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MeinPanzer posted:This is basically one movie comprised of two very different stories: a restrained, slow-build film about the contact between the humans and the apes and the diplomacy involved, and then a campy action movie. I actually found pretty discordant, because you're watching these measured, skilfully-arranged scenes dealing with the fragile creation of trust and filled with emotion and reflection, and then you get moments like Koba single-handedly taking down the human defences with two M-16s on horseback and everything devolves into stupid setups like the C-4 plot and Caesar confronting Koba on top of a tower a day after being shot. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get crazy here. Koba was dual-wielding loving SAWs while riding a horse at a high rate of speed, suppressing maybe a dozen closely-packed individuals with accurate fire which allowed the apes to close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver. This poo poo is taken straight out of the manual, man.
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Jul 11, 2014 21:50
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Bolocko posted:Jaded, maybe. "I knew what would happen" alone is lazy and isn't of much value as criticism. Thing is that most movies are predictable—particularly summer blockbusters and especially with established franchises. And sometimes it's part of the point the film is trying to make: we know where we're going and that's what's heartbreaking. Events mirror those familiar to those we experience too commonly in reality. Which was beautifully followed by the guy who's name I never bothered to remember resigning himself to his fate, and perhaps the fate of his species, and stepping into the shadows while Caesar steps forward, Sun rising in the distance and shining its light on the myriad of apes. In that moment, the age of man ends and the dawn of the age of apes begins. My only complaint about this movie is that the gorillas were relegated to a support role instead of shock troops. At the very least, they should have at least catapulted chimps into combat.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:12
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ShoogaSlim posted:You found that "extremely" problematic? I don't even remember what scene you're talking about off the top of my head and certainly made no connection to Donkey Kong. Maybe you played too many video games as a kid? 
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Jul 14, 2014 15:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:At the end of the first movie, the whole world (or at least San Francisco) knew that there was a whole clan (?) of intelligent apes that busted out of their zoo, wreaked havoc with downtown, were too many and too agile and too smart to be stopped by police and SWAT, but were convinced to go to the nearby forest and just stay out of humanity's way. Did they actually know they were on par with human intelligence, though? If you view those events without any background knowledge as to how they got there and what went on behind the scenes, it's a bunch of animals that had been experimented (we know where they escaped from, so at least that much is a given) on running amok and trying to escape to an environment closest to what those kinds of animals would be most comfortable with. The only, I guess, outsiders who would really know something was seriously wrong would be the cops. Even from the perspective of the news helo, it'd just look like animals being animals. The second anyone stated, "are these assholes making tactically competent decisions? Cause that's what it looks like", they'd be laughed out of a job.
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Jul 14, 2014 16:05
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No Wave posted:I just didn't really understand how privilege fit in, to be honest. Or even nice things. Privilege in terms of what? What nice things? They have different views on humanity - to say "privilege" seems to assume a correct perspective from which we are judging the two. This seems disingenuous. When he says Caesar has had a privileged life, he means he wasn't beaten and tortured and treated like a piece of garbage. Instead, he was very much loved, and treated almost like a human child. It was very much an easy life, all things considered. Caesar essentially experienced the best of humanity, whereas Koba experienced the worst of humanity. Their beliefs regarding humanity are fueled by those experiences, so Koba can never believe that humans won't turn on them, having never met a decent human, and Caesar refuses to believe that all humans are poo poo. He knows firsthand that they aren't. Much like children, the way they are now is directly linked to their childhood and how they were treated in their respective human interactions. Edit: ^What he said. Just pretend Caesar is Professor X and Koba is Magneto. Xeremides fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 04:20
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No Wave posted:I think using the word "privileged" to describe "not being tortured" is crazy. Who cares that his life was easy? If Koba perceives Caesar as weak and removed from the way humans *really* feel about apes, I still don't understand where privilege comes into the picture. If we're going to bring privilege into it, it would refer to his access to the drug in the first place/that he was positioned to bring the apes freedom rather than being imprisoned (thus ending up at the top of the ape hierarchy). But then again I don't understand why, because I don't think anyone's trying to assert the inherent innate superiority of one fictional character over another. You're getting hung up on a word, and whatever your reasons, it has nothing to do with this movie. Caesar? Privileged to have had such a happy, healthy upbringing and lucky enough to have been in the company of at least one caring human. Green Goblin showed a great deal of love and affection for Caesar, and it was all of the above that made him not only willing, but eager, to believe humans were not the force of evil Koba believed them to be. Koba? Not so much. Beaten, tortured, and experimented on, Koba's life had been nothing but tragic. He couldn't understand Caesar's affection for humanity, his desire to trust humans, because he had known only pain and suffering at the hands of humans. Now go ahead and zero in on the word privilege again and disregard everything else. Xeremides fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 05:09
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No Wave posted:Caesar didn't have things. He didn't have rights. He was not recognized as an individual by any legal order or otherwise. I can't understand how this falls under any definition of "privilege", given that he formally had NO privileges. He was an animal. By what order is he privileged? I get that his life was less lovely and that he had a better relationship with people. And that this is why he likes people more. Right, and when someone says, "It's a privilege to meet you", they're definitely using the spergiest possible definition of the word and stating they're only capable of meeting that person based on a special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste. That's definitely what they mean. There's no possible way they could mean they're fortunate to meet that person, or it's a pleasure to meet that person. Because being fortunate and being privileged aren't even remotely related in common usage. It's been my privilege to do such and such is literally an admittance of a special right granted by the state. Totally. Now let's argue about the real meaning of "is".
