Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Around ninety minutes into Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the teenager seated in front of me fell asleep. I’m getting to an age now where you might expect this to be one of those “kids these days” anecdotes, but with Kingdom I couldn’t help feeling like maybe this kid had a point. You won’t find too many moviegoers who love the Apes films quite like I do – one of them is even on my Personal Canon list – but after ten films I’m starting to feel like enough is enough.
 
Three hundred years after the time of Caesar, Noa (Owen Teague) sets off to rescue his clan of chimpanzees from the militaristic Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) when he discovers that he is being followed by a human woman (Freya Allan). On the advice of the spiritual orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), Noa allows the woman to travel with him to Proximus’s kingdom, where the battle for Caesar’s legacy will be fought.
 
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the tenth or fourth film in the franchise, depending on how you count, with another two to five being teased/threatened. When I went back and reviewed the original Apes films a few years ago, the thing that struck me was how the series never idled in place, continually reinventing itself from sci-fi fable to fish-out-of-water comedy to race war allegory. The Andy Serkis trilogy from the last decade pushed the envelope of digital technology while finding a new storytelling corner, and even Tim Burton’s swing-and-a-miss was at least cosmetically compelling. With Kingdom, though, the franchise appears to have run out of things to say; its protagonist looks almost identical to Caesar, the premise seems cribbed from previous episodes, and the film is littered with callbacks while dangling morsels for future installments.
 
Case in point, there’s a moment late in the film – and this is not quite a spoiler – in which one of the apes leafs through the pages of a children’s book and makes a startling discovery about the past relationship between man and ape. It ought, we assume, to recolor the dynamic between the film’s simian and human protagonists, yet the film’s finale punts that work of narrative dot-connecting downfield for the probable sequel. Meanwhile, another ape in the same room picks up a baby doll, which cries “Mama” in precisely the same audio track used in the 1968 original film. When Charlton Heston picked up the doll, it managed to warp the entire plot around its gravity; when an ape picks up this doll, it’s meaningless bait on the fishing line of nostalgia. (Or are we meant to believe that this cliffside setting in southern California somehow becomes the New York-adjacent cave where Heston finds the doll?)
 
It’s as if director Wes Ball can be felt reaching through the screen imploring us, “Don’t you remember? Didn’t you like this last time?” Equally striking are the moments when composer John Paesano invokes Jerry Goldsmith’s original score. One cue, airlifted from the first film’s hunting sequence, is a clear one-to-one analogy; when apes hunt humans, evidently they listen to this sonorous horn music. Later, however, Paesano borrows another track from Goldsmith (which I’ll confess, I really recognized because it’s the one looped on the disc menus for the Blu-Ray set). Cribbing Goldsmith, Paesano invokes the same strange mystery of Doctor Zaius’s Forbidden Zone; at the same time, Ball stages the trek to wander past orphic scarecrows without reflecting on their mysteries. Indeed, without Heston’s puzzled narration ringing in my ears, I might not have known these were scarecrows at all.
 
All of this is to say that the movie might be supremely distracting for diehard fans, because the film itself is entirely underwhelming and, dare I say it, more than a little boring. After four movies of this reboot franchise, the razzle-dazzle of motion capture has worn off, and everything looks fine enough. I did find myself asking, in the moments when apes play falconer, whether the birds were real, and extended sequences of soggy monkeys made me recognize that animated water physics haven’t ever really surpassed the mastery of, say, the moment in Pixar’s Brave when Merida’s hair gets wet. (Indeed, Kingdom seems a step backwards in that respect.) But the rival ape factions, the peaceable overgrown vistas, the warmongering gorillas, the humans who know more than they’re letting on... we’ve been telling these stories for fifty years and have already plumbed these depths. And in 300 years, ape language hasn’t progressed beyond broken English? Maurice Evans, eat your heart out. Again, these are minor details that caught my eye because the film at large wasn’t holding my attention.
 
There are ideas in Kingdom that might be worth exploring, but it takes entirely too long to encounter them. The antagonist Proximus Caesar isn’t seen until more than halfway through the film (about the time that the young man in Row K checked out), and the glimpses we get of his reign suggest a more fascinating movie we didn’t get to see. Ditto for William H. Macy, who (in spite of a mildly cartoonish performance) poses a unique moral quandary about human collusion with their ape overlords. Yet Kingdom is overlong and baggy in other less interesting places; while I was intrigued by Raka as the last of the Caesar loyalists (sympathizing, perhaps, with a fellow redhead), the film is much less absorbed with him, focusing instead on Noa, a protagonist as white-bread as anything found in populist young adult literature – fitting, then, for the director who brought us three Maze Runner pictures.
 
