Well we watched the end of Planet of the Apes.
Oy.
The 2001 version ends, as you may know, in a massive battle scene, like some simian Braveheart.
Huh?
This is how a Tim Burton film (almost) ends? Not with a weirdness but a boom? Then there’s the whole Lincoln Memorial (actual) end.
Huh? Huh?
But nothing could prepare us for the 2011 version, with so many demands for our disbelief that one simply … tires.
Only briefly …
That’s not how drug testing starts and stops, on a dime, with no oversight, on the say-so of one guy and his private medical laboratory …
No, you’re not allowed to own apes, and the sexy zookeeper would be aghast at this, not intrigued, or (de)panting for the perpetrator …
Five years after they start visiting that forest, more convenient than a local 7-Eleven, he tells her how Caesar came to live with him …
Earthquake proof buildings, required in California, do not have plate glass windows apes can 1) leap through and 2) unharmed …
Why would zoo apes, who had not received the drug, know immediately, intuitively what to do if the smart ones set them free …
Well, because (of course) all animals want freedom … and no doubt justice, equality, and medical marijuana.
Have these people ever even been in a jungle?
I have not, but I would bet there is precious little freedom, justice, equality, or decent dope. In fact, that is the paramount problem with this whole modern newly enfranchised of the Planet of the Apes movies — damned if they aren’t … exactly like humans. But if they are exactly like humans, those same humans who enslaved their simian cousins in the first place, then why should we be even remotely glad they are now free to remake the society along their lines … which would actually be very much like ours.
The original — I mean the actually original 1968 version — was a commentary on racism, not animal rights. We weren’t meant to elevate the apes but to recognize that they were playing the parts of the humans in our actual world, unfairly subjugating humans in the movie just as we were doing to an entire race (blacks) in the real world.
When you make it a denotatively pro-ape dealio from the get-go, you lose that entirely. And frankly I say this as someone who carries more than a passing notion that we have certain responsibilities as regards animals and the environment. A book from a few years back discussed this — quite well.
Unlike these atrocious movies.