EPISODE 263: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Does compassion and empathy win the day in this new Apes picture? Gareth and Jett discuss in detail and, just like the old days, vehemently agree to disagree, (or do they?), about the merits of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Along the way the get into all the previous Ape movies, touch on Karl Malden's performance in disaster flick Meteor, have questions about Danny Boyle's Sunshine and fondly recall the Kevin Costner starring Waterworld. Enjoy.
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Universal Pictures presents a world unlike any you have ever seen. Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Gene Tripplehorn.
My God, folks, we're back. We're back to discuss Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Gareth, this is the film that asks the immortal question, what if an Avatar movie, but Apes?
Folks, it's the Film Talk. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. The conversation never ends. And Jett, you do indeed speak the truth, which I assume you always do, or at least trying to.
Always.
We kind of fully apprehend the whole truth, but we try.
And yes, we're going to discuss Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Apes? Planet of the Apes?
What?
Folks, you can't see this recording on one of those services, kind of like a scapey Zoom thing. I can see what Gareth looks like. You know, he didn't send his best today.
I don't know what happened last night. I kind of wanted to say, hey, let's put these recordings on the YouTubes. I'm not going to do that on this one because Gareth's looking a little rough.
Did you go to an Apes Marathon? Did you see all of the Ape Pickers? Did you see like there was scuffle for the Planet of the Apes?
There was knee-jerk reaction to Planet of the Apes? That was not a good one.
Two things, which may be three things and could be four things. First thing, I have so internalized the ape mythology that I don't need to see them again. They're just always with me.
Now, I have allergic blepharitis, which is actually a thing and it gives me empathy for people who have chronic allergies, which I am fortunate enough not to have.
But it turns out that pollens out there, pollens cause my eyelids to grow outsized and it turns out that it's a little bit sore, a little bit sore. So yes, I do look like I have bumped into Rocky last night, but no, I just have sore eyes.
Folks, allergic blepharitis of the apes was my personal favorite apes picture. I don't know why people aren't talking about it more.
It's slightly painful to laugh because my tear ducts have dried up. I have no tears left to cry.
Because you cried so much when a beloved character of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes passes away. Who could have predicted that?
Oh, come on. Come on.
Okay, we'll get into it. Don't be grumpy. Okay, folks.
I'm not grumpy. Folks, the old days of the Film Talk, you know, we did the show for years. The old tagline was, they agree to disagree.
And now for the first time in the reboot, we may get back to that when we're going to disagree about Forklift for the Planet of the Apes.
They agree to disagree agreeably.
You know, because we're friends.
Yes.
Now.
Jett, tell the dear listener how they can support the show.
Oh, yes. You know, we've got lots of different shows. We got lots of bonus episodes.
Don't make me laugh.
It hurts my eyes.
I'm doing it deliberately. He's got, you know, the other day I went to see Arthridic Knee of the Planet of the Apes. And that film is not as fast paced as you might expect.
If you want to get access to our bonus episodes archives, just go to patreon.com/ to Film Talk. That's patreon.com/filmtalk. Or you can also get bonus episodes by subscribing through the Apple Podcast app if you happen to use Apple.
So that's enough of it. And again, if you have any questions, queries or concerns, just email us info at filmtalk.com. We try to get, we try to answer whatever questions we get.
All right, we got to quickly, quickly, quickly move along. We've got a new Apes picture. Give us a synopsis and then we'll get a clip.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the 79th in a series of 12 films that have been being made since 1968, rebooted first of all in 2001 by Tim Burton, but we don't talk about that.
And more recently, I don't know, I guess about 12 years ago. This film is set, as they say, many generations in the future, the Apes basically rule the world. They can speak.
The humans have had their ability to speak wiped out by a virus or have they?
And as our film begins, the lovely gentle gentle Noah and his two friends are climbing in the trees to try to find eggs for a bonding ritual, which is not fully explained in the film. But it is delicate.
I don't know where we're going to drop into this film, but I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip. We've got a couple of the Apes. We got your hero Noah and his spiritual advisor, the orangutan Raka.
And they're watching a human by the water and they're discussing her abilities. Let's listen.
