think they were taken in by the plot twist for all the wrong reasons?
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Fletcherj119 — 11 years ago(September 14, 2014 02:18 AM)
In the novel the apes lived on a different planet, so naturally they spoke a different language. The apes in this movie patterned their culture after 20th century America. So naturally they would speak English.
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whynotwriteme — 11 years ago(September 14, 2014 02:29 PM)
But in 2000 years you would expect the language to have changed considerably. American English has had considerable changes even since the mid-20th century. Go back and read correspondence and newspaper articles from the 1940s and 50s. Even if they were written and aimed at average, run-of-the-mill people, they sound much more articulate and coherent than what passes for communication and journalism today.
Going even farther backwards, look at the form of English spoken back in the Dark Ages 1000 years ago and compare it to today. You can read Beowulf in the original Old English for an example. Then multiply those changes by 2 as the Ape world is 2000 years in the future. That is not even mentioning the differences that would be caused by the brains and vocal chords of Apes as the new speakers of the language.
Ape English of 2000 years hence would be incomprehensible to a 20th century American human.
But I agree that the movie did not treat it this way due to convenience. It really does not bother me that the Apes speak 20th century English. If you worry about that, I am surprised you can even get over the premise that Apes are speaking at all. -
haristas — 11 years ago(September 15, 2014 08:45 AM)
Charlton Heston wrote that there were discussions about this, so the filmmakers did consider it (having the apes speak their own language), but in the end it was decided to go the way they did, and it certainly hasn't hurt the movie, still as popular today as it was in '68.
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Rockhound6165 — 11 years ago(October 30, 2014 06:56 PM)
Going even farther backwards, look at the form of English spoken back in the Dark Ages 1000 years ago and compare it to today. You can read Beowulf in the original Old English for an example.
However, from the time of Chaucer to Shakespeare English changed quite a bit and that is within a couple of hundred years. However, from Shakespeare to now, with the exception of some idioms and slang, English hasn't changed all that much. Not saying you're wrong but I really don't see English changing all that much. I mean, Greek hasn't changed all that much from the time of Socrates. -
AnaElisa — 10 years ago(September 08, 2015 03:43 PM)
I, too, saw this movie when it was first releasedand, had heard nothing about any kind of a surprise ending. I was watching this at a local drive-in (they showed first-run films, how cool was that?) with a group of friends.
No, we had no issues about English being spoken, becausewe were too blown away by the amazing ending!
(One of many good times living the the SF Bay Area in the 60's.)
-AnaElisa -
discowhale — 11 years ago(October 26, 2014 11:54 AM)
anon,
I saw this at 14 y/o, I'd read the book, and the simplest answer is this.
We used to do this crazy thing, where we went to the movies, we unhinged our reality, and we enjoyed the story, FOR the story. We didn't dissect, split, and in general, critique movies the way people do now.
In the entire country, there were a dozen or so, well known, syndicated movie reviewers. The local newspapers and TV stations sometimes had reviewers, but it was NOT their prime or singular duty. Now, with the internet and blogs and smart phones, EVERYONE is a reviewer / critic.
Just as as I couldn't imagine my parents NOT going crazy when "The Wizard of Oz" came out [it's a movie I love BTW], you have no point of view for 'why' we didn't pick POTA apart and question the obvious holes in the story line.
Schteveo -
thetheeyecreature — 10 years ago(April 29, 2015 07:59 AM)
There's no getting around it the movie makes no logical sense (for many reasons). Yet I love it. That's something Rod Serling was great at. He wasn't scientifically knowledgeable enough to do rigorous, plausible hard science fiction, so what he did instead was make a story that works so well as a dramatic fable that the viewer just accepts its crazy reality.
"The truth 24 times a second." -
laplante-co-672-297856 — 10 years ago(August 04, 2015 08:44 AM)
"I see this has actually been discussed to death, but I couldn't really get over how unfazed the main character was by the presence of grass, trees, horses, humans, apes, and the English language."
Late to this thread and this has probably been explained to death already but
in the 60s it was quite common for sci-fi shows to use English as a 'universal' language for the sake of the story.
Watch Lost in Space. Or Land of the Giants on TV. Numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits
Almost every movie about aliens also had them speak in English, often in a sort of pseudo-Shakespearean sounding way.
Star Trek was probably the first attempt to 'explain' how/why English was universal in their universe. -
trollomatic — 9 years ago(April 10, 2016 02:56 PM)
in the 60s it was quite common for sci-fi shows to use English as a 'universal' language for the sake of the story.
Watch Lost in Space
and yet, even that had some episodes where the Robinsons couldn't understand the languages of the aliens. At all.
And also ones where the Robot had to translate for them.
Although most of the episodes did have the aliens speaking English. -
henrimaine — 9 years ago(April 05, 2016 01:47 PM)
I saw this movie in the eighties on TV. I knew about the twist ending in the book but I was not aware that the movie had a different ending. So seeing that Statue of Liberty was quite a surprise. At that moment, I knew right away that they had been on Earth the whole time. But strangely, the apes speaking English did not push me to conclude that they were on Earth. I guess I realized instinctively that the viewer is not supposed to notice the "language issue".
