Ironik

Too bad there's very little of that in the movie. You won't get to rant at that when you see it. People are shown to have a variety or responses and behaviors, from kindness to cruelty, gentleness to buttheadedness, and the apes do, too.

The good news is that you're wrong about that. There are over 3,000 chimps in captivity in the United States alone. It's not exactly a difficult feat to engage one's willing suspension of disbelief to accept there might be a sanctuary, a zoo and a lab with enough apes to create the small group of apes we see in the movie.

They aren't 10k apes in the city. There are a couple dozen at first, until Caesar manages to release all the other captive apes in the area (zoos, labs, private ranges).

Yeah, you need to get the "revolt" thing out of your head. This is a prison break movie. The apes don't take over the planet. I won't tell you how it's done, but stay for the ending title sequence. It's scary and shows exactly how it happens. I can't even think of another time off-hand where the story was continued *by* the closing credits.

Aside from a few minor quibbles, such as Freida Pinto's mostly-pointless character, this is a really solid science fiction movie.

What a weird thing to say.

TV shows are remade all the time. So are songs. Classical music is full of "variations on the theme of fill-in-the-blank". Even novels get remakes and sequels, including the classics. Justin Cronin's recent best-seller The Passage is nothing more than a remake of Stephen King's The Stand. Comic books -- and even comic book characters -- get remade constantly. Heck, Superman alone has had a new origin story just about every other year for the last 25 years.

They didn't say "may." They said, "If these numbers are correct, wormholes are both space- and time-travel and causality is no longer a factor."

Of course we don't know if that's actually the case since no one's done it yet. But that's what the equations say to them. And no, they aren't saying it's dimensional travel (which means nothing, by the way -- you actually mean "travel between universes"). It's actual travel to a point in time before the present one in our universe. So you get to go back in time and kill Hitler in *our* universe.

Don't take my word for it, there are tons of new books that have been released on the topic. Whatever it is you're thinking of isn't coming from people like Thorne, Hawking, Greene, Gott and Kaku.

While I agree with the general notion of "original idea uber alles," the reality is some suit who makes the financial decisions wanted there to be another PotA movie in order to generate revenue so they can make original movies. Which they do, every year, but almost no one goes to those, so who's to blame, us or them?

That said, if someone is given marching orders to refresh an existing property, you should at least be happy that they actually took the time to put forth a decent effort, which is what Rise of the Planet of the Apes is. The Burton remake was pure crap and everyone knows it. Rise however, is actually *good*. If we support it, then those filmmakers later get to try original ideas because that's how Hollywood works. "You made a ton of money for us, so here's a little something in return so you can make your vanity project."

As Bruce Willis once said about making yet another Die Hard flick in trade for getting to do In Country, "I make one of these for them, so I can I make this for me." Of course the studio hopes that the little side project will blow up huge and make them a ton of money, but really it's just a favor that they hope will make its money back.

Villains can't get there, so it's clearly a blue herring.

This seems to treat Freedom as a trial account, but that's only partially true. F2P players might also buy costumes and other geegaws and doodads without becoming Premium or VIP players. So alienating *any* players means the difference between some money and no money. So what if they only spend ten bucks? That $10 more than NCSoft had before that player showed up.

I can't hear you over your avatar. WTH is that?

I love it when irony punches people in the face.

Exactly. It's true that readers of SF will often read Fantasy (but little traffic going the other way, so your literary commute is easy), and it's likewise true that SF was originally derived from Fantasy, but the genres and the readership have diverged so much at this point that lumping them together is pointless.

I know people who read nothing but Star Trek novels or Warhammer novels, which is even more fractionalized than splitting the two major genres.

Or a spray can of carbon fiber. Where can I get some?

There was one expression that Caesar made which looked exactly like Serkis' face. Amazing capture, since the ape face looks nothing like his.

Exactly.

Taken all together, the PotA series has a lovely time travel story. What's even more interesting is that decades later physicists working on wormholes determined that they not only allowed for travel through space but also through time. And the really amazing thing was that the result of a lot of math I don't understand but they say works is that causality goes out the window.

Causality, for those unfamiliar with the term, is "cause and effect." Heat water -> water boils.

The most famous time travel conundrum is known as the Grandfather Paradox. It has variations but the idea is this: if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you will not exist. Therefore you can't go back in time and kill your grandfather. Gentler variations involve keeping your grandparents from meeting or your parents from meeting, et cetera.

Wormhole time travel, however, uncouples cause from effect. So if you kill your grandfather, you don't cease to exist: you're still there, you're still you and you still committed murder. (Or chronograndfratricide as it were.) The future continues on without your family forming the way it would have, but your memories still exist.

Which is totally weird, but they say the numbers bear it out.

The cool thing is that the time travel scenario in PotA is pretty much this except in reverse: the future apes exist because the descendants of Caesar went back in time and begat Caesar. That's a closed loop. However, it seems that *something* went astray from the original timeline, because apes and humans don't end up as adversaries, but rather as cohabitants in a new civilization.

Or do they? Dun dun dun.

The original PotA is just fun allegorical fantasy. It's about mistreating the planet and each other. I mean, it's silly on the face of it: astronauts travel thousands of years into the future to discover talking apes who happen to speak English (and have names that people have today).

You heard it here first: crickets play this game by Jimminy!

Good business to cover the bases and try to pull in some people who prefer manga. Since manga is quite popular in the US and Europe (France especially), why not throw them a bone?

Besides, it's something Sam has been wanting for a very long time.

Staff melee boring? Imagination fail. Pole vault, burly brawl, good stuff like that.

Manga ARE comics. Just not Western ones. And at least as popular as superheroes.

That's how they get ya.