Hacker Cinema
Planet of the Apes
1968 · Film · 112 min
Part of Planet of the Apes (Original) Collection
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
Science FictionAdventureDramaAction
Astronaut Taylor crash lands on a distant planet ruled by apes who use a primitive race of humans for experimentation and sport. Soon Taylor finds himself among the hunted, his life in the hands of a benevolent chimpanzee scientist.
9 positive1 negative11 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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22 comments on Hacker News
I'm in the UK and was intentionally kept conscious during angioplasty and stent placement. Mind you, it was an emergency heart-attack kind of appointment! The experience was very cool and I recall that the wire-wriggling cardiologist wore a sectional lead suit (rapidly firing X-ray machine) and to my drug-addled brain, reminded me of the armored gorillas in the Planet of the Apes movies.
> I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious
You clearly haven't seen Animatrix then. This option is explored in one of the episodes.
In my opinion, cinematically speaking, Neo is male Nova (from Planet of the Apes), old trope, non-AI dependant, recycled. This perspective also explains a lot of cultural ramifications Matrix took in the real world.
Deep down, it's just a fish-out-of-water trope with a twist (the fisher hooks him, cast as Lawrence Fishburne).
> AI agents (Agent Smith)
That's hilarious! That's really what you think of AI agents?
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
Mad Max, obviously, Night of the Comet, The Quiet Earth, A boy and his dog. I think the early 80s was a good time for the genre.
Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and that other Charleton Heston movie with zombies that I can’t remember (not a huge fan of zombies)
The Road is a fairly recent movie that fits.
British TV had Space 1999, lots of early Doctor Who and an attempt at the Tripods series by John Christopher. By far my favorite was “Survivors” written by Terry Nation - who needs zombies when you’ve got actual problems to deal with!
What do you think about the application of his theory to film scores? I’m immediately reminded of Jerry Goldsmith’s work for Planet of the Apes. Extremely atonal and alien, that score is really effective at putting the audience off-balance and feeling unsettled. I love it!
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
> It really depends on how you define a machine.
Sure, and depending on how you define a computer program hamlet is a computer program, and depending on your definition of Christmas movie, Planet of the Apes is Christmas movie.
The point is that for typical and sane definitions cells aren’t machines, hamlet isn’t a program and planet of the apes isn’t a Christmas movie (But Die Hard is).
I'd recommend another Verhoeven film, Robocop, over Starship Troopers.
And as far as sci-fi movies which are deeper than one might expect, I'd also recommend the original Planet of the Apes and its early sequels.
[Spoiler Alert:] Original 1968 “Planet of the Apes”? It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.
During the pandemic's "shelter in place", I started watching (and re-watching) older movies (anything pre 2000). I'm still on that binge.... I also got into 35mm film photography (developing it at home in my bathroom), and learning a ton about the chemistry, etc... I've discovered, and in some cases re-discovered, how much I prefer the older movies over newer ones. And my work in 35mm/analog gives me a new appreciation for movies shot on film. Movies like the original "Planet of the Apes" has found new appreciation in my eyes. There are some real, true, gems from the 60s - 90s.
Edit: I know this comment isn't about the audio, specifically - but rather, just about how movies have changed more generally.
"In class, I’ve shown students movies from the nuclear age, hoping that Gregory Peck’s stoicism about the death of the world in On the Beach or Charlton Heston’s damnation of all mankind in the final moments of The Planet of the Apes might make them understand some of the smothering fear of living in a world on the edge of instant oblivion. I make them watch The Day After and read Fail-Safe and Warday. To younger people, these films and books now seem like relics from some lost civilization, full of mysterious, apocalyptic texts and angry cinematic gods."
He should have shown them Threads.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Partially an action movie, but poses a couple of good questions.
Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.
Every language has its quirks. French doesn't distinguish between ape and monkey (singe) -- the famous French novel "La Planète des singes" known from the various American movies in the original and remade "Planet of the Apes" series could just as well be translated as "Planet of the Monkeys". Similarly, German doesn't really distinguish between science and other academic subjects -- "Wissenschaft" can mean science, but also includes much of what people in English call the humanities.
