Poll Favorite PLANET OF THE APES films & tv series?
- Thread starter Galileo7
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I've only seen the original, Beneath, the Burton movie, and Rise and Dawn, and of those the Original and Dawn were my favorites. I've enjoyed all of them, but I enjoyed those the most.
I've seen bits and pieces of Escape and Conquest on TV, but I've never actually sat down and watched them from beginning to end.
Never seen any of the other parts of the franchise.
I've seen bits and pieces of Escape and Conquest on TV, but I've never actually sat down and watched them from beginning to end.
Never seen any of the other parts of the franchise.
Well, I'm not going to judge War solely on its trailer...
Tough call what my favorite film is because the original, while sociologically inaccurate regarding the apes, is an incredibly powerful allegory that otherwise holds up to this day. It's Rod Serling at his finest and on a cinematic level.
The rest of that series varies in quality. I'm partial to Beneth not despite, but because of its weirdness. Escape is a fun film but it's radically different from the rest of the series. I barely recall Conquest and Battle, so I don't think I can fairly judge them and I've never seen either of the television series.
At the time, I loved Tim Burton's take, but in retrospect, I recognize how ridiculous it is. I like your suggestion that film should've started with its ending. That would have made it far more interesting than a straight remake but with a twist.
I have great love for both Rise and Dawn and I would rank them as high as the original Heston, but I would point out they're very different in nature from each other.
Tough call what my favorite film is because the original, while sociologically inaccurate regarding the apes, is an incredibly powerful allegory that otherwise holds up to this day. It's Rod Serling at his finest and on a cinematic level.
The rest of that series varies in quality. I'm partial to Beneth not despite, but because of its weirdness. Escape is a fun film but it's radically different from the rest of the series. I barely recall Conquest and Battle, so I don't think I can fairly judge them and I've never seen either of the television series.
At the time, I loved Tim Burton's take, but in retrospect, I recognize how ridiculous it is. I like your suggestion that film should've started with its ending. That would have made it far more interesting than a straight remake but with a twist.
I have great love for both Rise and Dawn and I would rank them as high as the original Heston, but I would point out they're very different in nature from each other.
The original Planet of the Apes is one of the all-time, classic, iconic, Science Fiction movies-- in a class with Forbidden Planet, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and 2001. The sequels are enjoyable addendums, but they sequelized the superficial aspects of the movie rather than the core of the piece. Same thing with the TV series, which was simply a straightforward adventure show. I barely remember the Tim Burton remake and even less of the more recent remake. The only other thing that can compare to the original is the Marvel Comics' series by Doug Moench and Mike Ploog.
Seen them all except War of course....
The Original is the best. Others have varying degree of merit...Rise is probably next...
The Original is the best. Others have varying degree of merit...Rise is probably next...
That's the beauty of this franchise. It doesn't need to be remade to fit in.
The first film is set thousands of years in the futhre while the current series is set in on a near future Earth. Taylor and his ship were background easter eggs in "Rise...". It took off and I believe they reported it missing, but I'm not sure of that part without a rewatch.
The filmmakers get asked that a lot, and I saw a recent interview (can't remember where) in which the director said no, it'd still be a long time before they got to that point. What they're interested in, if there are further sequels, is continuing to explore the origins and evolution of the society whose endpoint we know. Essentially the first two films were loose remakes of Conquest of and Battle for the PotA, and now there's this whole vast stretch of untold stories between the fall of humanity and the well-established ape civilization of the original film, and the filmmakers would rather continue to explore that untapped period than just jump right to the end.
Planet of the Apes (1968). Brilliant, sweeping adventure and frightening all at once. Nothing else in the franchise comes close.
Honorable mention: the dark hopelessness of Beneath & Conquest were the logical outgrowth of the original, with two last acts among the most potent in sci-fi cinema history.
I think that was in the interview I linked to after the trailer came out.