Let's listen in. I called my name. You misheard.
You said this Nova was smarter than most. With the reason, some intelligence to be sure. I have a name.
I know where they're taking your clan.
And that was Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Jett, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I think its pacing is rare.
It knows when to be slow. It knows when to be fast. I think it's mise en scene.
I think it's the term. It's fantastic. I think we take for granted these days just how good motion capture technology is, but the facial expressions and the vocal performances, particularly of Owen Teague as Noah are totally credible.
And it felt like an actual hero's journey by someone who might actually understand the traditional path as laid out by Joseph Campbell and others of separation, descent, ordeal and return, and that is also a weakness of the film because it's why it's
predictable in the broad brush strokes. It's not actually predictable in the detail, but in the broad brush strokes, it is predictable. And it felt a little bit like, I guess you could say calculated.
And again, that's not a massive criticism because that's what most movies of this scale are. I don't know how much freedom the screenwriter actually had. I don't, you know, when people get their hands on these things, too many cooks can spoil it.
But that's, it's really, that criticism shouldn't detract from the fact that it is way more entertaining and actually captivating would be the word I would use than most films of its ilk that have been released recently.
In addition to Owen Teague, I want to single out Peter Macon, who plays Rakka. This is the best Elder Wisdom figure I can think of since Yoda and Kevin Durand's great scenery chewing villainy is tremendously entertaining.
There's more I'd like to say, but my opening gambit of this film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is I enjoyed every minute of it. I probably will see it again mostly to do with just how beautiful it looked, particularly that opening scene.
And then there's some ideas to do with scapegoating and violence that I want to get into after I hear why you think it's terrible and a complete waste of time and nobody should ever even think of an Apes movie going forward.
My dear friend Jett, what is it that you feel about this film?
Shopping mall escalator of the Apes is a good movie. Here's the thing.
It has some good shopping mall escalators.
Yes, it does. Everything Gareth said is correct.
Can you say that again? I didn't quite hear you.
You'll have a recording, Gareth. You can make it your ringtone.
Are you referring to what I just said or the entirety of our conversations for the last 19 years?
Let's not overdo it. Special moment. Let's not ruin it.
It's a beautifully crafted film and everything works. The acting is pitch perfect. The script is great.
The cinematography is beautiful. Everything works. Now, there is a huge complaint I have, which I'm sure you know where I'm going with this one, Gareth.
It's what we call on the show the up problem. And you know what I'm talking about.
I do know the up problem.
But here's the thing. Why was I mind-numbingly bored every second of this beautifully crafted film? I'd almost call it, I need to coin some sort of phrase, like a stasis film.
This movie is the zenith, I think, the most perfect example of everything done right, but also by the numbers for how to do this. You know, Avatar, people complained about that it was predictable or it's Ferne Gulley or it's this.
Well, that was intentional by Cameron because Cameron is making a product that has to sell around the world. Around the world, it's going to make a billion dollars because it costs a billion, you know, will have very much cost.
You know, years ago when I was living in London, my roommate was a voiceover artist. He's Italian. He did a lot of, you know, he would dub the movies into Italian.
He was the Italian, I think, Darth Vader or something. And oddly enough, he paled around with the Darth Vaders from other countries. So we would have a dinner party, we would have the French Darth Vader and the Spanish Darth Vader.
It was a whole thing. I pointed, but he had a satellite rigged up in our place.
Is there a term for a group of Vaders?
A cape of Vaders. Have you been to Cape Vader, by the way? You don't want to go during tourist season.
It gets mobbed.
Stop making me laugh.
Anyway, but my point of this is he rigged up a satellite dish so he could watch Italian TV while he's there in London. Pre-streaming days. And my girlfriend was over and we were watching Independence Day, but it was in Italian.
And I think she had never seen Independence Day. And then she watched it and it had a bad reputation, sort of as being cheesy. And she watched it all in Italian.
She doesn't speak Italian. And maybe a little French.
Who does these days?
And she went, it's a romance language. And she goes, oh, I get it. Because you didn't need to speak the language.
What the voices, the people say in the words didn't matter because the storytelling is all visual. It's so simple. So you get it.
