Caesar: Rise of the Apes

[Kelso]

Chud has some details about this project... which they say is still alive and is a loose prequel to the original Planet of the Apes.

Like Scott Frank's version, Caesar: Rise of the Apes is centered on genetic research. Will is a doctor trying to cure Alzheimers, a disease that afflicts his father. He's working with monkeys to create a benign virus that can get into brain tissue and restore functionality. After his research is shut down he's left with just one chimp, the child of his most promising subject, and Will raises him at home. Young Caesar is incredibly intelligent for an ape, and over time he continues to mutate and evolve, looking less like a chimp and moving on from sign language to actual speech. Eventually Caesar ends up leading an army of apes in an uprising just as a catastrophe strikes mankind.

They go on to list some homages to the original Apes films, including a reference to Col. Taylor's mission on the Icarus.

As an unabashed Apes fanboy, I'm pretty excited about this flick. I hope they can pull it off.

 

[Greg Cox]

I always liked CONQUEST. This could be fun--and I would kill to write the novelization!

 

[Guy Gardener]

They already did something similar to this as a comic book maybe 5 years back.

And anyway it's hardly honest if Caesar isn't raised at the circus by Khan.

Is your Ricardo Montalban fetish shining through Greg?

 

[Greg Cox]

They already did something similar to this as a comic book maybe 5 years back.

And anyway it's hardly honest if Caesar isn't raised at the circus by Khan.

Is your Ricardo Montalban fetish shining through Greg?

Hah!

"The chimpanzees offered the world order!"

Amazing Apes Trivia: As I recall, the original novelization of CONQUEST was written by John Jakes, who later went on to become a hugely bestselling author of big historical sagas.

I suspect I still have a copy in an attic somewhere.

 

[Nerys Myk]

They already did something similar to this as a comic book maybe 5 years back.

And anyway it's hardly honest if Caesar isn't raised at the circus by Khan.

Is your Ricardo Montalban fetish shining through Greg?

Hah!

"The chimpanzees offered the world order!"

Amazing Apes Trivia: As I recall, the original novelization of CONQUEST was written by John Jakes, who later went on to become a hugely bestselling author of big historical sagas.

I suspect I still have a copy in an attic somewhere.

Yeah, I saw a copy at a used bookstore a few weeks back and did a double take.

 

[bigdaddy]

This sounds like a horrible, useless idea for a movie.

 

[Nardpuncher]

I know they established the year that the first movie happened as something like the year 2900 or so, but I always liked the idea that Taylor was in suspended animation for the millions of year it would actually take for apes to evolve (if they could that is) to what we saw in the movie.
I know that the experiments that are mentioned in that link can shorten that time, but it's just my thing that the far, far future feels better for the setting of the movie.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

I have a copy of the Conquest novelization that is basically falling apart.

The best thing about it is it has the original ending.

The first science fiction book I ever read was the novelization of Battle. I think I was 7 or so. Good times.

Conquest is, IMO, the second-best of the films, and a different prequel isn't necessary. The synopsis above also makes no sense - if Caesar is the first evolved ape, and there isn't a broad ape slave class for him to lead, who's in the revolution? Caesar and the orangutans from those old Clint Eastwood movies?

 

[Nardpuncher]

Conquest is, IMO, the second-best of the films, and a different prequel isn't necessary. The synopsis above also makes no sense - if Caesar is the first evolved ape, and there isn't a broad ape slave class for him to lead, who's in the revolution? Caesar and the orangutans from those old Clint Eastwood movies?

Now that sounds like a good movie!
Caesar would be trying to lead them but they'd give him the finger and pop open a Schlitz.

 

[Roshi]

I know they established the year that the first movie happened as something like the year 2900 or so, but I always liked the idea that Taylor was in suspended animation for the millions of year it would actually take for apes to evolve (if they could that is) to what we saw in the movie.
I know that the experiments that are mentioned in that link can shorten that time, but it's just my thing that the far, far future feels better for the setting of the movie.

3955 actually.

 

[Greg Cox]

The first science fiction book I ever read was the novelization of Battle. I think I was 7 or so. Good times.

?

That was by David Gerrold, I believe. Of THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES with fame.

I actually read that novelization before I saw the movie.

Boy, was the book better!

 

[FluffyUnbound]

That was by David Gerrold, I believe. Of THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES with fame.

I actually read that novelization before I saw the movie.

Boy, was the book better!

Me too.

In book form, the scene where the gorilla chases Caesar's son through the tree scared the crap out of me. Granted, I was a little kid, but in the movie that is a nothing scene.

The movie's budgetary limitations really hurt the depictions of the ruined human city. The city in my imagination was much cooler than what they did on screen. [I remember reading a comic version, that was nothing like the movie, where Governor Kolp was drawn with this leather mask that covered half of his face - the city and the human mutants were much more impressive in that comic than in the movie.]