Kingdom ends with the audacious promise that there’s so much more to discover, that this film’s MacGuffin was but a plot device to empower subsequent installments in a budding trilogy: to which I call a resounding and unequivocal “Phooey!” (In truth, the word I actually muttered as the credits rolled was a little more unprintable.) Imagine if Star Wars had ended with the discovery that R2-D2 carried plans to destroy the Death Star; picture a Maltese Falcon that concluded with Humphrey Bogart breaking open the bird, only to find a map to the real falcon. Such is the mindset that leads a franchise to declare, after ten movies, that the story is only just beginning. The original Apes pentalogy never knew if another film was coming, so each movie stood on its own, told its own story, and respected its own internal logic while building architecturally on what came before, not after. As for me, I have long since grown tired of franchise teases and narrative bucks being passed; I have lost patience with films that take my repeat attendance for granted. Blessed are the moviegoing meek, for they will inherit more of the same; blessed are the poor in creative spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence/action.” Directed by Wes Ball. Written by Josh Friedman. Starring Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, and William H. Macy.

April of the Apes: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Even if it weren’t the end of a franchise, Battle for the Planet of the Apes would be a strange beast. It’s a post-apocalyptic fable that seeks both to foreshadow an apocalypse to come and to assure the audience that the future is brighter than we think. That tension, between the planet of the apes to come and the planet the apes hope to create, gets brushed away in favor of a shoot-’em-up finale against uninspiring adversaries.

Battle picks up after the talking chimpanzee Caesar (Roddy McDowall) has successfully led apes to revolt against humankind, which has largely destroyed itself in an ensuing nuclear war. In search of guidance, Caesar follows the human MacDonald (Austin Stoker) and the orangutan philosopher Virgil (Paul Williams) into the ruins of the Forbidden City, where a recording of his parents exists. While the gorilla General Aldo (Claude Akins) foments unrest in Caesar’s absence, the ape king and his allies discover a band of irradiated humans living underground, led by Caesar’s old nemesis Kolp (Severn Darden).

 

I’ve said throughout this “April of the Apes” (and I hate to belabor the point) that the franchise is supposed to be a closed-loop time travel story, but Battle seems to hope that this inevitability won’t be the case. Virgil opines that the apes are blind travelers down a timestream with many paths, with no guarantee that the future will repeat itself this time around. Similarly, a framing sequence involving the Lawgiver (played by John Huston, who is quite plainly slumming it) rejects the ape supremacy of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, positing instead a utopia in which the children of man and ape may commune in peace. Yet despite the film’s trajectory toward a happy ending – and not the dystopia Dr. Zaius invoked – Battle (and by extension the entire franchise) ends with a statue of Caesar, weeping. Is the future written, or can we change our destiny? The film isn’t saying, yet it hopes to have it both ways.

 

It might seem unfair to expect this franchise to take a stance on weighty philosophical issues, but let’s not forget Rod Serling was at the helm of the first (and still best) film. This sort of sci-fi fable was exactly in his wheelhouse, and I can’t help but feel Serling would have embraced the dysfunction of dystopia, discomfiting though it might have been for audiences. Indeed, Battle is practically a cop-out in the name of happily-ever-after, still attempting nonetheless to sneak a bite of its dystopian cake. Battle is confused about what it wants to be, beyond being an excuse to trot out those impressive simian special effects one last time.

 

Make no mistake, those effects still hold up (though some of the ape voices seem more muffled this time around; perhaps the bean-counters skimped on the ADR sessions). McDowall continues to do masterful work under all those prosthetics, twitching and stooping his way to a very engaging protagonist. As Virgil, the apparent antecedent to Dr. Zaius, Paul Williams is fascinating, proving that vocal color is one of the keys to a good ape performance; fans of the blog may recall his impeccable turn as The Penguin on Batman: The Animated Series, and his film debut here is just as fun listening as his fowl fiendish felon. And as the film’s ape antagonist, Claude Akins is suitably gruff in the role of General Aldo, reminiscent of General Ursus from Beneath the Planet of the Apes but with a more revolutionary bent that makes him a fitting adversary for Caesar. The film’s chilling finale, in which the apes discover the violation of their central tenet – “ape shall never kill ape” – is grounds enough for an impressive franchise finale, with the assembled apes murmuring, “Ape has killed ape, ape has killed ape” over and over.

