This was an excellent movie-- entertaining, riveting, stimulating, smart-- smarter than some of the past episodes in the series. It has stayed the top selling movie the second weekend it ran.
I have an unusual relationship with the movie. I read the original 1963 novel, by Pierre Boulle and it was the first time I ever said to myself, "this book should be made into a movie." So, when it came out in 1968, I cut class for the first time in my life to see it on the opening day.
This is the first time that the apes in the film are digitally created and that makes a big difference. Actor Andy Serkis does a brilliant job portraying Caesar, the first ape to be infected with the genetically engineered retrovirus that makes apes smarter.
Watching the movie reminded me of Daniel Quinn's book, Ishmael, which has as its main character, a genius ape who gets the reader thinking about man's place on the planet, among all the other creatures.
The movie unfolds Caesar's gradual awakening as an intelligent being. He decides he should ride in the back seat of the station wagon, not the back of it. He starts to put things together to understand his roots, the ways he's not treated right.
He looks around him at the primate facility he's put into and sees chimps, orangutangs, apes, gorillas-- all acting brutishly, screaming and yelling-- kind of like tea partiers. He sees the apes entertained by violence-- by ape on ape or by the human guard, portrayed by Tom Felton, who played evil Malfoy in the Harry Potter series.
Finally, Caesar takes action and wakes up his fellow apes, organizes and leads them to freedom. It takes some script magic to make that happen.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet (more...)