And that was the whole thing with Avatar. And this film feels like Avatar, but even more so for me watching it, and maybe it's because I spent all my day, you know, editing video, shooting video, photography. I do that constantly.
I'm constantly structure. I, you know, we review movies for a living, all this stuff. There was not one moment in the film when I did not know what was going to happen.
Every and it's not because it's necessarily telegraphed, it does everything right.
But this is a film when you can watch it go, you know what, 20 minutes from now, there's going to be a father figure or maybe an old wisdom figure going to be introduced.
It's going to be some life lessons, and then he's going to sacrifice himself in it. Maybe 15, 17 minutes later. Everything is like a stasis film, it's an amber.
Every single element you have seen before, you could make a notation, give a name to every single scene.
This is the scene, this is like you mentioned the hero's journey, and then find the exact same scene with no variation from other films to make a kind of a collage version.
And this is the highest, purest example, most obvious example that I've ever seen. And that's why I was bored throughout, even though the craft is impeccable, and everybody on all levels is doing a great job with one exception.
There's one thing that would have elevated this, and that's what Avatar had, that the Avatar sequels did not have, they can't have. Maybe you know who that is, because he's not around, it's the late, great James Horner.
Avatar had James Horner, the score for this was generic, the visuals were not. If it had a Horner score, if they horned it up, then that would have done something.
But the problem is, is you've seen this entire film before, and the whole history of motion pictures, and nothing new is added, unfortunately. But it's still great. It's a great film, but you've just seen it before, so you don't need to see it.
You've explained yourself, and preemptive message to the long term listener, you may wish to do a drum roll, because I am about to agree to disagree.
I agree to disagree with you, Jett, I am not going to disagree agreeably. I hear what you're saying, and yes, there's some, I resonate with some of it.
I think there are things in this film that you haven't seen before, certainly haven't seen before as often, and there'll have to be some spoilers here. Number one, May, the human character, her raw aggression is not unchecked. It's not unchecked.
There is not, this film does not glory in the defeat of enemies. The second thing is, I'll try to, let's just say the most consequential-
Can we take your points one by one? Okay, never mind, we'll go.
All right, keep going. You can take them one by one. The most consequential killing in the film is not a scapegoating.
And it's not the up problem that you referred to earlier, which is, that's a reference to in that lovely Pixar movie, Up, the character played by Christopher Plummer is thrown mercilessly to his death at a time when I think in the film it's possible
that they could have found a non-lethal solution. In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the most consequential killing challenged me because, as you know and as listeners know, my preoccupation is around looking for stories that transcend the myth of
redemptive violence, the most consequential killing in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. It's hard to argue that it's not necessary.
Is it the egg, the egg crack, the egg cracking? By the way, the egg cracking, can I just say one thing? Did that egg look fertilized?
It didn't look like a fertilized egg. Is the idea they're supposed to grow the eagles and bond with them?
I think so. I think so.
If it's possible, they realize, they go, wait a minute, shouldn't it be fertilized? I think you might be misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about the death of Proximus, I'm talking about the death of Silva.
Remind me.
Here's the thing.
The whole film...
Which one's Silva?
He's the first big bad guy, the henshin.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
The dude who says first season.
Oh yeah, no, that is the problem because he drowns at a time when it would be entirely possible for Noah to save him.
Here's what I thought the film was setting up. Here's the one moment I thought, oh my goodness, they're going to transcend and do something different.
Yes.
He's drowning.
That's a horrible drowning, a horrible drowning.
Is there a good one? The whole film talks about ideas of compassion, there's ideas of, you have empathy. So I thought, oh my goodness, they're going to do it.
They're going to make the film transcend the standard formula. He's going to rescue Silva, who he'll then leave like, you know, panting and water's coming out of his mouth.
Then at the end of the picture, when the eagles are attacking Proximus, but it looks like our hero Noah is going to die, Silva is going to come out.
Yeah, he'll come in and save the day. Sure.