 

If the film had only focused on Aldo, it would have made for a very fascinating examination of ape society on the cusp of change. Aldo’s militant anti-human position puts him at compelling loggerheads with Caesar, and the political/military jousting therein is among the film’s best features. However, the film spends too much time on the human villains, who are creatively lifeless and without motivation beyond run-of-the-mill mustache twirling. As excited as a continuity wonk like myself ought to be at seeing Kolp, of all characters, return, Severn Darden’s performance isn’t exactly animated, and it’s very hard to be threatened by a militia that rides into battle in a dirty school bus. Mad Max: Fury Road, this isn’t. (But how much better might that George Miller film have been if Tom Hardy played an ape? Sound off in the comments: what movies would improve if they starred apes?)

 

Just about the only good reason to include the underground humans comes in the film’s extended edition. Where the unrated cut of Conquest completely changed that film’s ending – and, I’d argue, the tenor of the entire franchise – the extended cut of Battle only embellishes here and there, but it does close the loop on one of the most baffling elements of the Apes series. You may recall the psychic bomb-worshipping mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Battle explains how that death cult came to be, introducing the first Mendez (Beneath featured Mendez XXVI). This restored scene provides little more than a frisson of continuity, but I suppose it’s enough to justify this subplot’s existence. I’ve never felt that the mutants fit into the Apes cosmology, but Battle makes an effort to integrate them more deliberately, tying them more organically into the rise of the apes.

 

Despite concluding on a battlefield, Battle is more than a bit boring. Its visual spectacle is a bit of a letdown after the more visceral ape riot of Conquest, and its plot never quite goes anywhere. For all the magnificent ape characters in the film, it’s not unwatchable, but nor would I say it’s highly rewatchable. It is, I might argue, the Godfather III of the series, essential only as an epilogue after the franchise has long since said its piece. Perhaps it is better to remember Caesar for his thousand-yard stare, gazing over the ape insurgence of Conquest, much like Michael Corleone watching Lake Tahoe eddy before him when all his enemies are defeated; apes and mobsters alike do not age well. Put another way, this is a Battle that need not have been fought, and it is hard to imagine anyone winning.

 

Battle for the Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Written by Paul Dehn, John William Corrington, and Joyce Hooper Corrington. Starring Roddy McDowall, Claude Akins, Natalie Trundy, Severn Darden, Lew Ayres, Paul Williams, and John Huston.

April of the Apes: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

When it comes to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes – the fourth installment in the simian time-travel franchise – I can’t quite say whether I would have preferred the title to be Panic on the Planet of the Apes or Riot for the Planet of the Apes. (The conquest, you see, happens largely off-screen, after this movie ends.) It’s certainly the most violent of the Apes films, particularly in the unrated version that found its way onto Blu-Ray, and at times it seems as though the violence is merely an end in itself. But for all its low-budget sturm und brutish allegorical drang, Conquest is a compelling installment in a perennially strange series.

Twenty years after his parents arrived on earth, the talking chimpanzee Caesar (Roddy McDowall) has been hiding from the government under the protection of circus owner Armando (Ricardo Montalbán). While the rest of the world domesticates apes to replace the dogs and cats that perished in a global pandemic, Caesar becomes the unlikely hero of a revolution after his secret is uncovered by the forces of the sinister Governor Breck (Don Murray).

 

Conquest is somewhat unique among the Apes films in that it exists in two different versions: there’s the 1972 theatrical release and the more recent (and, as far as I can tell, fan-preferred) unrated version that debuted on Blu-Ray circa 2009. While the differences are largely negligible, with the unrated version featuring more graphic and startling shots of blood and violence, the ending is bracingly different. I’ll throw up a spoiler warning, although I wonder whether it’s possible to spoil a closed-loop time travel story: in the theatrical release, Caesar heeds his better angels and talks his fellow apes out of violence, while in the unrated version, Caesar embraces the use of force and encourages the gorillas to execute Governor Breck.