I was wondering, could you possibly say that the series is how things played out without the time travel in Escape?
I don't understand the desire to treat this as somehow of a piece with the original franchise. It's a complete reboot. It's taking the concept and reinventing it from the ground up. It's not going to lead into the original movie, because the original movie was a fantasy and this is a much more realistic new take informed by 50 more years of primate research. It's apples and oranges.
I'm often surprised at how many people seem to think these films are genuinely prequels to the original cycle of movies, just because of a few Easter eggs, when you really can't reconcile the fact that Caesar has a completely different origin and story arc in the new movies that isn't remotely compatible with what we saw in CONQUEST and BATTLE.
But, yes, I've seen people object to labeling them reboots.
But, yes, I've seen people object to labeling them reboots.
Try shocked that anyone just paying light attention to the filmmakers behind the reboots should know the films have no connection to the APJAC movie productions released from 1968-1973, or the two TV series.
If screencaps supplied by keen-eyed viewers of the War trailer are any indication, it looks as if War will be the closer Battle equivalent.
If I had to guess, maybe they're getting a "Superman Returns" vibe from it? As if it (loosely) acknowledges certain films from the preceding film series continuity but not others?
I mean, good grief, just look at them. One has human actors in latex makeup that, as excellent as it was for its day, only broadly suggests ape species, while the other has anatomically and behaviorally realistic apes created through CGI and performance capture. How anyone could possibly imagine they're in the same reality is beyond me.
And of course, even talking about continuity in the original PotA series is kind of a waste of time, because all five films contradict each other in one way or another. First, Taylor and his crew just traveled in suspended animation for 2000 years, then it was retconned into a time warp so another ship could follow them and one could eventually go back the other way. Then the whole world blew up, apes and all, but then, oh, somehow three Iron-Age apes managed to launch a space capsule into orbit without the technological infrastructure to build launch stages or a gantry or flight computers or to refine rocket fuel. Don't get me wrong, Escape is the second-best movie, but the handwave it uses to justify its existence as a sequel is profoundly idiotic and not believable for an instant. And then there's that stupid retcon about apes being bred into pets after the cats and dogs died out (I mean, what??? What about rabbits and ferrets and guinea pigs and whatnot?), and in one movie it's something that takes centuries of breeding, and then in the next the transformation of all the world's great apes into humanoid forms has magically happened in just 20 years, which is total nonsense. There's just no consistency or continuity or sense to any of it. The original series's continuity is as bad as that of the Frankenstein films, either Universal or Hammer. The films barely even fit with each other, never mind with a reboot series decades later.
I don't think so. Battle was about Caesar trying to make peace with the surviving humans and facing a coup from a human-hating ape within his ranks, and even had the villainous ape fall to his death -- very similar to Dawn. War has Caesar himself as a much more hardened character on a mission to assassinate the human military leader.
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I'm talking about the proto-mutants.
It seems like the humans are on a mission to kill the apes.
There's no debating that the original film was by far the best Apes film. IHMO, none of them have ever come close. Obviously, that got my vote. But I also checked off Beneath and the 74-75 TV series. I thought Beneath did a good job of following up on the beginnings of the world that was established in the first one. Also, I liked its freaky allegory of the mutants worshiping the atomic bomb. Very timely for the early 70s. The TV series really changed things, but I liked the world they established. I rationalized it in that it took place in the western part of North America while the films were in the New York area. Also, they were in a somewhat different time also.
The TV series is another thing that's clearly in an incompatible continuity with the movies. The time frame is different, the history is different, Central City is on the West Coast instead of the East, and of course humans are still intelligent and verbal and far more civilized than in the movies. Yeah, yeah, you could pretend it's an outgrowth of the altered timeline of the later movies, but the pilot's description of other human astronauts arriving in the past is inconsistent with any of the movies. It doesn't mesh with the movies any better than the animated series did. Like most TV adaptations of movies, it's an alternate take on the premise.
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