Aping Around
Review: Planet of the Apes (2001)
So, here’s where I confess my dim memory of the originals. In fact, the only thing I actually remember is the nuke at the end of Return and the dry voiceover about a planet that is now dead. Which, by the way, traumatized me.
Probably why it’s taken me over 20 years to get around to the remake.
The original movie was made in 1968, and the apes are both better and worse. They do have one scene where I can see the breasts of the actress playing the friendly female ape.
Major changes:
1. Taylor is on his own on the planet.
2. Humans are not prelingual, but perfectly capable of speech. The apes enslave them anyway.
And then there’s…
So, those of us who remember the original know that this is a classic example of the Earth All Along trope. How does the remake navigate this?
By leaning into the fact that everyone watching knows it’s Earth All Along…except, of course, Taylor.
And then by twisting it all around and making it not Earth. The humans are the descendants of Taylor’s crewmates, the apes are the descendants of the chimps they brought along. We won’t ask how gorillas and orang utans are descended from chimps. It really doesn’t matter.
In the original, we get the classic scene of the fallen Statue of Liberty to reveal that it’s the far future of Earth and Taylor is trapped there.
In the remake, Taylor hops into the pod that was piloted by the chimp he was training…whom he leaves with the apes, thinking he’ll be better there, flies back to Earth, and crashes into the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial.
Except.
You guessed it. Lincoln’s an ape, and the Earth to which Taylor has returned is now a planet of apes.
As iconic as the Statue of Liberty scene was, I like this better, and there was no recreating it. It only worked the first time you watched it, when you didn’t know. It wasn’t an ending that survived spoilers.
Neither was this one, but…it’s over 20 years so the statute of limitations has expired.
And I seem to have got over some of my Planet of the Apes related trauma.
Some.
Cinema Disaster: Space Wars: Quest for the Deep Star
Yes, this is a Star Wars ripoff that lacks one key aspect of being a Star Wars ripoff…the war.
“Starring” Michael Paré and Olivier Gruner, this is a somewhat incoherent space adventure. Our heroes are trying to get credits to buy a new body for the hero’s dead wife. When you die in this universe, if you have enough money, you can come back as a human-cyborg hybrid.
Yes, I know that’s redundant nonsense. Unfortunately, they didn’t. There are multiple bad guys, one of them after a coin they stole, one after the location of the lost treasure ship Deep Star.
There’s really no need for multiple bad guys. There certainly is no need for one of the two Black people in the movie to be fed to a space dragon just to show how evil one of them is.
(The other shows up at the end. He’s evil).
They have terrible autism coding, one of the female characters is in something scanty and uncomfortable because she’s an ex slave girl, or something.
At one point they try to go deep about who can afford a new body. They fail.
We also get the delight of the screwed up countdown, except this time it’s a distance countdown that, for no reason, switches from feet to meters. Usually bad countdowns are out of order, so this is new.
Lastly, the asteroid field trope.
There was actually a good movie here somewhere. If they had taken out one of the bad guys (and the fridging of a Black guy at the start) then it would have made more sense.
It would also have made more sense if anyone in this stinker could act.
But if you like terrible movies, this one’s not a bad popcorn choice. If.