rise of the planet of the apes

celtic

Jedi Master
Anybody see the "rise of the planet of the apes"? This is about a man who takes three chimpanzees from africa so he can use them as test dummies for an Alzheimer's disease experiment. The experiment goes wong and the monkey's become smarter and obtain intelligence equivilant to an average human being.

I wanted to share this because it sort of resembles the way we feel about freedom and truth. One of the monkeys was living with the professor (who was intelligent the monkey that is) and the monkey got in trouble and was sent to a monkey facility. When the monkey was in the facility he became angry at the conditions the other monkeys was in. They was all caged up like sheep, so the monkey being intelligent as he is found a way to escape and free the other monkeys.

Once free he went to the professor home got the stuff that made him smart and use it on the other
monkeys. So, they developed a plan to set themselves free. I thought this movie was really similar to our situation. As in, we could be the caged monkeys who develope awareness and once we have become aware of our enslavement we plot to set ourselves free.

Im not saying we are caged monkeys though just comparing the two analogies. Sorry if I gave away to much detail.
 
you should have put a ***SPOILER ALERT*** celtic :)

Well yeah I thought the movie was about freedom more than anything else, and puts a nice beginning to the whole saga of POTA series, the original of which was a great movie (1971 i think?)
 
I saw it and thought it was a pretty cool movie. I agree with moksha that it makes a good prequel. I hadn't thought about it like celtic did though. In a sense you could say that the people were 4D beings and the apes were us humans? All we gotta do now is wake up the other apes and escape into the level playing field. ;)
 
:D Yes now I understand that filling, that overcame me after the apes came to the trees! to be free. I`m gonna watch it again!
 
I just finished watching this film and thought it was very good too.

It actually made me very emotional. The main monkey's character (Cesar) was very deeply portrayed and I enjoyed watching it.

It's a movie worth seeing :thup:
 
As a habit I usually prefer to avoid blockbuster movies whenever I can... I find a lot of them rather childish and insipid, not to mention full of suggestion and programming (eg, as much as I liked Avatar, the offhand comment in it about US forces being in Venezuela really grinded my gears).

That being said, I'm glad you guys found it generally positive :) so maybe I will check it out.

I've seen the original Planet Of The Apes series, which was quite good, if a bit dark and dystopian. The time loop/travel part was quite interesting, and made me wonder what their inspiration for sentient species coming and going was. Has anyone else seen the original series of 5?
 
Ok I am going to go out on a limb here but I did not like that movie because I could not help to see not so subtle undertones of racism in it.
While seeing the movie, it did not strike me until I saw the scenes with Caesar in "Jail" and I thought to myself, hey how racist can you be if you see apes you think of black people, that's an horrible thought.
I am as subject as anyone else to unconscious bias, even if I don't want to.
But there were too many parallels for me to avoid seeing them.

I think this is a willing choice from the director/writer/producers (?) to push those unconscious associations for a purpose, but which one I do not know.

Obviously I am not the only one to have felt very uncomfortable about it and saw some unnerving parallels :

How “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” Steals Black Political Imagery :

_http://madamenoire.com/110794/how-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-steals-black-political-imagery/

and a more positive review but the person who wrote this also see/feel some parallel with black history

So many things are happening in these scenes: the primates in their cages and the attempts to the communicate through the bars despite their differences (Caesar befriends a circus orangutan), recalls enslaved Africans trying to communicate with each other whilst speaking different languages during the Middle Passage. At one point, Caesar has a hose turned on him as punishment for rebelling, recalling images of brutality from the civil rights movement. The man who runs the Sanctuary tells Rodman to make sure to call before he comes, meaning he wants time to prepare for his visit and hide the signs of abuse. Rise of the Planet of the Apes then becomes a movie about those thrown away in our society, about institutional care for the mentally ill, or elder care when patients are left to waste, only to be “cleaned up” for their families on visiting days. In the yard, when all the apes are briefly allowed to leave their cages, Caesar is forced to defend himself from another inmate. The viewer experiences the horror of being incarcerated, of having to survive within the prison system. Because there is no condescension in Serkis’ performance, nor in the writing or directing, the scenes have the power to overwhelm one emotionally. When the apes orchestrate their break from the “sanctuary” there is a soulful look between Caesar and the orangutan, a deep, mature, knowing exchange that made me want to sit up and shout, “Now that was definitely a black look!”