You would have a look on Silva's face when he is rescued by Noah, that he has almost a religious transformation, but without comic relief like Sylgar and Dune, The Awakenings or whatever it's called, part two, that it would have been an incredible
shock to have him realize, oh my God, when he is confronted with compassion. I thought the film was setting it up because it brings up all these concepts of, we have these great religious figures like Caesar and then their message is lost and they're
brought back and they didn't do that. And it's disappointing.
And it's not like that's an unfathomably imaginative idea. It actually happens in the Last Mission Impossible film and it's happened in a few other movies.
That's just as predictable as the rest of the movie, but it would have made it better.
Yeah, I mean, here's the, I think it's my third point that you're going, you're delightfully, if mistakenly rebutting each, each, each time the third point is I haven't often seen this, this idea of the new Caesar, Proximus misinterpreting the
teachings of the original Caesar and the points that are being made here about nationalism and frankly, the miss, the, let's call it the shadow side of religion. You know, I come from the Christian tradition.
I grew up in a tradition that was kind of mixed.
You know, there's, there's a continuum of Christianity from contemplative Christianity through to fundamentalist reactionary Christianity, but every Christian sect, and I don't use that as a pejorative term, I just mean a community with hard
boundaries. Every Christian community I was a part of was always mixed.
It always, you could see the kind of throughline of the teachings of this person called Jesus, who pretty much everyone, whether they, they, they believe in Jesus, they recognize Jesus as a, as a good teacher.
You could see the trace imprints of those teaching to a greater or lesser degree.
And I grew up around people, particularly political figures in Northern Ireland, who were using the beliefs that other people have about Jesus to create sectarian communities that were motivated against each other in a zero sum game.
Now, whether they knew they were using those teachings, whether they were doing it consciously or not, I don't know.
I tend to think actually once you become part of a sect whose membership depends on not questioning the teachings, it's impossible to know what you're being motivated by until you actually step outside it.
And I thought that was really quite interesting in this film that Proximus is misrepresenting the teachings of Caesar, whose biggest passion was ape shall not kill ape. And he also had a wee bit of compassion for human beings as well.
Whether or not Proximus knows he's doing that isn't explored in the movie. I would like to see that explored. You have a question.
No, it's not something that's...
He's a pretty two dimensional villain.
Again, that's why I was disappointed the film didn't take that opportunity to have somebody that was a follower of him, that Silva character who says for Caesar, then come to realization and transcend those teachings.
Proximus just doesn't want to die. He talks about evolution. There's a secret de-mortality within this locked in vault.
So I think the film had... We can agree to disagree. For me, the film had a chance to transcend its blindly crafted great workmanship or origins to actually get us somewhere.
And for me, it just didn't do that. Now, possibly after we talked about Civil War, which I realized that all these other film critics must all have left simultaneously to the bathroom and missed the one scene why they explained there was a Civil War.
I had a big diet coke at the 11 a.m. matinee screening and I did have to go out. So I may have missed some.
Here's a question for you. Almost everything was perfect again for a film that I don't recommend to see because you've seen it.
Did they thematically let you know or introduce the idea of the vault in the beginning of the first third of the picture before we get to it? Because it seems very abrupt. Oh, look, here's this vault.
Of course, you could make the argument that you've got the characters carrying the eggs. The egg is a symbol for rebirth and the shepherd is the egg kind of symbolically close to the vault.
But I feel like there should have been at least one line that Sylva says. Again, maybe I went to the bathroom and had a diet coke. It was like 84 ounces or something.
No, no.
I had this question as well. This is a place where I think that the film is more interesting. I find it more interesting than you did.
They don't set up the vault prior to the first attempted explosion of the vault, but they do retroactive exposition on that vault, which is more interesting than having a, oh, look, here's a vault. Let me tell you about what happened.
No, no. I would just say you could thematically introduce that idea or even have a line that were silver. Why are they chasing this woman?
You would say something along the lines about immortality, something that would set that up so it's not so jarring.
Again, this film, it's interesting that it engaged you at the beginning because it did not engage me because I found it so predictable that I literally was just completely bored throughout the entire picture, but somehow it must have grabbed you.
Are you an apes aficionado? Can I read the list of the Planet of Apes pictures? You tell me which one.
We got Planet of the Apes.
I like that one.
Well that's like written by Rod Serling.