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VValkyrie — 9 years ago(April 12, 2016 06:56 PM)
Saw this at a Drive In theatre in New Orleans when it first came out,I was 9. I remember the movie was very LOUD coming out of the speaker hanging from the window. Parents didn't care for the movie at all. Please remember there was a lot going on at the time, Apollo 11 moon landing, VietNam & more.
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lucluv — 9 years ago(May 26, 2016 09:01 AM)
I saw
Planet of the Apes
when it first came out. I was 9-years-old at the time.
I watched this movie again last night (5/26/16) for the first time in decades. As a now 57-year-old man, I see and understand a lot more than I did as a 9-year-old child seeing it for the very first time. To my now adult, 21st-century mindset, the movie seems a bit hokey at times (never noticed the "See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil" bit during the tribunal before, LOL), but, back in the day, this movie was something special.
You're looking at this movie with 21st century sensibilities. It was a much different American society in 1968, than it is today.
This movie was released on 3 April 1968. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War and protests were gaining strength. The civil rights movement was in full swing. (In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the day after this movie was released). There were hippies and yippies and we had been through "the summer of love" the year before. We were traveling in outer space, but still months away from Apollo 11 and the first man on the Moon.
There was no cable TV, nor DVRs, home computers or cell phones. The computers that were in use often used reel-to-reel magnetic tape or Wyandotte(sp?) punch cards to store their data and run programing.
Star Trek
was entering its second season on TV.
Lost in Space
had just completed its 4 year run. In both shows, aliens looked just like humans, often with silly clothes and painted skin to differentiate them from the Earthlings. There were no forehead ridges on the Klingons, they just looked like swarthy humans with a deep tan and a bad haircut. The most exotic alien on
Lost in Space
was a (real) chimpanzee with a set of horns/antennae (the "Bloop").
In Hollywood, Caucasians were still routinely playing Native Americans, Chinese and just about any other ethnicity, except, perhaps, Blacks (as Afro-Americans were then called). You could tell they were a different ethnicity because, although they all spoke English, they did it with an appropriate (and often terribly executed) accent.
These were
American
movies and tv shows made for
American
audiences. Movies in other languages were considered to be
Foreign
or
"Art"
films, with limited audiences. There was no such thing as "made-up" languages, except perhaps for Pig Latin and Esperanto
. (The first few words of Klingon weren't heard until
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
in 1979.)
With all of the political turmoil and social upheaval, movies were escapism. We suspended our disbelief and slipped into a world of fantasy to get away from the nightly news. We didn't scrutinize and nitpick the movie's construction, as we do today. It was simply entertainment.
That being said, it didn't mean that movies didn't also carry messages. The main theme of
Planet of the Apes
is man's inhumanity towards his fellow man (a hot topic in the '60s), which leads to mankind's ultimate downfall, and the evolved apes who know about it and are trying to keep their own future society from repeating mankind's mistakes.
Special effects were not as sophisticated as they are today. Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion F/X was still pretty much state-of-the-art. CGI wasn't even a glimmer in someone's creative mind. The one thing I distinctly remember is, when
Planet of the Apes
came out, the sheer fascination the ape SF/X make-ups had. In previous movies, apes were usually just some guy running around in a cheap gorilla suit. But, to see evolved apes, who walked, talked and dressed like humans now THAT was really something! It was something that we'd never seen before and garnered a lot of attention. It earned John Chambers an honorary Academy Award for his outstanding make-up achievement in the movie.
In the 1960's, people were just starting to wrap their heads around the idea that we might not be alone in the universe. With our eyes turned towards the space race, we began to look beyond our own planet. However, it was still hard to envision beings wouldn't develop as humanoids similar to ourselves, so it was easy to believe that, somewhere and some
time
in the universe, creatures would have evolved similarly to us, and resemble life here on Earth. Seen through that lens, Taylor believed he had traveled to another planet. He states that throughout the movie. We viewers believed it, too. That is why him finding the half-buried Statue of Liberty was such a shocker. Like Taylor, we believed he had landed on some unknown planet, that just happened to have a similar evolution, and never imagined he was on the future Earth. We, in our hubris, could not imagine the downfall of mankind and the rise of a society of intelligent, evolved apes.
And lastly, if they had given the apes their own language, I doubt that the movie would have been as successful as it was. A few years later, the WWII movie
Tora! Tora! Tora!
was released, with real Japanese actors playing real WWII Japanese naval commanders. They spoke actual Japanese in the movie, -
silverr8c — 9 years ago(July 03, 2016 10:26 PM)
I was in my early 20s (born 1946). A lot of time has passed since I watched it and my memory may be faulty. I do not recall that it was a big deal that they spoke English. I am watching it as I type this and so much time has passed since my first viewing it is almost like watching it for the first time. I do remember figuring out the ending a few minutes before the big surprise.
I think this movie is still worth watching even though it is almost 50 years old. I am at 1.22 right now close to the end. I also recorded Beneath and Conquest of TPOTA on MAX which I will probably watch tomorrow
I want to win the Nobel Peace Prize so bad that I would kill to get it