Come tomorrow, there’ll be an 800-pound gorilla in movie theaters. No, really.
I haven’t yet seen Bob Hoose’s review (which is due to publish later today), but even without reading it, I’d imagine that The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes will feature several of them. Hundreds, maybe. Millions. The coming ape army will need them if they hope to topple mankind. Hey, we may spend a little too much time playing video games to be in tip-top shape, but we still have tanks and jets and stuff. Right? Right?
To be honest, I doubt I’ll see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in the theaters, no matter what Mr. Hoose might have to say. Sure, the special effects look pretty great but, frankly, the whole series creeps me out a little. And while I love orangutans and chimpanzees as much as the next guy, anyone who watched the very first Planet of the Apes movie (released in 1968) knows this story does not end well for us. Besides, I don’t like to see Charlton Heston cry.
I had the opportunity to watch the original Planet of the Apes movies—all five of them—one day when I was sick. They were kinda fun in their own late ’60s, early ’70s way, but I think every single one of them ends badly.
The first flick, and most famous, sends Heston discovering a future Earth where humans are considered beasts and simians are on top of the food chain. Nothing like predicating a blockbuster on some disturbing aspects of Darwinian theory and humanity’s potential for self-extermination.
The next one, Beneath Planet of the Apes, one-ups the first in terms of both weirdness and gloom. In this installment, we meet a remnant of humankind—now telepathic—living deep underground and worshiping an atomic bomb (labeled with the Greek letters Alpha and Omega). Naturally, things get out of hand: The apes invade, someone pushes the button and the bomb goes off, killing everyone. Everyone. It makes 2012 look like The Sound of Music. A voiceover at the end says, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”
The end! Hope you enjoyed the show! Grab another bag of popcorn on the way out!
The next three were all prequels, really, chronicling the rise of the apes and the descent of man (one even features, I think, a weeping statue of civilization’s simian founder), and perhaps not so surprisingly they grew less and less popular. We Americans do like our happy endings … or, at the very least, a little uncertainty over what the end might bring. When you spoil the whole works in the second movie, well, there’s not much suspense after that.
I know the Apes movies are supposed to be cautionary fables of sorts. And I’m not fundamentally averse to dystopian movies. But I also like a little hope somewhere, y’know? These stories always felt cynical to me, offering very little in the way of grace or goodness or God. And unless this new franchise has a mind to rewrite the old one (which it already has a little), I feel a little fatalistic about the whole works.
But maybe that’s just me. What about you? Does the thrill of CGI apes throwing things outweigh the fact that they’re throwing things at you?
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