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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Monkey Business: Rise of the Planet of the Apes



Karen: Let's hear your opinions of this new film. Is it a worthy entry or re-start of the series?

 

8 comments:

  1. I don't plan to see it, I am a fan of the original series(before it got super-convoluted), but this just seems like another case of "Hollywood is out of ideas,slap a familiar brand name on the marquee".

    I thought they learned their lesson with the Burton re-make(Apebraham Lincoln?), but I guess not.

    If anyone here plans to see it, this review says try to arrive late:
    http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/51153/rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/

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  2. hell, yes. I'm a big fan of the original fims, and I hated the Tim Burton one. but this looks like it's gonna be great fun. yeah, I know it's just another Hollywood reboot, but I don't care.

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  3. I'm torn on it. On the one hand, yeah the Burton movie sucked. On the other, reviews have been universally (almost surprised-soundingly) positive. On the THIRD hand, I hate the notion of the apes rising in revolt like this. Having them take over after we kill ourselves off? Cool. But armed uprising? Not buying it. Didn't buy it the first time either. No matter how many monkeys you got, and how smart they are, the humans have automatic weapons. That phalanx of monkeys from the trailer could get taken out, easily, by three soldiers and a howitzer. To say nothing of air strikes...

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  4. And that's what happens when you accidentally put the word verification in instead of your name. Maybe the monkeys have a better shot than I thought...

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  5. We saw it this afternoon and it was a lot of fun. They came up with a fairly plausible way for the apes to rise to dominance (eventually). I went in thinking that the CGI was going to be hard for me to take but after a few minutes I didn't even think about it. This film may do for POTA what 2009's "Star Trek" did for that franchise -pump some new blood in the apes and get them going again.

    Karen

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  6. Hi, Karen, I saw it too tonight and thought it was fun and even somewhat thoughtful in exploring how intelligent non-human creatures might respond to our mistreatment of them. Of course, we can read history to see how people respond to being mistreated by other people. Sometimes the rebellious victims win and take over, sometimes they lose and are massacred and more often there's a sort of stalemate. As Chris says, it's unlikely such a small, motley group of chimps, gorillas and orangutans could take over the planet overrun with billions of humans -- even one of our medium-sized cities has more people than the entire existant population of big apes. Still, if some disease wiped out a big enough percentage of our kind to make the numbers more even and they got a hold of and knew how to use our weapons ....
    Being conquered by a bunch of other apes may be pure fantasy, but we do have the means to wipe ourselves out and despite our big brains our leaders may yet prove stupid enough to do it.

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  7. I saw POTA this afternoon and my sons and I loved it!! Wow -- what a fun, thought-provoking film. The CGI was simply incredible, the storyline was very well-conceived, and the acting was for the most part good. I think I came up with at least a dozen homages to the original five films -- is it too soon to begin listing them?

    Doug

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  8. yes indeed the tim burton one like everything else he does sucked. as far as i'm concerned if i get to see San Francisco get fucked up that's good enough reason for me to see this movie.

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