So erm, kinda scared to ask this, but is this film like the Prequel Trilogy is to Star Wars? Or the New Star Trek’s are to all the previous stuff?
I’d like to feel ‘The Movies’ are just not a waste of time and money due to this stuff, and really the original Planet of the Apes is right up there with original Star Wars in my list of great films…and i’m not sure i wouldn’t curse all future films ever, after seeing Ja Ja Binks in an ape suit/cgi skin, or a Michael Bay like re-imaging of such a strong social-commentary and ‘good’ film. (nothing is sacred anymore is it? It’s all about the money.)
It’s definitely not a case of being like the prequels. It’s got a solid story to tell, takes it time with it instead of blindly hurtling from action scene to action scene, and has social commentary tanged with nihilism.
That’s not a bad analogy. Matt Reeves is a horrible director and he doesn’t have to chops to handle Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ weird mix of social commentary with what used to be camp in the original movies from the 60s. And he doesn’t have any clue about how to work with actors. Then there are all the badly forced plot points in the script. So what you get is a movie that’s deadly earnest, but also bag-of-rocks dumb and overly saccharine.
Not having enough wire to clear out the dam without needing to be rescued by apes, the asshole ape-hater being the dam expert, Koba shooting Caesar in front of a crowded ape gathering, Gary Oldman having to stand under the tower to blow the charges, the radio being inoperable without power from the dam, all the apes pouring down the one street facing the entrance, Jason Clarke conveniently meeting Caesar’s son when he has to retrieve the medicine, a pair of greasy drunkards left alone to “test” the weapons, all the apes gathering at the top of some tower, the humans being handily gathered and put in cages, Keri Russell conveniently bursting in on Caesar’s sick wife, Caesar finding James Franco’s house so he can poignantly watch their home movies, and pretty much anything having to do with how firearms are used.
Listen to Kellywand’s synopsis for a great take on some of these. I can dig that someone might like the movie, but it’s a script chock full of dumb.
Oh, those are some plot points of a very fine gauge indeed. I don’t mind those sorts of contrivances because they are so arbitrary; you could solve those problems a lot of different ways without affecting the core of the narrative. I understand why you’d be irritated though, if you felt that they were mishandled down the line.
There was a CG shot of Koba waving a weapon while standing in front of the flames burning outside the human enclave that just screamed “bad CG” but other than that one scene, I didn’t think it was bad. Saw it in 2D, btw.
Oh, I remember not understanding why this bothered you on the podcast, and since you mentioned it again, can you explain what you meant? As I understood it, they just needed the power from the dam for everything, including the radio. They had been living off generators for power, and were a few days from being out of fuel for them. Did I miss some particular line about the radio that bugged you or didn’t make sense?
re: the CG, Weta Digital doesn’t do bad CG, they do 80-100 hour work weeks for years on end by some of the best artists in the industry bribed to work overtime and not see their kids in a place with nothing to do in the evening, to make as good as you can get in the industry, limited mostly by insane schedules and director changes right up until the edit is locked two weeks before release, on a movie where the subject is about the hardest thing to convincingly create (barring fully photoreal human performance), on a huge scale. I think what you mean is rushed, or perhaps not quite convincing in spots, because ‘bad’ is reserved for Sharknado and Asylum type things which is clearly an unfair comparison.
That said, the old 80’s Greystoke was on TV on the weekend, and I was pretty amazed at how good some of the apes were, for just hairy suits. I imagine you could do some more dynamic camera and choreography work (they were pretty clunky in the scenes I watched) and get away with something decent without having to render a zillion CG apes.
Being explained doesn’t excuse dumb writing. You know what else is explained? Midichlorians! In fact, I’d argue that what makes a lot of dumb writing dumb is the explaining.
There was some special urgency about the radio, as if it took up a whole lot of power. And when the power came in from the dam, they were scurrying about hurriedly doing whatever radio stuff they needed to do during whatever precious time the radio was turned on. If the radio was such a big deal, why not just ration some power to fire it up for a little bit of time every day? It was dumb offering it as a primary motive for trekking out into the woods to fire up an entire dam. Heck, just put a guy on an exercise bike for a few hours a day!
Also, if there was a military force up north, isn’t it convenient that they happened to reach them via the radio as just the apes were mounting their attack?
Sure, but when you’re asking why Gary Oldman has to be below the tower to detonate the bombs, and the movie shows Jason Clarke coming on them as they’re setting up the explosives, I think the problem is more you checking out and not paying attention.
I avoided it, because It looked like very-low-budget for some reason. But you guys (mostly the fist page of the thread) sell it well :D
I am a fan of sci-fi, and of classic sci-fi. I am on a weird position, because I hate all the “GOD did it” movies, or the “See? technology is bad!” or “Don’t play with mother nature!” stupidity. About 90% of movies have these themes.
The “planet of apes” universe have some of that (don’t play god with monkeys!, or you may create another inteligent race that may replace us as dominant) but is much less in-the-face than other settings.
Planet-of-apes is a fun campy version of “I am legend”. Except the “zombies/vampires” here have a primitive society that is sort of medieval. The planet of apes is better in these parts, with ape politicians hating the truth, and having reasons to hide the truth.
Is “I am legend” / “Omega man” with the zombie/vampires capturing the Last Men before he has time to kill a lot of zombie/vampires, so … this is could be interesting.
Is too bad the last version of hollywood I am legend made the vampire/zombies brainless monsters. You can’t be a legend, if nobody can remember you.
Another question is, if politicians can hide the truth, shape the truth, how much of what us (modern apes) feel about the world is made of lies. We ignore the things that has ben stolen from us, the ideas, concepts, etc… that politicians have killed in history. The History Book is written by the winners and have a fuck ton of removed pages.
Thanks for the insights on this, i will just wait for it to appear on TV, films are not (and never where for me) ‘Just’ entertainment to while a way a few hours (i got games for that!), so unless they are doing something better than what has already been done, they rarely get me to part with money at the cinema, and if they are worse than what has already been done, just forget it.
This is probably not a film to change that, and why should i subsidize mediocrity (or worse) when i have other things i could be doing? My generation have really screwed up all this stuff, much of the time, and i can’t blame the global scope of it on Margret Thatcher alone! We are just more shit these days at a whole bunch of stuff, films included.
The film version has a settlement of humans still alive at the end with the cure on it’s way, so he would be remembered as legend. I hear the book has a better ending of how the vampires are the new society and that he realizes he was a legend to them in a bad way. Either way, legend?
Really? That old chestnut? “The game isn’t bad, you just didn’t play enough!”
But I’ll bite. What did I miss? Why did the guys detonating the explosions to destroy the building (i.e. rattle the scaffolding on the top of the building to minimal effect) have to be conveniently standing in the middle of all the explosives with the detonator? What bit of non-dumb explanation did I miss because I wasn’t “paying attention”? I’m pretty sure the answer is “to force Gary Oldman to have to blow himself up because he’s the villain”. But if there’s something less dumb, I can’t wait for you to share it with me.
I didn’t get that from my viewing, I guess. I know he was trying to do something that a desperate man with the amount of knowledge he had concerning the situation “up top” would’ve tried to do. But I don’t think the film tried to make him out to be a villain because of it. Quite the contrary. I felt they avoided making Snidely Whiplash villains out of most of the characters (with the exception of the immediately hostile chief engineer and the drunken armory attendants).
