Friday, August 5, 2011

Apes Have Risen...


...and it was every bit as epic as I had hoped it would be.

From start to finish, I was completely entertained. The acting was good, the action was great, and WETA Digital shows us once again why they are, without question, the best digital effects team in the world. Amazing special effects.

What I really liked about the movie was the tie-ins to the series that this movie is a prequel to.

For instance, at one point in time they show a news clip where the Icarus is taking off for it's mission to Mars. For those that don't know (or don't remember) the Icarus was the ship that Chartlon Heston's character, Taylor, crashed onto the Planet of the Apes in the original movie. A few scenes later in this movie, a newspaper is shown with the headline "LOST IN SPACE" and then an article that appears to be about Taylor's Icarus. Which shows us the correlation between this movie and the series.

I also liked the use of "Get your paws off of me you damned dirty ape!!" It fit well, and when you see this one you will see why.

Overall, amazing movie, and I'm definitely glad I went to see it when I did. Great stuff!!!!

2 comments:

Doug said...

I've been watching the clips and am amazed at the technology and what it can do.

I plan on watching it, at some point (probably on Netflix, but am not sure about the tie in to the original series.

The original series was about time travel and our own self destruction. This seems to be about our messing with genetics and evolution.

Gimpdiggity said...

Actually, the original movie was about space travel, and cryostasis. There wasn't any time travel in it, other than the fact that the astronauts effectively traveled to the future while they were "lost" in space. Relativity says if you are traveling near the speed of light, things around you tend to be "speed up," so if you were gone at the speed of light for 5 years, like 100 years would pass on earth. In the original movie, Taylor crash landed on earth some unknown time in the future because he had been travelling in space and possibly was in a state of cryostasis.

The original movie didn't really go into WHAT exactly happened to the humans on earth and HOW the apes came to power.

Time travel wasn't introduced to the series until the third movie, "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" where the three apes escape the nuclear bomb that Taylor detonated at the end of "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" and end up on earth in the 1970s.

This movie is the prequel that explains how the apes came to be. It kind of takes the place of the rather poor sequels to the original.