Okay, I’ve been a “Planet of the Apes” fanatic ever since I was a little kid and I used to whine and moan until my mom let me stay up past my bed time to watch that crappy TV series that lasted like five episodes (when I was 6, though, I thought it was the most inspired TV show ever!)
So then Matt Drudge goes off and puts the surprise ending of Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” film in a story headline and the folks at Aint-It-Cool-News just go ape with all sorts of profanity directed at Drudge. Now Tim Burton’s upset with the Internet for Drudge letting the cat out of the bag.
Personally, I’m not impressed with what I’ve seen of Burton’s film, so I figure what the heck — after some moron e-mailed me the ending to “The Sixth Sense” before I saw it, I figure there’s nothing that could top that.
And I was right. I won’t reveal what Burton’s ending is, but it is so stupid, as far as I’m concerned, that the main effect for me is I’ll wait for this film to come out on DVD. The whole movie, right down to the last minute rushed reshoots at the end, seems completely uninspired and not all that different from other flopped attempts at pop culture nostaligia that seem to be all the rage at the movies these days.
But that’s not the dumbest “Planet of the Apes” story. That mark goes to primatologists who actually disapprove of the POA series because it gives people the wrong impressions of non-human primates. It turns out, for example, that gorillas are not gun-toting human hating carnivores. Who knew?
Personally I’d think there’s little hope to begin with for people who look to cheesey sci-fi movies as a primary source of information on primate behavior. (I wonder if anybody’s bought the movie rights for Bonsai Kitten.)
And since I’m in that sort of mood, why do so many major studio sci-fi films just outright suck? For example, what was the best sci-fi film of the last 5 years. Okay, fine, The Matrix, but in a close second as far as I’m concerned was Cube which had basically no budget and was filmed on a single set left over from an abandoned movie project. And yet it gives The Matrix a run for its money in the psychological department (if the Cube had more guns — er, any guns actually — it might even come out on top).
Which of course meant Cube got no distribution or marketing whatsoever while absolute dog crap like Mission to Mars suckered fans out of money before word-of-mouth caught up with it (I love the opening line from Amazon.Com’s review of MTM: “If Brian De Palma directed Mission to Mars for 10-year-olds who’ve never seen a science fiction film, he can be credited for crafting a marginally successful adventure.”)
Or look at a movie like Pi which isn’t really sci-fi or horror or suspense but rather just flat out weird. But you can say whatever you want about Pi (except “it’s 3”), but at least it didn’t suck, which is more than most studio films can say.