It's Friday night, y'all. Time for #wenchwatches
Tonight: #beneathThePlanetOfTheApes
We pick up right where we left off. Taylor and Nova riding off into the Forbidden Zone leaving Zira, Cornelius, and Zaius behind....
Waitaminute...Statue of Liberty, THAT WAS OUR PLANET! YOU MA---.
Anyways...
Luna is deciding to make this watch difficult. Cat, I need that hand...
Sequels can often go one of two ways:
You do the same thing as the first film, sometimes better, sometimes worse. You do a completely different thing.
This film is doing more of the former than the latter. Instead of merely continuing with Taylor and Nova, we get a second ship crashing in the Forbidden Zone, with our lone survivor of Brent.
For whatever reason, Brent is a PoV character this time, and not Taylor. Perhaps Heston asked for too much cash this time.
"I do not say the human is evil just because his skin is white..."
Welp. The movie just put it on the nose. I shied away from the potential racist metaphor at he heart of the first PotAs. The speech by General Ursus immediately has fascist and colonialist tones. It does lead credence to the idea that the franchise plays on white fears of being replaced by those they oppressed. Given racist depictions of black people...yeah. It's hard to unsee at that point.
Oh, yay. Casual misogyny too.
So, somehow both Zira and Cornelius are not....censured, imprisoned, or banished? Movie, weren't they up for heresy last time?
Movie? Anything?
*sighs* Fine, I'll go look under the rug you swept the rest of the plot under.
Universe, I really can't unsee the racist metaphor in this one. Brent, captured, is caged with other humans -- all white coded -- filthy and rattling cages, used for military practices...
Yeah. This movie isn't subtle. I shouldn't also be surprised that I completely missed it the first time I watched it either. White blindness to racism is baked right into white culture and takes a hell of a lot of work to unlearn.
There are several things I really miss in this film from the first PotAs. The music was far more percussive and incidental. It felt markedly different that the normal cinematic background music in this film.
This film has *much* faster pacing out of the gate, but I miss those long, drink-it-all-in shots of the Forbidden Zone. That was so damn pretty and desolate.
Are we really going to a Vietnam reference here, movie? Really? Complete with protests by the learned class? Really, movie? I don't think you have the balance to cash that check.
It's also hard to imagine, movie, that after nearly 2000 years a subway with exposed beams would be intact in any recognizable form.
We really kinda meandered into act three already as Brent and Nova descend into a cave to avoid the gorilla patrols.
Just like on my first watch of this film, it felt simply too close to the surface. I find myself wishing for a much longer montage of their decent. The touches of buried New York are nice, but feels somehow not believable. It is meant to shock in the same way the Statue of Liberty shocked in the first film.
I would have preferred something with more world-building. Dragged pieces of the destroyed city to the underground. Enormous recreations and artistic depictions on the cavern walls...
...I know, I know. I'm expecting too much.
The heavy makeup in Beneath is a bit more hit or miss than in the first film too. Headline characters like Ursus or Zaius have some excellent makeup, while more background characters have cheaper or partially degraded appliances.
Interesting note, the conclusion of the mutant ceremony was used in the Orbital track, "Desert Storm".
Still feels appropriate to this day.
And finally, we see Taylor again. As if this film needed more white, wiry, blond, toothy men.
"We are a peaceful people. We don't kill our enemies, we get our enemies to kill each other."
This makes me think of Thalosians. In Star Trek, they also are an underground species who survived after broad destruction of their planet. They too developed mental powers.
Yet here, in Beneath, it's turned to brutality. The film is trying to make a parallel of the 20th century geopolitical arms race and nuclear weapons to the gorilla's holy war. At least, it's trying too. The end result isn't exactly believable and doesn't quite come together in the end.
Taylor gets shot, then blows up the world out of spite.
Yeah, that tracks.
@socketwench - I love that end narration. "The Planet Earth is now dead."
That ending was suggested by Heston, if I remember right, as a way to make sure "NO MORE SEQUELS." The original ending was that the bomb goes off, supposedly killing everyone inside, but life goes on.
Decades later, though, a hand breaks through the rocks, and it's the hand of a gorilla. A MUTATED hand of a gorilla. With a rifle. And...get this...the first thing it does is kill a dove.
SYMBOLISM.
@dolari @socketwench you tried dot meme