Best Planet Of The Apes sequel?

[Kirkman1987]

Overall, I think Conquest is the greatest sequel. I really love it's dark and violent edge. Governor Brent is a great villain.

That said, The last 20-30 minutes of Beneath is excellent. I like the end scenes as much as anything in the original film. I would rate this movie first if not for the fact that the rest of the film is mostly a retread and not that interesting.

[Emh]

It might be weird as fuck but I love Beneath. Unfortunately I've only seen bits and pieces of Conquest and Battle.

[lurok]

Escape... is by far the smartest and most enjoyable (I always loved that scene where the scientist explains time travel) but I like the apocalyptic tone of Beneath...

[Christopher]

I don't remember liking that much about Beneath other than the abundant Linda Harrison screen time.

And E-DUB, the one with Montalban is Conquest.

[Tosk]

Christopher wrote:

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And E-DUB, the one with Montalban is Conquest.

And a little bit of Escape.

[RJDiogenes]

This is a tough question; I think the original Planet of the Apes series is best viewed as one epic story. However. In terms of overall quality, Escape From The Planet of the Apes is probably the best-- but I hesitate to vote for it because I can't forget that they expect us to believe that Cornelius and Zira roamed around the Forbidden Zone, somehow found the lake where Taylor's ship sank, somehow knew it was there, somehow raised it to the surface, somehow repaired it, somehow fueled it, somehow learned how to fly it, somehow launched it and somehow found their way back in time to roughly the same time that Taylor left. That's a lot to swallow. The last two movies are ostensibly the worst in terms of production values and story, but Battle has that great speech by Roddy McDowall. Beneath has production values equal to the original, but the story is weaker and I always felt that the mutants were superfluous to the concept-- although I did like the climactic sequences in the mutants' lair. And, as noted, there is Linda Harrison. If forced to choose, the far-fetched premise of Escape forces me to default to Beneath.

[cooleddie74]

The best thing about Battle in my eyes was John Huston as the Lawgiver. He added some very much-needed gravitas and in-universe continuity to the film, a film that like I said earlier was a pretty sloppy mess with the weakest final edit of any of the Apes films with the exception of the abysmal Tim Burton remake.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I was absolutely blown away by the ending of Beneath. If the rebooted film series makes it far enough, I'd like to see them do the same thing.

That being said: What's everyone's opinion on the theory that the original POTA films establish a closed time loop?

[Steve Mollmann]

I waffle back and forth between Escape and Conquest on this one. I remember liking Conquest a lot, but last time through, Escape edged it out. (What a tone shift that one has!)

Beneath I always found to be a boring version of the original, with the exception of the ending. Nothing good at all is happening in Battle.

[Praetor_Shinzon]

i always fall asleep during Beneath.

[Christopher]

RJDonner&Blitzen wrote:

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This is a tough question; I think the original Planet of the Apes series is best viewed as one epic story. However. In terms of overall quality, Escape From The Planet of the Apes is probably the best-- but I hesitate to vote for it because I can't forget that they expect us to believe that Cornelius and Zira roamed around the Forbidden Zone, somehow found the lake where Taylor's ship sank, somehow knew it was there, somehow raised it to the surface, somehow repaired it, somehow fueled it, somehow learned how to fly it, somehow launched it and somehow found their way back in time to roughly the same time that Taylor left. That's a lot to swallow.

That's just an example of what makes it hard for me to see the five films as one epic story. None of them, save the last, was designed with a sequel in mind. So each film had to retcon the rules of the previous film in order to justify its existence. In the original, there was no time warp; Taylor and his men were just in hibernation for thousands of years, maybe time-dilated by their velocity, but either way just in suspended animation. Beneath had to retcon that into a time warp to justify a second ship coming to the same future. Then Escape needed the rather absurd retcon you describe, and it introduced the revised backstory that the apes themselves were responsible for the destruction of human civilization after being bred into servants, rather than evolving in the wake of human nuclear war as the original indicated. (Taylor's famous rant before the Statue of Liberty only makes sense if he's directing his rage at humanity for its self-destruction; saying the apes were responsible undermines it, even if you say they were driven to it by human cruelty.) But Escape implied that those events were a considerable distance in the future -- naturally, since it would've taken time to breed the apes into the more humanoid form we see. Yet Conquest showed that the apes had somehow magically mutated into that form within a single generation after the previous film -- although at least they were almost all mute except for Caesar. But then Battle retconned that and had all the apes able to speak. Ironically, Battle was the only film that was written with the goal of allowing a sequel to exist, yet it didn't get one. (Unless you count the TV series, which retconned things even further.)

So while the idea was to create the illusion that these films followed on one another in an overall arc, they really don't fit together logically. Each one is a reinvention of the premise to some degree.

[BennyRussel]

Escape....if only for my favorite line in the series not spoken by Heston.

"Because I loathe bananas!"
- Dr. Zira

[Harvey]

RE: Christoper

You really think that the cliffhanger in Escape from the Planet of the Apes wasn't intended to facilitate a sequel? I can't remember the behind-the-scenes details, so perhaps it wasn't, but it's always struck me as the movie that had a follow-up in mind.

[Christopher]

I remember seeing a special about the POTA movies some years ago, and I'm pretty sure they said that Battle was the only movie written with a sequel in mind. Certainly the ending of Escape was meant to be ominous, to show that the seeds of the apocalyptic future had been sown, but as I said, I think the idea there was that it would be many generations down the road, not just a couple of decades as the next movie had it.

[Galileo7]

Beneath POTA. Escape POTA would be my next favorite.