A prequel novel to a film that no one liked is a hard sell, but this turned out to be a fun sci fi adventure that shows the beginnings of life on a new planet while the apes slowly start to become a part of the human community. It doesn’t really come together until the last couple of chapters, but I dug the weirdo Lovecraftian villain The Core and enjoyed it as its own oddball part of the Tim Burton apes universe. Easily better than the Burton film, though frankly it doesn’t take much to accomplish that feat.

While Tim Burton's re-make of Planet of the Apes is bad, the prequel novel is infinitely worse. Planet of the Apes: The Fall follows the crew of the space-station Oberon as they fight for survival in the aftermath of the station's crash-landing on an alien planet. Tonally the book feels completely disconnected from Tim Burton's film. And, it ham-fistedly inserts sociopolitical commentary about class and prejudice that doesn't fit within this version of Planet of the Apes. Unfortunately, author William T. Quick does an extraordinarily poor job at building on the film's vision and substitutes his own instead.

Decent back story forming.

This book changes the whole Planet of the Apes mythology. It attempts to explain how the "new" version started. Unfortunately, by having it all take place on another planet, possibly in another galaxy,it looses any sense of scariness the original contained. The original made clear the possibility of those events actually taking place in our future, RIGHT HERE. By changing the venue, this series loses it's hook.