Rise of the Conquest

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people mistake apes for Monkees! Apes are tailless bastards that were too afraid to shed their fur and become humans and too stupid to stay in the trees and remain true Monkees! With that said I have always loved Planet of the Apes. When I was kid the movies would come on Saturday afternoons after Kung-Fu Theatre on channel 46 (that's UHF for you kiddies who don't know-look it up!) , which came on after Soul Train, which came on after cartoons! I wasn't a shut in I just lived really far away from other kids and had a lot of free time. Anyway, so we've all seen the new trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes starring Sir Jonathan Lithgow and some stoner names James Franco! If not here it is:

Yes, this is a retelling/re-imagining of the 1972 classic Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which was a metaphor for the Black Power Movement and an expression of white peoples fears that militant African-Americans would rise up and slaughter them in the streets of San Francisco by 1991! Seriously that's what it was about.

Now it's about how humans search for a cure for everything and medical testing on animals will lead to gorillas attacking helicopters??? Not that the original wasn't convoluted as well. Conquest was the fourth Planet of the Apes film and centered around Caesar who was somehow the child of Cornelius and Zira from the first film and was also played by Roddy McDowall who also played Cornelius in the 40th Century! In Conquest he's the first talking Ape but in the previous movies it had been stated that Aldo was the first. Now that means nothing unless you're a really anal nerd about continuity and well sometimes I can be that really anal nerd! Yet how anal can you be about rubber masked actors pretending to be apes. Thankfully in Rise we will not be subjected to humans in rubber mask, but old Golem himself Andy Serkis (who previously mimed for a CGI King Kong in the horrible Peter Jackson remake) this time he will be covered up by WETA who are the geniuses responsible for Avatar. The trailer released this week is painfully short and absent any Lithgow goodness. So we'll have to keep watching before we go-ape!