Caesar: Rise of the Apes

[Mr. Laser Beam]

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?

Governor Breck and the other surviving humans are executed, on Caesar's orders. Linky

 

[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?

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 Pournell
CONQUEST by John Jakes
BATTLE by David Gerrold.

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

The Apes, like the Diclonius in Elfen Lied, often seem no better than the species they're supposedly replacing. It seems the director did want to confirm a timeline of doom, which seems odd considering the changes wrought in the series itself. If Caesar's reign was to prove no different than Aldo's, why enact a difference that makes no difference?

My ultimate ending to POTA :

(We see Taylor in the distance, screaming at the statue)

Zaius : He doesn't like it! All that effort to re-create one of his world's icons, and he actually seems to hate it.

Cornelius : I told you to give it better support. Damn thing's buried halfway in the sand!

Zira : He must think we're just horrible.

I remember the early/mid-70's. Between movies, live action TV, cartoons, comic books and magazines, you were all but surrounded by POTA.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

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.

I think the difference between Boulle's vision and the 1968 film reflects the differing sensibilities of a French novelist and an American screenwriter.

The American is afraid of getting nuked back to the Stone Age.

The Frenchman is afraid of decadence. The humans in Boulle's novel become decadent because their technology and their ape slaves allow them to live a life of idle luxury. The apes then replace them because they have become weak.

Conquest really employs neither vision, but does its own thing. The ruling class becomes weak because of its ape slaves, and is morally compromised and corrupted by the mistreatment it is forced to inflict on its ape slaves. Man doesn't fall because he loses his faculties due to disuse [as in Boulle]; he falls because he remakes himself until his only skill is slave-driving, but his power structure is hollow and can't hold the slaves down once one of them becomes politically aware. It's basically late-60's revolutionary ideology dressed up as sci-fi.

 

[Dayton Ward]

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

Seconded. I'm an unapologetic Apes fan, too.

Like Greg, I'd kill to write the novelization, or some other book set in the Apes milieu.


(:: Ponders making Greg "disappear" in order to improve his own chances :: )

 

[Greg Cox]

Dayton, remember the words of the Lawgiver:

"Hack shall not kill hack!"

 

[Dayton Ward]

Dayton, remember the words of the Lawgiver:

"Hack shall not kill hack!"

"Beware the tie-in writer, for he is the Devil's pawn."

For the record, the original novelizations were:

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

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

Yep. George Alec Effinger wrote four collections of adaptations for the live-action show, which adapted three eps each (apparently chosen at random). "William Arrow" (which I think was a pen name for Willam Rostler, but I'm not sure), also wrote three books that pretty much novelized the main plot thread of the Apes cartoon.

There was also a novelization of the 2001 film, as well as two prequels, all written by the same author, who's name escapes me at the moment. There were some YA Apes books based on the newer film, as well, but I'm totally blanking on those, even though - yes, I have them in a box in The Vault.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

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.

My favorite part of that film is when Sam Jackson is in the middle of doing an inspiring speech when one of the sharks pops up and eats him because of how unintentionally funny that was.

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.

That would be an interesting movie.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

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.

My favorite part of that film is when Sam Jackson is in the middle of doing an inspiring speech when one of the sharks pops up and eats him because of how unintentionally funny that was.

Actually, I believe it was intentioned.

Jackson wanted to be in the film, IIRC, but killed off. It was unexpected because Jackson was one of the people you expected to live...

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Dayton, remember the words of the Lawgiver:

"Hack shall not kill hack!"

"Beware the tie-in writer, for he is the Devil's pawn."

"Get your stinking whiteout off me, you Damn Dirty Editors!"

 

[Zachary Smith]

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.

Taylor's chronometer reads 3978 at the start of POTA. Brent reports to his Skipper at the start of "Beneath" that their chronometer reads "Three-Niner-Five-Five".

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

I was hoping for a remake of "Black Caesar" with a talking chimp becoming Harlem's crime boss.

 

[Dayton Ward]

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.

Taylor's chronometer reads 3978 at the start of POTA. Brent reports to his Skipper at the start of "Beneath" that their chronometer reads "Three-Niner-Five-Five".

And then the president references the 3955 date again in Escape, but it changes to "3950" in Battle.

I see now where the Highlander gang got their training in maintaining continuity between films

 

[Procutus]

^


There's a reason why 'There Can Be Only One' should've been adhered to, in the case of Highlander.

 

[Skywalker]

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.

My favorite part of that film is when Sam Jackson is in the middle of doing an inspiring speech when one of the sharks pops up and eats him because of how unintentionally funny that was.

Actually, I believe it was intentioned.

Jackson wanted to be in the film, IIRC, but killed off. It was unexpected because Jackson was one of the people you expected to live...

I still think that if they'd never done that scene, hardly anyone would even remember that movie now.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Boulle was less interested in telling a cautionary tale about nuclear war or decadence than he was in satirizing society - the underlying premise of his history of how apes took over Soror, and presumably Earth, is that the intelligence we pride ourselves on is largely unnecessary to maintaining society because almost everything we do is a matter of custom and imitation of others.