned that a chimp can land a spaceship better than Mark Wahlburg.
And now, for no good reason that I can see (except maybe to show off the effects technology), we’ve got another sequel. Why?
There’s jokes in the above rant, but my basic point is serious. aside from some very heavy-handed satire, I’ve never seen the point in the entire Planet of the Apes idea. Apparently it’s immensely popular, or producers at least think it is. But why? what’s the draw?
I think it was one of Harlan Ellison’s rants about TV producers back circa 1970 where he complained that one of them wanted him to put more apes into something he was trying to get on the air, because Planet of the Apes stuff was hot back then, and he cried out in frustration. That’s what I want to do. Dammit, there are lots of science fiction and fantasy works out there with brilliant and filmable ideas, many of them opening up now due to the flexibility and power of CGI. Why in the name of Cornelius to you have to keep re-visiting this one-note franchise?
an angry, intelligent ape might be more viseral and strikes closer to home than a totally made up monster. that last closeup shot of that ape in the trailer is just familiar enough to put you at ease while harbouring a sinister intelligence at the same time.
Hollywood apparently prefers known franchises than to bank on something new. if said franchise is on shaky grounds, one can always change things up and call it a remake.
I have been slowly working my way through the original Apes movies, and I saw #4 not too long ago. Near as I can figure, the original late '60s/early '70s movies were about Race in America, and it isn’t any more complicated than that. The fourth movie has a near future where all the world’s dogs and cats died in a plague, so humans started keeping apes as pets… but found they were intelligent enough to be trained as all-purpose servants (but servants that had to be monitored constantly and beaten regularly). So basically it’s slavery all over again. I don’t know if anyone at the time thought that was clever. It made me squirm.
The Tim Burton remake was just exploiting interest in a well-known movie. I was only a toddler when the original came out, but I remember the action figures and I knew a kid who had the playset. To people my age, it’s a dim memory of something fun, a classic of that genre. I just wonder about the kids who grew up long after the originals were made. Have they even seen the original, or are they just going for the SPFX, vaguely SF/adventure genre angle?
Someone will ahve to explain to me why the masks in the original series of movies work so much better than either the masks of the Burton remake or those CGIed apes.
BTW, never a good sign when the biggest name you can throw around on your trailer is the name of your SFX company…
I disagree, as well. Much as i admire Chambers’ work on the original, Rick Baker has improved on it tremendously over the years in his many films using Ape Makeup. I didn’t realize that some of the gorillas in Gorillas in the Mist were people in Baker makeup – it’s that good. And he blended that skill with caricature/exaggeration for the 2001 film extraordinarily well. The quality of that makeup was light-years beyond Chambers’ – which you’d expect, given the developments between the two films.
I think there must be some kind of uncanny valley for ape masks. I saw the planet of the apes original and its remake in one go last week (it was being broadcasted that way, in a “the original,and its remake” way). I had no problems with my suspension of disbelief with the original, God would that thing have been handy watching the remake.
