When the legacy of a film that you a feel deep affection for is messed with the knee-jerk reaction can be negative; every once in a while a remake can be respected (Dawn of the Dead) or a sequel can outdo the original (The Road Warrior, Aliens) but most sequels and remakes are strictly quick buck affairs. So there’s no point in getting snotty about Rise of the Planet of the Apes; it’s a big, fun, flawed but intelligent reimagining of the series. It’s the best Apes flick since the original film, Planet of the Apes in 1968, one of my all-time favorite movies. The legacy has already been contaminated; the quality of the four sequels (Beneath…, Escape from…, Conquest of…, and Battle for…) vary in quality. Both the live action and animated television series, based on the film, are amazingly boring. And Tim Burton’s ill-conceived remake was a dud. Frankly, fans of Pierre Boulle’s original book have the most to complain about as the ‘68 version’s screenwriters, Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, hit the bull’s-eye, but completely abandoned much of the novel’s concept. The rebooting of a stale series has done wonders in recent years for both Batman and James Bond; rebooting as opposed to remaking looks to be the new way to find new creative angles.
 
The first act of Rise is almost a boy-and-his-dog story, or a scientist-and-his-genetically-intelligent-chimp story. Will Rodman (James Franco), a brilliant geneticist, inspired by his Alzheimer-stricken father, Charles (John Lithgow), works to find a cure while working for one of those evil medical companies. When things go wrong, the apes are slaughtered, but Will brings home one of the ape’s newborn babies, whom he names Caesar (the first of many name references to the original films). He and his dad and then his zoologist girlfriend, Caroline (Freida Pinto), are happily raising their extremely intelligent young ape in picturesque San Francisco and other then the scientific mumbo-jumbo mixed in this could be an above average family flick. But then things go wrong; as Caesar grows into maturity he starts to wonder who he is, and after protecting Charles from a brute neighbor, he is sent off to a sort of stray ape kennel (doesn’t every city have one?). It’s an old, rusty animal shelter and here the flick really lights up and becomes a classic prison tale.
 
The sleazy and abusive monkey jail is run by Landon (a wasted Brian Cox) and his overacting creep son Dodge (of course in the original flick Dodge and Landon were the names of Charlton Heston’s astronaut cohorts). Here Caesar must survive the abuse of his new captors as well as his fellow apes who he has never been exposed to; his anguish in his new environment is truly heartbreaking. He ends up befriending an angry Gorilla and, like Caesar, a sign language-talking orangutan (named Maurice, after Maurice Evans who played the orangutan Dr Zaius in the original), while trying to adapt to his new life. Eventually he becomes the leader of the apes, teaching them collaboration, while planning their escape. In a rather far-fetched plot twist he escapes, goes home, and grabs some of that smart medicine and gasses his ape pals so they can be on closer intellectual ground. This leads to their breakout where they team up with zoo apes and rescued lab apes; they wreak havoc on the streets of San Fran and have a showdown with the cops over the Golden Gate Bridge, before retreating to the safety of California’s redwood trees in Muir Woods.
 
That first act of the movie has definite allusions to the original Apes: a sympathetic scientific couple trying to protect an intelligent creature in a world that considers him a beast. But interestingly once the movie hits the ape jail it jumps up three flicks to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, where the talking ape Caesar leads his fellow suppressed apes in a revolution against man (I mean, if you consider taking over a Century City mall revolutionary).
 
Besides the name references, there are repeated lines from the old series, “It’s a mad house,” “damn dirty apes,” and “no!”

Is it possible to love a movie and recommend it but still advise to turn it off just after the half-way mark? The history of films with great Act Ones and maybe even Act Twos that then fall apart by Act Three constitutes a long list (Mulholland Dr., From Dusk Till Dawn, Full Metal Jacket, etc.). I Am Legend may be the most extreme case. It has a pretty spectacular first half that’s suspenseful, exciting, but by that last act things go terribly astray. Based on the classic novelette by the great writer Richard Matheson, it had been filmed twice earlier— first in the ‘60s as a dull low-budget Vincent Price flick called The Last Man on Earth and then the culty Charlton Heston early ‘70s vehicle re-titled The Omega Man. I don’t remember ever making it all the way through the Price version, but the beloved Heston flick had the same problem as the newest take; though the whole of the ‘70s film is so goofy that the plot twist in the second half is less abrupt and problematic than in the newer more “realistic” version, they both have great set-ups that couldn’t carry through to the end.

Though not in the same league with John Wyndham’s brilliant sci-fi novel that it’s based on, the low budget 1962 film version of The Day of the Triffids is still a heady piece of post-apocalyptic entertainment and still one of the best and most influential end-of-the-world films ever. A more faithful to the book version was made for BBC TV in 1981 and it’s also essential “survivor movie” viewing. (A more recent TV version in 2009 was terribly disappointing.) But while this first on-screen edition may veer from the book, it was a landmark in British B-movie sci-fi and in a lot of ways it still packs a wallop.

With all of London excited about watching an astounding meteor shower outside, American merchant seaman, Bill Masen (Howard Keel) is stuck in a hospital bed with his eyes bandaged after surgery. The next day he awakens to find that the hospital staff and then the entire town are now blind (everyone who watched the sky that night at least). If having to navigate among the desperately blind isn’t apocalyptic enough, it seems a deadly plant known as a Triffid is also on the loose—these are walking shrubs that shoot a poisonous stinger at their victims and if that’s not bad enough they have the ability to verbally communicate with each other. Eventually Bill comes across a little girl (Janina Faye) who can see and the two have to fight their way out of England and make it to France. Once there they help a group of blind women, including a pretty love interest (Nicole Maurey), while trying to escape a group of violent convicts as they head for Spain.

Long before writing the novel Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton created another futuristic amusement park where everything goes wrong. Directing his first feature, Westworld, the result is much more credible than the later Spielberg directed flick. Closer to the vibe of cult-television show, The Wild, Wild West, than the Gene Autry serial Phantom Empire, Crichton’s film may be the best science-fiction / western Hollywood has ever produced.

A new high tech adult playland offers vacationers the choice between Medievalworld, Romanworld or Westworld. Vacationers get to enjoy exotic pleasures both in danger and even sexual, interacting with perfectly human looking androids. Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and his much cooler pal John Blane (James Brolin) opt for Westworld. It’s an Old West experience straight out of Bonanza, with saloon fights, shootouts, and robot brothels (though the guys are usually left to wonder if that was a human or a droid). The cowardly Martin has a run in with a gunfighter of few words, likely a droid, played by the famously shaved headed Russian tough guy Yul Brynner (wearing his same cool black outfit from The Magnificent Seven), killing him gives Martin some new found bravado.

In The Omega Man, as Robert Neville, Charlton Heston drives around an abandoned Los Angeles in his convertible. He steps into a torn out department store and grabs a new track suit; he gets the generator working on an old movie theater and watches Woodstock; then he chats and plays chess against a bust of Caesar. Spotting some hooded figures in the darkness, he pulls out his machine gun and opens fire, killing them - you see, as the poster proclaimed, “The last man alive…is not alone!”

Before The Omega Man, Richard Matheson’s brilliant 1954 post-apocalyptic mini-novel, I Am Legend, was adapted into a Vincent Price snoozer called The Last Man On Earth. More recently the book was the source for a Will Smith vehicle that kept the title but went overboard with the CGI (a fantastic first half, it loses its way by the third act). Though it may be closer in spirit to Matheson’s book than The Omega Man, for pure fun the Heston version is the most entertaining of the three.