I’d never really given much consideration to the Planet of the Apes films before. I think I have this inherent prejudice against primates for some reason, maybe? Like, King Kong is an incredible movie, a classic, far better than most other giant monster movies, but I’m not that into him. Even as a kid, I thought monkeys were weird. Donkey Kong, his games are great but I wouldn’t even consider him on a list of favorite Nintendo characters. Even at zoos the chimpanzees just don’t impress me. So for whatever reason, I never tried watching those movies, even though the first one’s a classic and it’s a beloved franchise. I think I saw Tim Burton’s remake in theaters when I was young, but I remember almost nothing about it.
That’s changed though. I saw the teaser for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in front of some other movie a month or two ago and was surprised by how good it looked. It stuck with me more than the movie itself. Then I saw the main trailer and decided it was something worth watching. I found Rise of the Planet of the Apes for 3 bucks at a Best Buy in Charlotte and it was a slippery slope from there. A week later I got the original, then just the other day I bought the Legacy Collection on bluray.
In the past week I’ve watched all five movies from the original series, none of which I’d ever seen before . Overdosed on apes. I decided to try to collect and write down my thoughts on the series, since it’s kind of rare for me to get into something so quickly like this. Spoilers abound, of course.
Planet of the Apes (1968): I would have watched this way sooner if someone had just told me that Rod Serling co-wrote this movie and that it’s essentially one big long Twilight Zone episode where Charlton Heston, a man I’ve never been terribly fond of, gets shot in the neck, repeatedly beaten up, thrown around, and hosed down. The movie plays out like a feverish nightmare (amplified by the fact that Heston had the flu for most of the shoot), Jerry Goldsmith’s bizarre score making sure you’re always a bit dizzy and uncomfortable as you watch the madness unfold. All of the social commentary, the jabs at racism and everything else, it still feels relevant. It’s actually welcoming that things slow down a bit for the final act, with Taylor’s trial having echoes of the McCarthy era witch hunts. You can finally rest and think about everything. As many times as I’ve seen it parodied, as long as I’ve known about it, that ending is still pretty great, isn’t it? A real kick in the teeth when it first came out, I’d like to think. It was also really neat to see all the parallels to Rise, comparing and contrasting the two.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): Everyone in this looks awful, especially Charlton Heston. This is just an ugly movie all around. The bulk of the film has a been there, done that feeling to it, hitting a lot of the same notes as the first movie but without any of the bite since we know where we are this time. It doesn’t help that the new astronaut lead in this one was picked specifically for his resemblance to Heston. Things get good in the second half thankfully, once our hero finds the underground ruins of New York City and a freakish race of telepathic mutants who worship an unexploded nuclear bomb. That’s kind of awesome. I didn’t know the other movies in the series had sucker punch endings similar to the first one, so this one took me by complete surprise when it just straight up murdered everyone. Originally, I’d planned on stopping with this one and saving the other three movies for after I watched Dawn, but after that? I knew I had to keep going, I wanted to see what else they’d throw at me.
Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971): Absolute tonal shift here. The first half of this movie seems to have no plot at all outside of watching Zira and Cornelius from the first two movies touring New York, getting new outfits, and attending parties, a fish out of water comedy scenario. It’s way more entertaining than I’d like to admit, refreshing after watching everybody die violently in the last movie. But then all the laughing and smiling is thrown out the window when a drunken Zira explains the dark turn which humanity’s future will take and an enterprising agent decides that now is the time to change the course of history by killing the two apes. Not unlike the moral debate about going back in time to kill Hitler as a child in order to prevent the Third Reich and WW2 from happening. Things keep getting uglier until we get another shock of an ending with Zira and Cornelius gunned down, their child left crying for its mother in a cage in the circus.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972): By this point I just really didn’t know what to expect at all. They were cranking these things out once a year at this rate, with the budget sliced down each time. Setting Escape in the present with only three apes seemed like the ultimate attempt at cost-cutting, so I figured Conquest would be a letdown. I was wrong. While it DID in fact have a smaller budget, it somehow feels like the biggest movie yet, taking place in the “future” of 1991 and going back to packing the screen with apes. This is also the only PG-rated movie, though I watched the unedited version that’s more violent and has the nastier, darker ending. Another gut punch. Whereas the other films kept the social issues mostly to the side, not exactly hiding them but not really making them the focus either, this one puts it all right up front. Parallels to slavery are frequent, especially given that there are far more black actors in this movie than in any of the others. The movie is shot in a dark, uncomfortable fashion and when violence breaks out (which is all the time) the camera doesn’t even try to look away. The final act riots and stand-off with the police is where Rise lifted its own finale from, as well as the basic story of Caesar as the most intelligent ape leading the others. This may very well be my favorite in the series. The original theatrical cut has a softer ending, with Caesar changing his mind about having the movie’s villain murdered and making a hasty speech about equality, but I much prefer the darker turn.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973): Sadly, this one is without a doubt the weakest of the series, though I feel like this is the one that they’ll have mined the most from for Dawn. We’re taken further into the future. Caesar rules the apes, has a son named after his father Cornelius (which led me to some weird time travel paradox ideas for a brief moment), and there’s an uneasy peace between them and the surviving humans. It’s a bit boring to watch, even if the movie is trying to make a point here. Humans can no longer say “No” to apes while apes can say it to humans, but it’s a weak metaphor. It wasn’t really holding my attention until they decide to journey to the bombed out ruins of New York to find the old Ape Control Center from Conquest. I feel like the developers of the Fallout series of games were heavily influenced by this movie, because that whole portion of the movie reminded me a lot of Fallout 3. The humans still living in the irradiated ruins are slowly mutating into the freaks we see in Beneath, cracking jokes about radiation and sitting around waiting to die before Caesar shows up. It turns into an all-out war between these guys and the ape settlement, with the gorillas rounding up all the humans living with them into pens. (Oh hey, didn’t we Americans kind of pull this same nonsense in WWII by putting Asians in internment camps?) This one does have the most action, and while it still has something to say, it really just feels underwhelming through and through. Plus, the ending is pretty basic, especially compared to the twists of the previous four movies. Yeah, I was let down by the fact that this one DIDN’T end on a dark note. I’m a creep.
I was going to write about Rise of the Planet of the Apes too since I watched it first, but this thing is long enough already, so I’ll save it for after I’ve seen Dawn and can compare the two. But there you have it, in no time at all I went from being completely indifferent to very much in love with movies about talking apes with machine guns. While it’s hard to say how or why, watching through all of these felt like watching a bunch of Godzilla films. I wish they’d just kept on cranking these out into the 80’s, you know? They’re so much more bizarre and clever than I’d ever expected, I was largely impressed with them. I’m absolutely a fan now, and I can’t wait to see Dawn tonight.
I could do without the CG Lawgiver intros for all the Blu-rays, though...
[Brett]