 

When I first saw Conquest ages ago, it was the theatrical version, but having watched the unrated cut for “April of the Apes,” I can’t imagine going back. The darker, more fatalistic ending gives Roddy McDowall the centerpiece he deserves; in a dramatic monologue that is equal parts Shylock and Richard III, McDowall mouths a somber and grim portrait of humanity, invoking the darkest chapters of American history while positing himself as a Darwinian emperor ape. In this closing soliloquy, dark and chilling enough to elevate the entire film, McDowall’s Caesar reminded me very much of another science-fiction fable of revolt – HBO’s Westworld. And like the violent delights of the android theme park, the precarious peace of Conquest’s earth, Caesar insists, would have violent and inevitable ends. (One also cannot ignore the unanticipated lasting potency of the film’s civil rights metaphor, all the more heated in 2021, when Caesar’s essential thesis revolves around which lives matter.)

 

While McDowall is doing simian Shakespeare, the rest of the film is bogged down by cheap effects and on-the-nose metaphors. The first two Apes films featured an incredible prosthetics technique by John Chambers, but by the time we get to Conquest, we’re lucky if more than two apes at once are sporting that innovative makeup effect; instead, the bulk of the cast is sadly restricted to low-budget pullover masks, at once inexpressive and unconvincing. It’s a plus for Caesar, who stands out all the more, but it is overall to the film’s detriment, especially since the film does not invest much time in ape characters like Natalie Trundy’s Lisa (who, in the theatrical version, masters the power of speech in time to soften Caesar’s hardened heart).

 

Similarly, the villains of the film are thoroughly undercooked, evil for the sake of being evil without much in the way of motivation or character development. Doubtless the makers of the Andy Serkis mo-cap trilogy took note, as this was something the Serkis films greatly improved upon, particularly with Woody Harrelson’s unsettling Colonel in War for the Planet of the Apes. In Conquest, though, the antagonists are little more than Nazi stormtroopers, callously engaging in barbaric modes of torture without the self-awareness to realize that their shiny black boots and crisp black clothing telegraph their inherent villainy to the world. There’s a shining moment of insight when MacDonald (Hari Rhodes) chooses a side and turns against the other humans, but the film bludgeons the point home when MacDonald and Caesar repeatedly call attention to the fact that the black MacDonald is “a descendant of slaves.”

 

So much of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes isn’t subtle, though perhaps that’s asking too much of a franchise that involved Rod Serling only once. Still, like Escape from the Planet of the Apes, there is something of The Twilight Zone in Conquest, particularly in the darker unrated cut. There is a tragic sense of inevitability as the series winds down; in attempting to avert the planet of the apes, the human slavers end up creating it. There can be no peace through subjugation, the film warns, yet it is a lesson that Caesar seems not to have learned. Like Ben Affleck’s Batman, Caesar is blinded by his rage and his pain – yet the film is stronger and more chilling without the theatrical cut’s moralizing (and ultimately inert) denouement. While it’s very short and subsumes substance for spectacle, one can’t help but be won over by Conquest’s potent go-for-the-jugular approach – but none of it would work if it weren’t for Roddy McDowall treating this sci-fi hokum like Elizabethan tragedy.

 

Put another way, this might not be how we imagined the birth of the planet of the apes (nor does it quite align with the versions we heard from Cornelius or Dr. Zaius), but in the moments when it stays out of its own way Conquest is very nearly better than a fourth film with no budget has any right to be.

 

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG. Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Written by Paul Dehn. Starring Roddy McDowall, Don Murray, Natalie Trundy, Severn Darden, Hari Rhodes, and Ricardo Montalbán.

April of the Apes: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

After a disappointing outing that dared to venture Beneath the Planet of the Apes – to say nothing of the sequel-proof ending to that film – the Apes franchise manages to strike silver, if not outright gold, with Escape from the Planet of the Apes. It might be the second-best of the franchise, at once advancing the narrative while self-reflexively examining its central conceits about human nature and destiny.

When Colonel Taylor’s spaceship washes up in 1973, the world is stunned to see three apes emerge from the craft. Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter), and Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo) convince the astonished Dr. Lewis Dixon (Bradford Dillman) that they come from the distant future, but Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) fears that the apes have come to bring about that same dystopian future. Dr. Hasslein’s theories are all the more troubling given the ticking clock of Zira’s pregnancy. Will her baby be the future of man’s relation to ape, or will that infant ape bring about the ruin of human civilization?

