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I caught most of the original Planet of the Apes this evening, not having watched it in a few years. Great, classic movie. The social commentary of the movie is pretty amazing and is something which is not done nearly as elegantly in more recent movies. Watching it now, I think that it also reveals a keen glimpse of the social outlook of the 1960s – space exploration, love, evolution, and nuclear war. Perhaps among my favorite movies of all time.
It still proves the point that cgi is not necessary to make a sci fi movie rock. I prefer putting a talented actor like Roddy McDowell into constume and letting him run with the character than having some uber nerd whip up some cgi character with voice dub overs. I love Star Wars but characters like Jar Jar Binks just don't do much for me…kids might be okay with it, but adults are harder to please.
I agree that cg has ruined some movies in recent years when it's used too prominently. I think that this was the major disappointment of George Lucas' last three Episodes. I don't know how some of the stuff passed the editing table.I also think that the social commentary that comes out of movies nowadays isn't great at all. In fact it's all the same-old-same-old polarizing socio-political commentary without any real inspection of the underlying nature of man. I saw the Mark Wahlberg remake of Planet of the Apes a few years ago and I wasn't impressed by it. I think they lost the original touch of the movie. Then again, you can't really recreate a great movie simply by copying it word for word.
Well if you don't like remakes then you might not like the new POTA either. It seems strange, when you think of it, to do a remake of a classic motion picture. What are they going to do, improve upon it? I'm not sure if I know any remakes of classics offhand that have been better than the original.
Planet of the Apes = POTA. I haven't seen High Noon, either the original or the remake. Now that I think of it, the movie The Jackal, starring Bruce Willis, was a decent remake of The Day of the Jackal from the 1960s or 1970s.