That was basically the plot of the sequel to Planet of the Apes (the original 1968 film, none of this reboot nonsense), no?
One thing I've noticed is that it's not very good with sequels.
For example, I liked the original Planet of the Apes, but I've absolutely hated every single one since. Yet it keeps recommending more sequels even though I've marked them "awful".
I've also noticed that it won't stop recommending various Lord of the Rings movies, even though I've marked every single one of them as awful.
I'm still not sure if the recommendations are good or not. I'm at 92% now, and half the recommendations it gives that I've already seen are bad, so I'm not inclined to believe the ones I haven't seen yet.
I also noticed that it started out with lots of sci-fi and action movies, to the point that I had to start manually searching for romance movies just to get them to even show up. Basically, after the first 4-5 movies, you're stuck in a genre.
> Help me to understand.
Human nature, maybe?
People seem to like to form groups based on some random similarity (supporting the same football team, driving the same car model, believing in the same religion, being of the same race, etc..) and start fighting the opposite groups.
My favorite example is the following trivia from the "Planet of the Apes" movie:
"During breaks in filming, actors made up as different ape species tended to hang out together, gorillas with gorillas, orangutans with orangutans, chimps with chimps. It wasn't required, it just naturally happened."
I just hope that they watched enough Planet of the Apes movies to not test it on monkeys first.
Oh that's interesting! I don't find the special effects in those movies laughable at all. In Dr. Strangelove they play only a minor role in the film, while I think in 2001 he cleverly worked around the technical limitations, and used a set and model design that still largely looks (60s style) futuristic, rather than dated.
Compare it with contemporary or slightly newer movies like Planet of the Apes, Barbarella, Logan's run. It's not a standard space opera with space battles, faster than light travel, alien empires and magic space gravity. Sure, the men in ape suits look a little naff, but then I don't see how else he could have done it. Claymation would have been worse, herding actual gorillas not an option.
Yep. It's all been way overdone. Brazil and 12 Monkeys were different because it was all more or less new then. Both also had great arc and reveals, but It's Been Done Now.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, and I don't feel like it is in conflict with anything that I said in my comment. One point about our trash - is it "simply thrown on a big pile", or is it "strategically centralized so that future people can effectively recycle it when it becomes economically feasible"? In a post apocalyptic wasteland, you will find me making runs to the "grocery store" that is the trash dump.
I think it appealed too much to "the masses" to be enjoyed by "sophisticated" people. And I think that the satire bits were much too sparing to really be absorbed by "unsophisticated" watchers. No one under the age of 18 that I talked with has any idea that this movie is a "withering criticism of where we are". Here's why:
I do agree with you that the movie had satiric elements, and I agree that it pointed out the specific issues that you say it pointed out. But if you watch the movie, these issues are only briefly mentioned, they are not explored or analyzed. If the film was pared down to the satire bits, it would be about 7 minutes long. The plot of the film was Luke Wilson the time traveler saving the world, the serious satire elements were the setting. Well if the plot doesn't get the message through, we can use the characters, right? Unfortunately, the low IQ people in the film were incapable of talking about their problems in a sympathetic way that most people can understand. Few people recognized that the characters were actually caricatures, because they were so dumb and happy about their lot in life. When you watch Schindler's List, do you relate to the characters that are unsympathetic oppressors or to the characters that are sympathetic and oppressed?
My friends and family were effected much more by the satire in Planet of the Apes, which is very similar movie to Idiocracy. The main thrust of both plots is "a hero saves the day," and the satire elements are mostly setting. PotA works as satire because some of the ape and human characters had problems that they were struggling with, just like you and I! None of the lower IQ people in Idiocracy was struggling with anything; the "dystopia" was NOT a nightmare for them, because they had IQs too low to express any anguish and garner any sympathy.
I think the movie would have made an excellent short film, and I think Luke Wilson would have been brilliant in it. It would have made a fantastic Family Guy episode for those that enjoy Family Guy. It failed as a feature length film which is disappointing from such an effective artist as Mike Judge.
This would make for a terrifying twist on a sci-fi movie -- they arrive back on Earth after being gone so long to find out that they forgot they had never left. Any movies like that? (Planet of the Apes seems close)