 

Make no mistake, Escape from the Planet of the Apes is bonkers. Three talking apes step out of a spacecraft and into a groovy fish-out-of-water farce with all of the unmistakable window dressing of the 1970s. Despite Taylor’s perpetual disbelief in the original film, the rest of the world seems to take to the apes rather well, all things considered. This angle allows the film to focus less on the fact of the apes than on their significance; as humanity oohs and ahhs over the ooh-ooh ahh-ahh crowd, we get to see humanity’s absurdity reflected back at them. Cornelius observes a human boxing match and its attendant throng of exuberant spectators. “Beastly!” he murmurs to himself.

 

The real fun of Escape is watching Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter perfect their ape schtick, with the film’s full attention this time. (As Dr. Milo, Sal Mineo’s performance is punishingly brief, and it’s a frustrating tease to read production notes that describe him as the ape Leonardo da Vinci.) As a pair, the two are surprisingly touching, doting and romantic as the best screen couples can be. Despite the unusual make-up effects, these performers are so graceful and deft that one almost forgets we’re not watching talented chimpanzees at play. Indeed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Cornelius could have had a long career appearing as, say, Hamlet or Willy Loman, with Zira doing the talk show circuit. The franchise’s greatest strength remains, then, the ability of its very talented ape performers to sell a ludicrous concept with limited makeup effects. (The Serkis trilogy, meanwhile, similarly succeeded best when it allowed us to forget that those apes were the product of pixels and computer code.)

 

Though Rod Serling had nothing to do with this film, you can’t help but feel his brand of cynical allegory at work. I’m reminded especially of an episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Gift,” in which a messianic alien is met with fear and hostility until the humans kill him and destroy the gift he brings – not black magic or a dangerous weapon, but a cure for cancer. In much the same way, our pacifist apes are greeted with suspicion from the moment of their arrival. It’s great fun to watch Zira in particular flip the script on the scientists who suppose her to be mute and mindless, while the humans never quite realize they are the butt of Cornelius’s droll observations. In this satirical vein, as in the montage where human fashion has never looked more preposterous than on a chimp, Escape strikes all the right notes when it comes to dark humor. 

 

Escape is also a grimly successful satire when it comes to the subject of American politics and the corrupting influence of power. On the one hand, you have William Windom as a willfully ineffectual President, slave to an upcoming election and his own refusal to take a stance on the ape issue. He delegates his rational mind to the will of a committee, agreeing to be their puppet in exchange for taking no responsibility. (He’s almost a Randian caricature of a politician, a surprising polar opposite to contemporary portrayals of then-sitting President Richard Nixon.) His counterpart Dr. Hasslein, who takes advantage of his committee seat to wield undue power in the Oval Office. Though Braeden reportedly did not care for this role, dubbing it stereotypical, Hasslein is the classic science-fiction archetype of a power-hungry philosopher, dictating military policy in judging the fate of the apes. 

 

In fact, though Escape is a suitable title given the film’s opening, Fate of the Planet of the Apes might have been equally apt. While the apes are attempting to escape the fate of their planet, the humans are likewise afraid that their fate will be that of the apes. Similarly, the film poses the question of whether this is a closed-loop time travel story, whether the future can be changed, or whether – as Ricardo Montalbán postulates in a memorable cameo – all this is in fact decided by the will of God. It’s heady stuff, the kind of intense sci-fi subject matter that made the original film such a watchable experience. Though dolled up in the trappings of the 1970s – and make no mistake, this film lacks only a disco dance montage – Escape is a worthy successor to the franchise, and it’s intriguing for once to see an Apes film with a clear-cut tease for a sequel. Who knew the word “mama” could be so potent?

 

Escape from the Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Don Taylor. Written by Paul Dehn. Starring Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Natalie Trundy, Eric Braeden, Sal Mineo, and Ricardo Montalbán.

April of the Apes: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

I mentioned last week that Planet of the Apes felt like a spiritual successor to the Universal Classic Monsters, with prodigious makeup effects and a weighty morality fable. Imagine my surprise, then, to cue up Beneath the Planet of the Apes and find the film begins with a five-minute recap, reairing the least forgettable moment of the original film – the ending. The recap reel was a feature in too many of the Universal Monsters features to count, and that feeling of déjà vu persists into the film itself, which repeats so much of what we have already seen; as Pink Floyd once said, isn’t this where we came in?