Are you going to tell me the titles and I have to remember one thing about each of them that distinguishes them?
Yes, Planet of the Apes, that's the one that's written by Rod Serling.
Yeah, that's the first one with the guy.
Arguably the best, or certainly the biggest budget Twilight Zone episode ever, right? It's Rod Serling movie. It's one of the best.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Is that the one that has the-
Victor Bueno.
Nuclear missiles?
Yes, a religious cult around atomic weaponry. That's one with Victor Bueno. Better than you might think.
Right.
Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Okay, is that the one that I can't separate in my mind from the Omega Man, and if Anthony Zerbe isn't in it, he should be?
Boy, you know, I agree to agree with you on that one.
That's the one that takes place in the 1970s. It's got Sal Mineo, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
I have no memory of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes whatsoever.
That's the one where a virus wipes out cats and dogs so people adopt apes as pets and use them as slaves. And that's the one that had the shocking ending they changed and people recommend you could get the uncut version.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Battle for Planet of the Apes. No one has seen it.
Don't worry. Literally no one has seen it. No one knows.
Then there's the reboot, Planet of the Apes.
One of the most misguided reboots, I think, and by Tim Burton, a person who has a tremendous visual style and whose best film, I believe, is Big Fish, because it's a film about storytelling.
And that's kind of like the inverse of what I think gets missed in so many Tim Burton films. And that is the story, the story. They all look fantastic.
They rarely, they rarely interest me as a story.
This is the one where Mark Wahlberg says, never send an ape to do a man's job. Yeah, it's got Paul Giamatti in the Paul Giamatti role.
So it can't be all bad.
No, nor is it all good. Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Okay, this is where they start to get good again. This is the James Franco, John Lithgow started the virus problem and a rare, you know, it's a reboot. It was the beginning of a new trilogy and it kind of the quality of that trilogy increases.
Well, I think this is a new sextology. Apparently, I was reading yesterday there's going to be six of these.
Oh, God. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
There's Gary Oldman, Bangy Bangy, Shooty Shooty.
Is Gary, I didn't remember that. Gary Oldman is in it? Yeah.
Doesn't Lithgow play like Franco's dad or Franco's uncle?
I don't know.
War for the Planet of the Apes.
Woody Harrelson, Apocalypse Now and I think a genuine substance around this question of Ape shall not kill ape, Caesar's deep desire not to scapegoat people and a tremendous, thoughtful, well-paced action film.
And I hear you on the, oh yeah, well, I don't think there is one.
Kingdom, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
The one we're talking about.
I've already forgotten.
I wonder how much this has to do with the context in which you saw it. I saw it with three of my best friends. We had a rollicking good time.
And yeah, it's not, you know, it's more, I find it more interesting and more entertaining than you did. I did not have a giant diet coke. It does.
You are right.
It has the up problem, but the most consequential killing challenged me and had me thinking about what else would you do when on the ledge of a cliff with a monstrous figure in front of you who's only going to kill you and more people unless
something serious is done with them and there's no option except for them to fall off the side of the cliff. It leaves me with some questions, shall we say?
Well, I'm glad you have a good time. And please, I in no way am casting aspersions. There's no aspersions cast here on any of the fantastic craftsmanship.
Well, talk about Raqqa.
Can we talk about Raqqa for just a moment because there's something-
You know they're bringing him back. He's a fan favorite. We don't see his body.
They're bringing him back. He's given his own show.
I really did have, but before you completely ruined the film for me and maybe decide I'm never going to watch a movie ever again, I did see three flaws in this movie. I want to name them. The first is-
Can I just say, is one of the flaws the fact at the end of the picture they go to the bunker that seems to be populated entirely by models?
Why are they still doing those jobs in the future?
This is connected to the first flaw, which is Freya Allen's. I don't know if it's her performance as May or it's simply her casting as May because she is conventionally beautiful. You're right, but all the people underground are kind of models.
And it takes away from the sense of what these people might look and feel like had they been exposed to the elements in this way or living underground for all this time.
That's why my initial thought, except she was too young, my first thought is, oh, I knew there was something up with her. You just know there's going to be something, you know she can speak, right? Not a film full of surprises.
