Top 10 Reasons I Don't Believe in God @ Greta Christina -- This is an excellent list and lines up well with my reasons, too. Read it. If you like it, Digg it.

Here we go again! Unfortunately, for some reason, Netflix doesn't have the fifth installment of the Planet of the Apes movies available, so for now, Ric and I will have to be satisfied with having seen four of them. Maybe I'll set up the TiVo to automatically record it. Anyway, this is the fourth of the POTA movies, and as the title implies, it's all about conquest. In this case, the apes are the conquerors. The setting is around 1990, and apes are being used as servants, and one of them, who is more advanced than the others, gradually moves from disapproving of the treatment of apes to organizing their revolt.

The first problem I have with this movie (and there are many) is the believability factor. I know, I know. I'm watching a sci-fi movie a and am talking about believability, but there still has to be a certain level of explanation that satisfies the movie viewer's sense of logic. In this story, we hear the actual history of how apes moved from being animals in the wild or in the zoo to doing regular human activities. The writers would like us to believe that all normal pets die from a disease and apes replace them as household pets, then they are given tasks to do, and eventually they are trained to do specific manual labor, and one of them even learns speech... all in the course of about eight years. Since they teach us that evolution occurred over millions of years, the brief time span here is a bit of a deal-breaker for me.

But beyond that, the movie is also prone to bringing up some disturbing images that seem to compare the plight of the apes to the black race. The only friend to the apes is a black man (on a side note, I did like that he knew what humanity's destiny would be if he helped them but still did it anyway), and there are many uses of language that suggest that his people went through what the apes are going through. I can see what they're getting at, but I don't like the comparison, especially since in a sadder part of history, people actually compared the appearances of the two.

And, while the sets (pretty sure they drained the moats at the L.A. DWP) are creative and the music and special effects are well-done, the movie loses its appeal as the revolt begins. These last parts of the film are filled with continuous action that often feels direction list. We see shot on top of shot of apes beating on security. And that, too, doesn't seem all that realistic, because men with guns are somehow unable to kill of a lot of apes who don't have guns.

It's also a very slow movie, and even though it takes its time, our protagonist seems to make the transition from a nice guy to an angry killer all too quickly. I didn't feel his pain and I didn't understand how he didn't confront his own hypocrisy in giving the humans the same treatment he despised of his own kind. The only redeeming factor was that he chose not to kill a couple of people.

I'm interested to see where the next movie takes things, but while this one could have turned out to be a much more interesting and effective story based on its premise, the way it plays out was less than impressive for me. It's definitely my least favorite of the series so far.

The comments tore the story to shreds but I just wanted to document my first submission to hit the front page of Digg. No, I didn't write it and all I really did was click a button, but it's still a cool geek achievement.