War for the Planet of the Apes - Hairy Gollum versus Larry Flynt

Movies
1

[quote]
In War for the Planet of the Apes, the third chapter of the critically acclaimed blockbuster franchise, Caesar and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless Colonel. After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind. As the journey finally brings them face to face, Caesar and the Colonel are pitted against each other in an epic battle that will determine the fate of both their species and the future of the planet.[/quote]

July 14, 2017

Matt Reeves directing.

2

This reminds me that I need to see the other two movies.

3

These movies are surprisingly great. I went in expecting almost nothing and was impressed both times.

4

I’ve heard this from many people, so I need to sit down and watch 'em. Could someone clue me in on which two films comprise these? There are so many of these Apes films I wanna make sure to watch the right ones.

5

Yeah, you really only want to watch great ape movies.

This series begins with

And continues with

6

Perfect, thank you!

7

I’ve always loved Planet Of the Apes.

The original series was pretty much awesome, with maybe the exception of the second one where they had that other dude who looked like charleton heston kind of but wasn’t, and charleton heston played a cameo.

The new ones were great too.

The one with Marky Mark was pretty bad though.

8

So awful. The only thing interesting was the stunt casting of Heston as an ape.

I’ll join the others in praise of the last two Planet of the Apes movies. I was surprisingly pleased by both.

9

I’ve seen the marky mark one a few times, and I still don’t really understand the plot exactly.

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Do not want.

-Tom

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The 1st of the new in the series was great, I loved how they made the apes believable, the apes were really, really great. Ceasar was amazing. It was magical to see the awakening of the apes. The second one became almost a war movie,
but still kind of OK, but too much dumb action (although Ceaser was still great)… and the 3rd one looks like it will be a war movie. I hope it will have more depth (I like war movies if they are historical), not sure I like the direction, but what can they do? They have to follow the basic plot from the past… they were really free in what they were doing in the 1st one, which was kind of a prequel… hope it turns out well, but I have doubts

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He also directed the 2014 “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” though. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve heard it’s good.

Yeah, I’ve seen it twice, and I just don’t understand what the hell happens at the end. They end up on an earth where Abraham Lincoln was an ape, and everyone else is also an ape? What the hell is that even supposed to mean?

13

That’s a trope from the original movies I think. I.e. advanced ape society resembling 1960s Earth. That’s about the only thing that was genuinely funny about the Marky Mark movie.

14

Not really.

Here’s what happened in the original movies: (Spoilers for the whole series, obviously)

Planet of the Apes: Charlton Heston and crew go on a deep space exploration mission. When they land they find themselves on a planet of apes. He’s trying to get away from the apes so that maybe he can get back on a ship and go back to earth. At the end of the movie, he finds a half buried Statue of Liberty. He realizes his module isn’t on another planet. It returned to earth. But earth has been taken over by apes who had overthrown their human overlords.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes: There’s still a society of humans on earth in the future. They fight with the apes that live on the surface. They live underground and worship the atom bomb. At the end of the movie faux Charton Heston is unsuccessful at preventing them from launching an attack to destroy the earth. Earth is destroyed by atom bombs.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes: In the third movie, it turns out before Nuclear apocalypse in the last movie, two ape scientists were able to escape using a time machine. They went back into the past to 1970s America. Americans received them well. They were celebrities. But when they find out that society in the future has been taken over by apes, they kill the two apes. However, it turns out the female ape had a child, Caesar. And Caesar is an ape taken care of by the circus. But he’s secretly a smart ape from the future!

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes: In the fourth movie, we see how there was a disease that killed off dogs and cats. So people started keeping apes as pets. And Caesar, the smart ape from the future was able to organize the apes and lead a revolt against humans who were mistreating the apes. And Caesar became the new leader of an ape society.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes: In the fifth movie, we see Caesar lead his ape army against the remnants of the humans who have started to go underground to survive. He wants to live in peace with the humans, but the remnants of the human race are pretty wretched. And by the end of the movie we see they have moved underground and have nuclear weapons.

So it’s a circular time travel story. It’s sort of a paradox. Smart apes from the future come back to the past. But even though it’s circular, it all ends the same way with a nuclear holocaust that destroys both and ape and man.

Pretty cool right? And it’s all internally consistent. Unlike Marky Mark’s version. If he ended up on a future earth like the Charlton Heaston original movie, then how the hell did he go in the past and discover an earth that had an ape Abraham Lincoln and ape police, etc? So it as an earth where it was apes all along and not humans? Some kind of parallel earth maybe?

Edit: Btw, this is all from the top of my head, and I haven’t watched the original movies since the mid-90s so apologies if I messed things up in my recollection.

Also if someone wants me to put that behind a spoiler tag, I can do that. But it’s been 50 years now since the original, so I think I’m okay.

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Hmm… I believe that in battle for planet of the apes movie though, they prevent nuclear holocaust. It’s actually not exactly the same reincarnation of what had happened previously. I remember it being a more happy ending.

The way I liked to interpret it, is that Caesar in the later movies isn’t actually the same ape that is described as the lawgiver in the first. A similar outcome has transpired in which apes became dominant, but in this second timeline, Caesar has benefited from not only being more intelligent and fully evolved, as he’s actually from the future, but he benefited from learning about how to be humane from the guy who ran the circus (KHAAAAN!).

In this scenario, you could potentially fit the new reboot movies into the canon by interpreting them as the original ape evolution, where apes evolve in the early 2000’s via genetic manipulation, rather than through introduction of a super intelligent ape from the future.

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Oh yeah! That is ringing a bell! I think you’re right. I also remember Battle (the 5th movie) having a happy resolution.

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I loved the original film of course. I consider it a classic, and I’ve seen it multiple times.

After that, I saw “Beneath” a few years later. I was still very young, and I liked that movie quite a bit as well. But even though I was young, I could recognize that it was nowhere near as good as the original, and it worked for me only because I treated it as more of a B-movie. I thought James Franciscus did okay.

After that, I have not seen any of the remaining films in the original series I think because my father told me that each succeeding film got worse and worse. So, from my teen years until now, I’ve been wondering what I’ve missed. Somehow, I have never seen films 3, 4, and 5 at any time on television either. Nor any of the more recent films.

Are any of those remaining films worth watching, considering how much I loved the first one, and liked the second? I’m not so much concerned with the budgets or effects (IIRC the budgets were very low for the last original films), but rather if any of you enjoyed them, or if you consider them as totally disposable.

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Yes, they’re worth watching. The first, third and fifth are the good ones.

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Yeah, the second one was, in my opinion, the worst of the original series… the rest of them are much more in line with the quality of the first one.

I think a big part of it is that Roddt McDowall was in all of the planet of the apes movies except the second one, and McDowall was just AWESOME as Cornelius, and then came back to play his son, Caesar as well. McDowall’s portrayal of Cornelius and Caesar kind of carries those movies in a lot of ways, as his role becomes bigger than in the original, since there’s no Charleton Heston.

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Thanks guys. We just now finished watching the original. It’s been maybe 15 years since we last saw it, and it still holds up really well. The version I have is the 35th anniversary DVD, and while the video was excellent, I thought the audio was kind of thin-sounding. Hopefully newer editions may have rectified that? I’m thinking of getting all 5 in a set, but I’ll need to check and make sure the quality is okay. Anyway, glad to know we have something to look forward to.