Wherein I demand more horse-punching

When you're in the suburbs and it's raining and you're terribly bored, it sometimes seems like a good idea to go to the movies. The magic of Hollywood will amuse and enrapture you, and you will have two or three fewer hours to try desperately to fill. Such was the thinking when I went to see the latest Planet of the Apes movie last weekend:

our scene opens on L and G slouched on the couch in a coma of inactivity
TV: Planet of the Apes! Watch It! This is a preview voiceover!
G: You think?
L: Eh...
The preview shows what looks like a gorilla punching a horse
L: Yeah, I'd watch that.



Y'all, that was some false advertising. The real Planet of the Apes movie is something I would never watch - not on an airplane or in a dentist's office or alone on the couch with a bottle of wine on a Saturday night. It is awful. Here is why:

1. The whole first 5 hours or whatever are like a super-long version of those ASPCA commercials with the Sarah McLachlan song.

 It's just a bunch of sad animals being sad and scared, and humans sure are mean, and, what, John Lithgow is dying? What? blahblahblah. That is not the summer action adventure I paid to see! I can't even eat my popcorn with all the sadness!

2. Then the monkeys start talking.

With ridiculous British/posh accents! It's like Gandalf but with more beard up in there. I don't care how smart you make monkeys with your fake movie serums, they can't talk (and if they could talk, monkeys raised by James Franco would not sound straight off the BBC). It's not a brain thing, it's a physical ability thing. If monkeys could form words with their ridiculous toothy monkey mouths, they would be doing that already. I know it's a movie, and they need to talk in order to be all snooty to Charlton Heston later, but seriously - the very first super-smart monkey of all time just teaches himself with no evolutionary process or anything? If you're feeding me sci-fi, the science needs to be probable or so fantastically beyond my grasp of science that I can't tell whether it's probable or not (hello, intergalactic travel).

3. Speaking of probability/plausibility: The movie opens in a lab, where a monkey freaks out and ruins James Franco's powerpoint about curing every disease ever with a single drug. Everyone's like, "Why is the monkey freaking out? We have to kill it." Later, they discover a tiny baby monkey inside the crazy monkey's 5' glass cell. Are you telling me that a monkey used for medical testing would be able to hide a 9-month gestation period and a birth? Would you not notice that in any bloodwork or X-rays or looking at the monkey? And when it gave birth no one would notice extra blood or hair or baby monkeys in its tiny clear cage? WHAT KIND OF LAB IS THIS?

4. Also, when the monkeys finally go on a rampage (after, like, a full Sarah McLachlan album plays OMG so boring), they keep hurling themselves through triple-plated glass windows (at this same shoddy laboratory). Apes are strong, I know, but they are not made of iron and super-sonic glass-shattering magic. They are mushy, hairy flesh, just like the rest of us. They cannot just fling themselves through windows as if they are so many ransom notes attached to bricks.

5. Speaking of that final monkey rampage (and I just realized that I keep saying "monkey" instead of "ape" - my b, primatologists. Monkey is a funnier word, and I don't feel like going back and changing it now.):
a.) How do they have so many monkeys in San Francisco? I didn't see any when I was there!
b.) A bunch of monkeys go rampaging through the city, and the best force you can muster is, like, 20 cops at the end of the Golden Gate bridge?
c.) And then the cops run away all scared like even though they have guns? That's not how humans roll, dude. They would mow down those monkeys in a second.
d.) Only one horse gets some action in the throw-down, and it turns out it's less of a punch than, like, a tender belly-rub in fast-motion.

This gorilla could take some lessons from Mongo: