Favorite Apes film?

[Confessional]

^^ For many fans of the POTA-verse, including myself, it's the non-linear sci-fi/socio-political content of the franchise that made it relevant in its heyday and keep it in rare space today. Lots of anti-heroes to go around, each adding to the mythos of our collective caput mortuum. The ideas were bigger than the movies, but the movies (and subsequent cross-media) were magical and startling… each in their own way.

Back in 2014, Don Kaye wrote a pretty good summation for Rolling Stone; it may provide you with some perspective you dismissed as poor writing: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/n...-apes-20140701

Of course if you really want to deep dive, there are numerous books, publications, blogs and wikis that offer much more spanning 40 years of both intellectual and entertaining discourse. Rich Handley (MM member) has written a couple amazing tomes (Lexicon & Timeline of the POTA) of knowledge which answer/connect much of that content: http://www.hassleinbooks.com/pages/index.php

[enyawd72]

^There's no denying that the original POTA series was groundbreaking and highly entertaining. I totally get the social issues that were presented and addressed throughout the series. The first film holds up very well, but as the series continued, I maintain my assertion that the ideas presented, the explanations given, and major plot holes were more detrimental and for me, overshadowed the positives.

The most glaring example of poor writing in the series was "the dog and cats all died" explanation of how the apes eventually came to be as we know them. That's something I'd expect a child to come up with, not a professional writer.
As good as the first film was, the sequels were just poorly thought out and executed IMO, and they tend to drag the first film down a notch with them when taken as a whole.

I still enjoy them, and my favorite ape character is still General Ursus. I just think Tim Burton's stand alone film is better. That's never going to change. Is it as socially relevant? No, but I think it's better sci-fi.

[Mego Milk]

Filthy Humans!

[Mikey]

The dog and cats dying so we took apes as pets was just stupid.

If dogs and cats ever did die there's plenty of other animals that would more likely be replacement pets including "designer" pigs, goats, skunks etc.

It would be SAFER having a black bear as a pet rather than any great ape

[jwyblejr]

I never could figure out how that disease managed to zero in on just cats and dogs.

[apes3978]

Taylor, Dodge, Landon and (also dead) Stewart land in the year 3955 (or 3975, I believe both dates are given) in the original Planet of the Apes.

PLANET's date is 3978, BENEATH is where the 3955 date comes from...

IIRC, 3975 *was* used in an early BENEATH script...

I never liked that Paul Dehn made the date(s) between PLANET and BENEATH go backwards, if anything, BENEATH should have taken place in 3979... (I think the date 3979 is used in the RETURN series, but that's no consolation, especially since I don't include that series in on any of my personal APES scenarios...)

[apes3978]

Ranking the films, I put them in this order:

PLANET
BENEATH
CONQUEST and ESCAPE can flip-flop back and forth, and lastly
BATTLE

[ZMOQ]

Here's a question about BENEATH that I had wondered about. Why is there only 26 generations of Mendez? The Mendez of BATTLE is presumably the founder of the dynasty. Some of the earlier versions of the BENEATH screenplays describe Brent seeing a hallway of Mendez statues, where they start off looking relatively normal, but radiation and presumed inbreeding had caused considerable degeneration of their appearance over time. Then, they abruptly start looking beautiful again (this is when they started to wear masks).

So, mathematically, why only 26 generations of Mendez over a 2000 year period (1955-3978)? This implies that each Mendez heir was born when his father was 75? Since Papa Mendez waited so long to have kids, he'd be pretty elderly and prone to age-related problems like senility, illness, death, etc, so who's training Mendez Junior to take over?

If we were to recalculate this, assuming that each Mendez has children at age 30 (more reasonable), then they should be on Mendez the 66th, not Mendez the 26th in 2000 years.

[Apositive]

My favorite POTA film is Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I like it because of the action sequences, Roddy McDowell's performance and that it's a movie about revolt/revolution and it works well in the action genre. Some of it was filmed in Century City here in L.A. and occasionally I will go by that area and all I can think of is Caesar leading the charge with an M-16!!!