George Taylor (Charlton Heston) leads a deep-space exploration that loses its way during two thousand years of cryosleep, stranding Taylor and his comrades (Robert Gunner, Jeff Burton) on a distant world with no way to communicate with their home. To their horror, the astronauts discover that they have landed on a planet where evolution seems to have run in reverse – humans are little better than mute domesticated animals, while apes have mastered civilization. Betrothed chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius (Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall) are fascinated by Taylor, but the orangutan Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) fears that the astronaut’s arrival will be the undoing of ape society.
For a movie that is more than 50 years old (I know, right?), Planet of the Apes has a surprisingly modern pace that keeps the movie clipping along briskly. At just shy of two hours, it’s also delightfully well-balanced, with the first ape appearing 30 minutes in; at sixty minutes, the plot turns when the apes discover that Taylor can talk. The final quarter of the film takes an even stranger turn as ape allies with human to investigate the Forbidden Zone – it’s a very methodical and deliberate construction, deploying the underrated four-act structure to craft a narrative that hums like an engine.
Though his script was largely rewritten, one senses the steady hand of Rod Serling in the tight plotting, punchy rhythm, and (naturally) the shocking final frames of the film. That ending, which has probably saturated into cultural osmosis by this point, is the sort of tragic allegory that made Serling’s Twilight Zone a television masterpiece. Little of Serling’s dialogue persisted into the finished film, though the bits that remain smack of his brand of cautionary cynicism – as when Taylor opines to his fellow space voyagers, “I’m a seeker, too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.” Indeed, one almost expects, as the film zooms out from its final tableau, to see Rod Serling standing just out of sight, fingers perched around a smoldering cigarette as he delivers an equally incendiary soliloquy about what man (to borrow a phrase from Serling’s best teleplay, “Time Enough at Last”) has deeded to himself.
No one does outrage on the edge of madness like Charlton Heston, and so he’s a perfect audience surrogate for a film that turns the world topsy-turvy as Planet of the Apes does. I’d forgotten how fallible, how cynical Taylor is in this film, even before he falls headlong into the monkey madhouse, but Taylor is that late 60s archetype of the disillusioned older generation, suspicious of the future but guardedly optimistic about his own ability to thrive. His colonial impulses and self-aggrandizement are slowly stripped away throughout the film, and he becomes the hero not because of any traits he possesses – but because he’s the best we have, and he refuses to acquiesce, the reluctant hero whose hesitation is only overridden by his own self-preservation. He comes not as a savior but as a seeker of truth, which is perhaps the higher calling. (Twelve years earlier, Heston had played Moses in the Easter classic The Ten Commandments, though Taylor is a far cry from the divine inspiration of a leader of men.)
Inside of the film’s larger allegory, there’s a sub-allegory about ape society, with the gorillas serving as the ape army, chimpanzees as their workers and scientists, and orangutans as the theocratic governing body. The slippery blur between religion, science, and government feels like another Twilight Zone parable, and nowhere is that tension more acutely rendered than in the character of Dr. Zaius, played brilliantly by Maurice Evans. One of the all-time great screen villains, Dr. Zaius is the venal and desperate orangutan deputy who knows better than any other ape how precariously their society sits atop a mountain of lies, and so his increasing anxiety motivates his every action as he strives to keep Taylor from dismantling his house of cards – not just out of some philosophical drive for truth but also, one senses, out of the escalating spite that exists between the two enemies. Dr. Zaius is so beautifully characterized, his motivations so deftly clear, that he makes a fitting rival for both Taylor and for the very idea of the good; his final scene and his fateful decision therein remind us that there is nothing more dangerous than an authoritarian afraid of losing his power. Put another way, when one man – or ape – controls multiple institutions, those selfsame institutions lose their epistemological power.
Let’s not forget Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira, on whom the unlikely franchise would eventually be built. McDowall especially does a fine job emoting behind his heavy prosthetics, his snout twitching whenever he’s irritated – which is, to be fair, quite often in this film. McDowall would go on to appear in four of the five Apes films (Cornelius was briefly recast while McDowall was away directing his own film), but I was struck by how human Kim Hunter manages to be as Zira, arguably the deuteragonist of the film. Though her fiancé has been beaten down by Dr. Zaius and his refusal to endorse true science, Zira remains open-minded in her pursuit of the truth, captive only to her fascination with Taylor, whom she dubs “Bright Eyes” when she realizes there’s something special about this human. That instinctive and irrepressible curiosity – even more than Taylor’s brutish cynicism – is as compelling a portrait of humanity as anything the film offers.
The film’s final statement on humanity is, however, something I can’t spoil here. On the off chance that someone in fifty-three years hasn’t seen the ending or one of its myriad riffs in pop culture, I’ll simply say that it fulfills Aristotle’s definition of an ending – it is both surprising and inevitable, and it is to the film’s great strength that it’s not a mere “twist.” It is the natural conclusion to a dynamite story, and the film only becomes more watchable with each viewing. It’s the sort of film that I’d happily rewatch with anyone who hasn’t seen it before. But it’s also not a film that would demand a sequel, let alone four – unless you’re looking at box office receipts. In its initial release, Planet of the Apes grossed nearly $21 million on a $6 million budget; even in 1968, studio heads went bananas for numbers like that.
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