One funny thing about the budget on that movie - I remember thinking that the sets of "early" Ape City were crap, and that it looked like a bunch of people wearing ape costumes at a summer camp. But since then I've seen enough documentaries about Jonestown or the Manson family to "get" it. That version of Ape City is supposed to look like a 70's California hippie commune. Viewed in that light, the sets actually work, and it's a better movie than I first thought that it was.

 

[Mistral]

Any Apes is good Apes, in my book. The films captured my imagination as a child and the original is still one of the all-time great scifi movies, IMO. If there's a story I wished had been explored more thoroughly its this one.

 

[Silvercrest]

Conquest is, IMO, the second-best of the films, and a different prequel isn't necessary. The synopsis above also makes no sense - if Caesar is the first evolved ape, and there isn't a broad ape slave class for him to lead, who's in the revolution? Caesar and the orangutans from those old Clint Eastwood movies?

Now that sounds like a good movie!
Caesar would be trying to lead them but they'd give him the finger and pop open a Schlitz.

Right turn, Clyde.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Talk about your "damn dirty apes".

 

[Gojirob]

Do the novelizations explain why the one astronaut who was stuffed was such a fascination to the Apes? Did the remaining Humans have race wars on top of fighting the apes? Also, do Caesar's activities avert or confirm the original POTA timeline?

 

[Greg Cox]

Do the novelizations explain why the one astronaut who was stuffed was such a fascination to the Apes? Did the remaining Humans have race wars on top of fighting the apes? Also, do Caesar's activities avert or confirm the original POTA timeline?

Well, there was no novelization of the original film. They just reprinted the original novel by Pierre Boulle with a movie tie-in cover. So the taxidermy bit wasn't explained.

I don't remember any racial conflicts between the humans, but, boy, the chimps and the gorillas didn't get along!

Whether Caesar diverged the timeline is a topic of much fannish speculation. I would think so, since Cornelius's description of the rise of the apes in ESCAPE doesn't quite match what happened in CONQUEST. As I recall, Cornelius actually claims that Aldo started the revolution, not Caesar.

Whether Caesar actually changed things for the better is left ambiguous at the end of BATTLE.

For the record, the original novelizations were:

BENEATH by Michael Avallone
ESCAPE by Jerry Pournelle
CONQUEST by John Jakes
BATTLE by David Gerrold.

There were also a couple of novelizations of the tv show.

 

[Procutus]

I know they established the year that the first movie happened as something like the year 2900 or so, but I always liked the idea that Taylor was in suspended animation for the millions of year it would actually take for apes to evolve (if they could that is) to what we saw in the movie.
I know that the experiments that are mentioned in that link can shorten that time, but it's just my thing that the far, far future feels better for the setting of the movie.

3955 actually.

If memory serves me correctly, in the original POTA, Taylor's chronometer read 3978 just before he bailed out of the ship. It was changed to 3955 in 'Escape' when Zira was talking about their future.

I've got to admit, I'm psyched about this. I loved all five films, though the first remains the best, IMO. I really hope this comes to pass.

 

[Lapis Exilis]

This sounds like a horrible, useless idea for a movie.

Yes - it already is: Deep Blue Sea in which a doctor researching Alzheimer's, which her father suffered and died from, uses experimental methods on shark's brains to derive large quantities of a chemical that can reverse the nerve damage of Alzheimer's. Sadly she made the shark's brains bigger to harvest more of the chemical, they got smart and ate her along with several other people. While they did not then go out and lead a revolution of smart sharks over the humans (Planet of the Sharks - now that'd be an update!), it sounds like the Caesar project is ripping off a deliciously bad b-movie. One of my favorite bad movies actually.

I'm with those who point out that one smart ape does not a Planet make, and the much more interesting story is one in which humanity wiped itself out, leaving space for the other apes to evolve as suggested by the movie. Conquest, if I recall correctly, derives largely from a section of Boulle's original book that was abandoned in the 1968 adaptation in which the humans on the Monkey Planet trained their apes as servants. While Ulysses finds smart apeas back home when he arrives, there's no explanation of how the apes took over on earth.

Something in which a large segment of the human population blasts itself back to the stone age, then has to coexist with smart apes, competing and losing - now that'd be interesting. It would also allow a stage of development more primitive than that seen in Ape City in the 1968 version and never before done in any of the apes movies. Then I'd love to see a fllow up, proper remake in which the apes have the flying cars and future tech originally suggested for the 1968 movie.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I have a copy of the Conquest novelization that is basically falling apart.

The best thing about it is it has the original ending.

What was the original ending?

Montalban taught Caesar well: "It was only the fact of my superior intellect that allowed us apes to survive!"