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Jul 17, 2014 05:43
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No Wave posted:Does "privileged" mean fortunate now? I'm not up on my SJW lingo. Right, because people who speak english as a first language must be SJWs. Common usage is a thing. Remember when literally meant literally and not not-literally? Me too. Common usage changed that. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/privileged Scroll down to Thesaurus, look at related words, and maybe play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic.
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Jul 17, 2014 05:53
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Erethizon_dorsatum posted:It didn't keep me from enjoying the movie, but was anyone else bothered at the almost complete lack of female characters? One female character for each side. Why? It kind of made sense to me. This movie is very much about conflict, and when poo poo hits the fan, its men who take to the front lines. Both the apes and humans are significantly fewer in number than they'd like to be, with a large number of humans being wiped out and the apes being comprised of those who escaped from their respective facilities. In that scenario, you wouldn't send out your women and children to perform risky jobs or fight. They're too important to the survival of the species. So Malcolm tries his best to keep his kid and girlfriend back in the rear, failing miserably in that regard, and the apes keep the females as far away from danger as possible. The communal area they kept showing may very well have had a shitload of female apes, but I can't tell the difference so I wouldn't know. Back to the humans, Malcolm's excursion was a high risk operation, not because of the actual work being done, but because they were venturing into what is essentially enemy territory. There's no reason to take more risks than necessary, especially to the detriment of the human race, so bringing more women than absolutely necessary doesn't seem like a smart move. Back in the rear, we focus mostly on Oldman's character as a leader, and the two dudes who get schwacked by Koba. They're integral to the conflict brewing. The civilians doing whatever it is they do don't really matter, so we don't focus on them, really, outside of them smiling at electricity and getting wasted by apes. That isn't to say women aren't important in their respective ape and human societies, but they played a vastly different role in more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, which is slowly where humanity was headed and where the apes already were. When we're down to the wire, we revert to those evil patriarchal devil gender roles that not only ensured humanity survived, but thrived. Spoilered in case I spill the beans on something.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:29
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Erethizon_dorsatum posted:I see what you're saying, Xeremides, but there's some characters that could have been made female and nothing would have changed. Carver, Malcolm's son, Gary Oldman's character etc could easily have been made women. The humans would have had to take female Carver with them anyway because Carver was apparently the only survivor who had worked at the dam. Malcolm's son went along because he felt like it he was equally safe with his dad as he was at the compound. That wouldn't have changed if he had been a daughter instead. I think Malcolm's family dynamic was meant to mirror Caesar's, so it was actually important for him to have a son versus a daughter. As Blue Eyes was Caesar's heir, so was I-Never-Bothered-To-Remember-His-Name Malcolm's heir. Gary Oldman's character could have potentially been made female, but are we just changing genders for the sake of gender quotas in film, or because it actually adds to the story? For me, it goes back to the idea of conflict. Oldman was a former police chief, and a mayoral candidate; someone people would look to for leadership in a crisis. San Francisco just got their first female police chief 5 years ago, so I don't know that the one female police chief would be more likely to survive than the myriad of male police chiefs, of which Oldman happened to be one of them. To me anyway, but I'm probably a shitlord. I agree that changing doucheface who shot anything that moved with a woman wouldn't have changed very much, but then you'd probably get comments about a woman being depicted as too emotional and incompetent. Or not. I don't know. Xeremides fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 20:50
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DeimosRising posted:Besides the biotruths/tactical realism combo attack of cruddy logic, you don't really understand what those words mean. There was/is no patriarchy in egalitarian societies, because patriarchy is a kind of hierarchy, which egalitarian groups necessarily do not have. Gender and sex differences are a totally separate (not to say unrelated) thing, and connecting them to the greater marginal reproductive value of females to males is speculative at best and absurd at worst. No breeding population big enough to be viable has few enough women that any one of them is reproductively vital. None of which has the least bit to do with why women aren't more prominent characters in this fictional movie. Yeah, I was using every word in their most literal sense and definitely not stringing along a series of words for comedic effect. That said, gender roles absolutely do influence our expectations of people in certain situations. In a crisis, we expect men to step up and fight and to protect women and children. It doesn't matter if it's because they're physically weaker, more essential to the survival of your tribe (which is arguably what became of the humans in the film), unable to defend themselves, too important to die or whatever. Be it genetic instinct or social expectation, it's what we do, and it's exactly what they did in the film. Again, Malcolm's first instinct was to leave his kid and girlfriend behind in order to protect them. Oldman had all of the civilians locked in within the confines of the skyscraper or whatever it was, and all of the fighting men at the front to defend everyone else. This is how all the males in the film react to danger, man or ape. Within the narrative, the apes obviously do the same, and keep their women at bay for the duration of the movie, save for Caesar's wife. It's only once the action is done and victory is theirs that they bother to mention their women again, and its to move them from the safety of the forest down to their new base. Throughout the movie, we are seeing the humans mirrored in apes and the apes mirrored in humans. The point being we're not so different. As I previously said, and you ignored, this is a film about conflict, and both in the movie and in reality, you'll find a poo poo ton of men in the middle of it, and women and children in the rear. It's an absolutely valid reason for women not to be prominent characters, because they're being kept away from the action, and the movie takes place primarily in the thick of things. Be it in enemy territory, be it during the assault on the human city or when Caesar and friends cautiously watched the humans work in the dam to ensure they didn't gently caress them over, the point is to have your warriors on the forefront and everyone else away from it all. In that situation, youre warriors are every able-bodied male, and everyone else consists of the women, children and elderly. Within the confines of the story, it makes perfect sense. Xeremides fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 21:53
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