Project 1 Draft 2

Tommy Jimenez

Mat Wenzel

ENC 2134 24

9 July 2017

Damn Them. Damn Them All to Hell

There is one defining characteristic that makes me who I am and that is the passionate love I have for cinema and film. It is a part of me for better or worse whether it’s time for relaxing and watching my favorite movies or needing to get my mind off something to unbearable, time to turn on an episode of television or when I have any leisure time and I’m not doing anything, click! There goes some YouTube video discussing my anticipated upcoming films. More than a decade of my life has been devoted to sitting or lying in a theater or couch or bed and simply watching. The cinema is a place where for an hour and half to two and a half hours you can forget about what’s happening in life and take a break, learn a lesson, behold amazing visual effects, and be entertained. I remember being a child snuggled in bed intently watching The Incredibles, The Lion King, and Toy Story; I really did enjoy my Disney animations as a kid. I remember going to Blockbuster every Friday of the Month with my brother and father to rent out the movies we were going to watch that night. It was a tradition we would never break. My brother would get a horror movie while I grabbed a comedy and my father would grab some obscure eighties action flick none of us had ever heard of. Dear older brother loved to get horror movies to scare me because I could never bear to watch them hence me grabbing a comedy and my dad well just really loved old action movies. The tradition was always the same never changing not one detail: Go to the local blockbuster grab the movies we would watch for the night, then head over next store to grab the pepperoni pizza pie that would be dinner for the night, and finally buy some Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies from Publix which was in the same plaza; this is one of my most cherished memories and it was those long nights that I remember staying up all night to finish every movie as my family passed out beside me.

As I got older things changed; my brother was older, went out on the weekends, and our tradition became less of one and it was a monthly viewing with my dad and I but he would always fall asleep during the first movie and I was up by myself analyzing and watching and re-watching.Everything changed when blockbuster closed their doors and I saw the big blue banner say “Out of Business” my film Fridays were no more. This wasn’t the end of my watching movies but the opposite I watched more of them. Blockbusters replacement Turner Classic Movies; I watched some of the greatest pieces of art ever to be put to screen such as Casablanca, Singing in the Rain, Ben-Hur, and The Ten Commandments. None affected me quite the same way as did the original 1968 science fiction classic Planet of the Apes.

Being about the age of ten I was a kid and the movie was a sight to behold with this world of apes the makeup was phenomenal and had been like nothing I had seen before at least at the time. As I got older and I continued to re-watch the film it was almost as though it was changing before my eyes and of course the movie wasn’t really changing but I was picking up on details I’d never once seen as a kid simply watching the film through the eyes of a child enamored with Charlton Heston going to battle against giant apes. Staying[MW4] in love with the films I saw deeper meanings and a deeper political context with the movie being a fun family film but offering something more. There are very striking scenes within the movie that themselves could be analyzed with men specifically white men being chained up, locked in cages and hosed down with water being oppressed by in any other time period would be a lesser race. Coming out in 1968 during the heart of the civil rights movement the racial message of Planet of the Apes was heard all throughout movie theaters taking a stance showing that Apes and Humans were not equal in the film; it’s this message that through so many sittings of Planet of the Apes that I saw and that many other people saw thirty years apart.

Charlton Heston’s Col. George Taylor is brought to his knees coming to the realization that the “Alien World” he crash landed on is the sad result of Earth succumbing to some atomic fallout and that it was the humans who brought upon themselves their own extinction. It’s this moment of so many that stood out to me because in the nihilistic view of the planet of the apes movies we can’t change anything and that were doomed to befell our fellow man but in our world the film and this scene offers hope that we can change things and make things better. In one moment, there is so much to unpack and the filmmakers don’t need a full page expressing the thoughts of the main character but instead one line exemplifying his anger and sadness “Damn them, damn them all to hell!”

I wasn’t the only one who loved Planet of the Apes: there were groups of fans all over the internet that made reviews on the movie and made video analysis on movies that I loved and some that I didn’t. I’ve been a part of this collective group of people for so many years now maybe seven now where we talk about movies on websites like collider movies, rotten tomatoes, IMDb, and on YouTube channels like beyond the trailer with Grace Randolph and I’ve had many discussions with people that I have disagreed with and they were great because even if we didn’t agree we respected each other’s thoughts and ideas