As I've already sort of detailed, I thought, oh, is she going to be one of the astronauts? Sorry, because the astronauts are mentioned in the first film and it's basically the planet of the Apes.
You have Einsteinian time dilation, you travel real fast, you come back to Earth, it'll be a thousand years later. So I thought, oh, maybe she's one of the crash-landed astronauts. They'll probably save that for the next one.
But she's too young. No, she worked fine. I thought she was great.
Okay.
That's amazing. We agree to disagree and I'm being critical of something and I'm actually going to retroactively The film's getting better now for you.
No, I'm going to disagree to agree to disagree for something retroactively from a long time ago and that is Danny Boyle's movie, Sunshine, which if I recall, you had some problems with, you had some questions about and that was to do with the people
who were on this spaceship who've been selected to save the world are not the people that the world would decide to be on a spaceship if it was mankind or humankind's last hope to save itself. I now agree with you.
I think I was being churlish when I said you were being churlish. There we go. Fifteen years later, an atonement and an amends and maybe in the future.
Well, Benedict Wong is great.
His scene when he's in despair thinking he's doomed humanity, I still, not a month goes by I don't think about Benedict Wong. Everybody's great. Maybe I'm changing my mind.
Maybe I'm going to agree to disagree with your agreement about my disagreement about our disagreements all those years ago.
So that well, fair enough. So that my first.
Is it fair?
But the first thing that I thought was a flaw with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. I think Freya Allen is too many apes.
There were too many apes.
The second thing is, I'm not going to spoil who the actor is because there was a little bit of pleasure to discover the surprise cameo appearance late in the movie.
I wanted one more scene with this actor about where he came from and why he had made the choices that he had made.
Can I just say one thing to that? There was a scathing review of Stranger Things when Stranger Things first came out. I forgot who said this.
They talk about Matthew Modine's character in Stranger Things and they say, it's a paper thin character and he does nothing with it, which is terrible. Look, man, people got to work. That's not what happens in this film.
He needed one more seat.
He needed one more seat and at least we now know we haven't seen him for a while and what he's been doing is he's been growing his hair. Good pony tip.
Hollywood wizardry. There is makeup wardrobe, Gareth.
Most striking to me in this film that I like and I will see again. But the most striking flaw to me, the thing that kind of saddened me the most because it came hand in hand with what I think is the most beautiful thing in the whole film.
There is a moment when a character points at a funeral pyre. It's actually the second funeral pyre in the movie.
It's one of those kind of movies. It's a funeral pyre movie.
He responds to Noah saying, they burned my village. Noah is dealing with the trauma and the grief of his entire village being destroyed. Not only that, his guilt for feeling like he somehow is responsible for that.
And this character, it's Rarka, points at the funeral pyre where we see a burning ape skeleton and says, he was my village. Now, there's two lovely things happening here. One of them is really quite significant.
The first is, it's just a lovely piece of writing. He was my village conveys a whole lot of information in Ongoing.
The second thing is, while this is not made explicit, it's absolutely clear to me that the filmmakers want you to think that this is actually his partner that he's talking about.
This is a same sex ape relationship and that we live in an era now where something can be said like that. It's not a throwaway remark, but it's just taken for granted.
It's a little bit like the second scene of the Last Avengers film where there's a kind of a group therapy meeting six months after Half of Humanity has been wiped out and a character speaks about going out for dinner.
A guy talks about going out for dinner on a date with another guy and it's just completely, it doesn't need to be remarked upon that he's normalizing same sex relationships. It isn't just for personal reasons that I think that's important.
It's for global reasons. It's kind of amazing that this is happening in a Planet of the Apes movie. It touched me.
And here's the problem. He doesn't actually follow this with any expression of what would feel like grief, right? And for a film that at other points, I mean, it's taking Noah's grief seriously.
I kind of sat with, you know, are they consciously saying, well, maybe, maybe Rakka is just old and he's world weary and he doesn't want to express the grief this way.
There's some other little bits of business where, you know, Rakka is looking at encyclopedias and he's, and he's saying there's symbols in here that means something.
