Make A Monkey Out Of Me

 Another Planet of the Apes movie is now showing at a theater near you. Perhaps you may have seen some of the promotions. If not, I am here to let you know that the saga of intelligent apes has now reached the ten-film plateau with no real sign of slowing down. 

Now you probably want to know if I will be buying a ticket. This one is an itch that I have been scratching, hard, since before there were ever Wars in the Stars. I grew up with Zira, Cornelius and their pet human Taylor. I sat transfixed as the budgets were throttled back with each new iteration until we were left with a weekly live-action TV series on CBS. Then quickly after the show's mid-first season cancellation, a Saturday morning cartoon was the last-ditch effort to catch on to those hard-core Apes fanatics who were willing to lap up those thirteen half hour episodes. 

And if you believed that this beaten horse was dead, pardon the non-simian metaphor, you were wrong. Tim Burton, whose sensibilities often crossed paths with mine, brought us what was at the time a new notion: A Reboot. Tim's magic was not enough, or perhaps too much, to revive the story of a future where those intelligent apes end up making many of the same mistakes as their human forbears had made. Almost as ironic as, spoiler alert, finding a Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. It might have had something to do with having Marky Mark Wahlberg cast as an astronaut. Or maybe it was just time for this once clever notion to die. 

Meanwhile, Twentieth Century Fox was becoming a nostalgic notion itself in the new century. Thirteen years ago, Rise of the Planet of the Apes came along, with its CGI chimps and orangutans and gorillas, with Andy Serkis using all his motion-capture performance skills to bring us an ape for the digital age. It made almost half a billion dollars in its theatrical run. 

Spawning the now oh-so-familiar series of sequels just waiting out there for when the bottom line at Fox gets a little red. 

Because Dave will pay to see it, right? 

Formulaic dystopian future flicks are my bag. Don't hate me for it. 

There's plenty of other reasons to hate me. Like giving away that Statue of Liberty thing without a spoiler alert.