Sci-Fried

 With my son, it was and to some degree continues to be giant transforming robots. During this year's Super Bowl, the one thing that made him sit up and take notice was the preview for the leventy-seventh entry into the Transformers saga. To his everlasting credit, he is consistent. He also went straight out to the movie theater to see Pacific Rim and its sequel. An enormous version of Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots is his idea of a way to spend an afternoon at the cinema. 

He knows what he knows, and that's a good thing. 

For me it was super-intelligent apes. I truly appreciated the way that producer Arthur P. Jacobs was able to make a loop out of Planet of the Apes franchise. If you were to sit down in your living room with a boxed set of the original five installments, from Planet to Beneath to Escape to Conquest to Battle, you would eventually find yourself back on the path to start the whole shebang over again. A friend of mine and I did just that a few years back, spending the better portion of a day immersing ourselves in all things Ape. We even managed to squeeze in an episode of the TV series. It was a magical time. It brought back a youth spent mining all the lore that existed in the void between films. There was plenty of time to imagine how things might have spun out in the years that young Milo lived in the circus with kindly Armando. Or the events that ran up to the moment when the humans decided to blow one another up and the ever-evolving apes retreated to their safe havens, waiting for the radiation scarred mutants to crawl out of their self-imposed rubble to seek revenge for we can't be sure what reasons on the ape's society. 

Sometimes it's best not to ask questions. Like why Adam Driver would want to take his daughter back to dinosaur days, unless he really didn't like her in which case it makes a ton of sense. Once movie makers decided that they weren't going to get away with putting humans and dinosaurs into the same movie without a pretty darn good reason because, you know, science, screenwriters have been working overtime to merge these time streams. And special effects artists have been hard-charging right behind them trying to figure out ways to make it all look like it was supposed to happen. 

I have even gone so far as to line up at my local movie palace to see the rebootage of the Planet of the Apes. You know the ones that have all the computer-generated chimps and orangutans and gorillas pasted over actors who have to emote through a layer of pixels instead of the latex they used to wrestle with back in the day. I figure it's only a matter of time before someone gets the clever idea to merge Transformers with Planet of the Apes for some out of this world CGI romp. 

And when this happens, know two things: First of all, it was my idea first, and secondly that my son and I will be standing in line to buy out tickets.