And another really interesting thing about Rakka, unlike Yoda, is that Rakka knows there are things he doesn't know. And that he's curious about.
It seemed to me to be a flaw that they didn't allow Rakka's characterization to actually express the grief about he was my village, even if this was simply a friend or a colleague, never mind. I love her.
You know, I'm reminded of Karl Malden in the film Meteor with Charlie Carter.
I knew you'd get to Meteor.
In Meteor-
Jett, is there a way, has 2B or Freebie or any of those other services developed a way where you can broadcast through social media what it is you're watching so that the listener can know which free ad-supported films you're watching in a given week
I'm sure it's coming soon.
The thing with Meteor and Karl Malden is that Meteor is about to hit the earth and destroy it, right? This is talking about, you know, he was my village. This is a huge thing, tragedy is coming.
But for some reason, never explained, Karl Malden is joyous and happy to see everybody shaking hands, smiling, he's supposed to be a lung killer and it doesn't work at all. It's a disaster.
No pun intended in a disaster film, interestingly enough, Meteor, even though it's huge budget, they ran out of money and so they had to go to Roger Corman and they actually use footage from his avalanche.
Of course, Roger Corman late, great, passed away and by the time you hear this, do listen and we already have our special Roger Corman episode out. This film has a lot to juggle. Think about the huge amounts of effects, everything is going on.
They are trying to be economical in some sense and it is a great line, he was my village. They don't follow it up at all, there is nothing, we just move on. This film is very cut and dried, I am not going to say two dimensional.
And to your point Gareth, the reason why that didn't work for me is because that is what I expected because he is a monk figure and that is a cliché about men who are together in places of learning is that they are in same sex relationships.
So, as soon as he said that, it's like that was another predictable, it was like, oh yeah.
You haven't seen it in a…
I've seen Name of the Rose.
Name of the Rose is totally somewhat different. All I want to say is when it comes to the Film Talk, Jett, you are my village.
That's very sweet of you, I just hope you don't say that. Or when I do go before you, if I am on a pyre…
Do you want to be on a pyre like Kirk Douglas in The Vikings?
No, I want to go like Peter Boyle in the X-Files episode, in which he sort of melts into the ground and becomes one with things. That's kind of my vibe.
Well, is that the actual act of his death or is that like the funeral after he died?
No, he's seeing his own death, I believe. I haven't seen that X-Files episode since I was a kid in the 90s.
Back when cinema was real.
Again, we were kind of touching on some of the stuff we talked about in our Roger Corman episode which we recorded right before this. Hey, big shout out to Waterworld. Nice to see old rusting oil tanker again.
It was good to see. I was like, waterworld. Waterworld is another one which is like predictable, but not to the extent that Kingdom of the Apes.
And by the way, dear listener, I might completely change my view on this because of course there are films that you will watch again and again and again and again, they're like comfort films.
For me, it's Tarkovsky's Andrei Rubalev and Toby Huber's Life Force. And you know what, with Kingdom of the Apes, I'm changing my mind right here on the show.
It's because there's nothing new in it and it is so perfectly an encapsulation of everything that comes before, it's already the film that is your comfort film. It's because you've already seen it 20 or 30 times.
So I am now changing my mind on the show, why? Kingdom of Planet of the Apes, you've already seen it. You're welcome.
Folks, don't forget you can contact us anytime at info at thefilmtalk.com and where do folks go again if they want to help support the show?
If you want to be part of the Film Talks Village, you can do that just by listening. Just by listening. That's true.
It's a community. You don't need to financially support the show to be considered part of the community.
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And let me reiterate, everybody's welcome, whether you contribute or not. We hope that sometimes portions at least of these conversations can offer a little bit of shelter as we try to help you decide what to watch this weekend.
This is a tricky one because I don't know if we've come to a conclusion about this film at all. I'm going to see it again without a big diet coke.
It's okay, folks. Don't be worried. You know, even if we disagree to agree on Web browser of the Apes, it's your new comfort film.
Gareth, I've enjoyed talking with you as always.
I agree to agree. It's been delightful talking to you as well. And I'd say my eye has even got slightly better during the course of recording this show.
I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been Jett Loe.
We'll keep talking next time.