At one point in the movie, when the testing of the drug is reinstated, a new chimp named Koba is brought in, who has clearly been through hell. His face alone can move one to tears, or terror. I loved the movie at this point for showing us that face, because every black person in America has at least one family member with a face like that, whether we admit it or not. It’s the cousin in prison, or the relative driven mad by racism or poverty. It’s the face of an angry slave, a face that has been whipped and tortured. It’s a dangerous face, a face that you keep incarcerated, or your boot pressed down against, because if that face ever gets up, it’s going to have something for your ass. (There’s no face like this, by the way, in The Help.)

On one of the promotional posters I saw, an ape is holding up his fist, Black Panther Party-​style, and the tagline reads, “Evolution Becomes Revolution.” Could it be that when Hollywood finally decides to tell the truth about black lives, it’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes? And, if so, how -flicking- shady is that? Perhaps no one would come to see a bunch of black people rioting and throwing metal spears at police cars (spears made from the broken fence of the local zoo where the primates liberate others from captivity), but they’ll watch these apes. And with one very cruel exception, the apes are surprisingly non-​violent. They kick ass, but only when they feel they have to: and there are many instances where the film could have poured on the sadism, but the apes make their point, and let the people go. They don’t want revenge for revenge’s sake, but self-​determination.
...
I came out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes feeling larger and beautiful, which isn’t easy for a black man to admit, because the last thing you want anyone to compare you to, or to compare yourself to in a racist society, is an ape. I am aware that a white writer might seriously hesitate to write a piece comparing Caesar to a black man. But the real truth of the movie is an emotional one, transcending race and categorization. Rise of the Planet of the Apes could have been done in the “blaxploitation” tradition, a revenge fantasy for the oppressed, but it goes deeper than that. It speaks to anyone who has been brutalized, but even more significantly, underestimated. And if you’ve ever been raped, or bashed, or bullied, or called a faggot for being gay, or “caged” by being made “other”, you know what it means to want to escape from the cruelty of being unvalued, to find your own sense of self-​definition and power.
...

_http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/i-wish-i-knew-how-it-would-feel-to-be-free-on-rise-of-planet-of-the-apes-and-the-help/discrimination/2011/08/21/25639

I do hope I don't offend anyone but I can't help wonder what's the real message behind this movie as Hollywood is obviously a giant brainwashing machine, those parallels can't be just coincidences.
 
Indeed I watched it, I enjoy this move more than transformers 3, just like I did with district 9 and transformers 2.
 
Well, I was looking forward to this film having read several positive reviews, but I was greatly disappointed. It was just another by-the-numbers Hollywood action movie, lacking in any philosophical thought or depth, or even originality, come to that. Any philosophical content was rapidly passed over in favour of action spectacle. The longer it went on the more tedious and predictable I found it.

Tigersoap said:
While seeing the movie, it did not strike me until I saw the scenes with Caesar in "Jail" and I thought to myself, hey how racist can you be if you see apes you think of black people, that's an horrible thought.
I am as subject as anyone else to unconscious bias, even if I don't want to.
But there were too many parallels for me to avoid seeing them.

I think you have a point there, Tigersoap. Interestingly, there is only one black human character in the film, as far as I recall – the director of the research facility, Gen-Sys. The reading of it as having racist undertones is spot on, I think. For example, it is white people that experiment on the apes and white people imprison them in the ape 'sanctuary', although the black character as director of Gen-Sys does sanction these activities. From that perspective, one could say that it is a comment on the mechanical human tendency to be prejudiced against any beings perceived to be 'less' than ourselves.
 

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