Beneath the Planet of the Apes picks up moments after Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Linda Harrison) make their fateful discovery in the Forbidden Zone. Just as Taylor disappears, a second spacecraft lands, bringing astronaut Brent (James Franciscus) to the planet of the apes. While Brent sets off in search of Taylor, aided by the chimpanzee scientists Cornelius and Zira (David Watson, Kim Hunter), Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) and General Ursus (James Gregory) mount an expedition into the Forbidden Zone in search of food. What they find in the Forbidden Zone, though, is worse than starvation – a horrible reminder of what created this planet in the first place.

 

Devising a sequel to Planet of the Apes would have been an unwelcome challenge for nearly anyone. Rod Serling and original novelist Pierre Boulle both took a stab at it, their pitches ultimately rejected by the studio. (Serling made several pitches, some involving a second crew of astronauts and a second time/space voyage for Taylor, while Boulle wrote a screenplay called Planet of the Men, in which Taylor led an uprising of humans against the apes.) Equally challenging was Charlton Heston’s disinterest in doing a sequel and the story limitations he required for his participation (prefiguring, in a way, Harrison Ford’s love/hate relationship with reprising his role as Han Solo on three separate occasions). One senses, then, the herculean task of extending the Ape Saga, and the forces who bring us Beneath do not appear to have risen to the undertaking.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was, after the Star Wars films, among the first sequels I ever saw, and it taught me a valuable lesson – sequels are almost never as good as the original. (More shared territory, it seems, from Monster March.) I said last week that there was nothing about Planet of the Apes that demanded a sequel, especially given the film’s game-changer ending that makes the final statement on the planet. Planet of the Apes was a totality, tied in a bow by its Rod Serling ending; it had much in common with an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, and I can think of very few Twilight Zone episodes that would have been much improved by a sequel.

 

Still, there was room to grow. There was the looming question of what would happen to Zira and Cornelius once Dr. Zaius returned to Ape City, though disappointingly the film never quite explores that. Instead, it’s monkey business as usual, and there’s no mention of the trio’s experience in the Forbidden Zone (which is, perhaps, how Dr. Zaius would want things, anyway). Unfortunately for Beneath, Zira and Cornelius are shunted to the side rather quickly. With McDowall away directing his own film, the brief recasting of Cornelius is distracting, especially given the inclusion of recap footage featuring McDowall, and David Watson, though competent, lacks the vocal color McDowall brought to Cornelius. However, we welcome seeing Zira, who becomes a kind of franchise den mother, but she’s given nothing much to do besides perform cursory assistance to newcomer Brent.

 

When it comes to the subject of Brent, he is lamentably little more than a bargain basement version of Taylor – a fair-haired bearded human who comes from the stars and is mystified by the planet he’s discovered. After losing his crew, he meets up with Nova, journeys to Ape City, befriends our chimpanzee scientists, and makes his way into the Forbidden Zone, where he learns the dark secret of the planet of the apes. It reads familiar because it is familiar: it is exactly the journey Taylor undergoes in Planet of the Apes, but James Franciscus lacks the screen presence of Charlton Heston, to say nothing of how unengaging it is to see a new protagonist tread the same boards one more time.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not exactly a remake, though, for it adds something substantially new to the franchise. I’m not speaking merely of the gorilla General Ursus, who is an intriguing foil for Dr. Zaius and for the humans (“The only good human,” he growls, “is a dead human!”). Ursus is good hammy fun, and I do wish we’d seen more of him in the franchise beyond this one film. But I’m speaking particularly of the answer to the question posited by the film’s title – what really is beneath the planet of the apes? The answer is a gang of mutated humans with psychic powers, grotesque scarring, and a church of death which worships the last atomic bomb in existence. I have never liked these characters, and I still feel they’re out of place in this franchise. For one, the morality fable is even more on the nose with their inclusion; yes, we know atomic weaponry is no good, very bad, don’t do. This allegorical unsubtlety, coupled with the low-budget sci-fi makeup and set decorations, would seem to belong more properly to something like the original Star Trek series. Moreover, every moment we spend with the mutants is a moment we don’t get to spend with the apes, and that’s a criminal offense in my book. 

 

Planet of the Apes is ultimately a franchise that zags when you think it will zig – not because the story merits a zag but often because the zag is more cost-effective and will extend the life of the franchise into a strange new direction. I promised not to spoil the ending of the first Planet, and I certainly won’t give away the ending to Beneath, which almost feels like a sporting challenge to the writers of any possible third film. “Let’s see you get out of this one!” scripter Paul Dehn seems to say. It’s an anti-cliffhanger from which there seems to be no escape, and yet a scant year later, we would see exactly that – an Escape from the Planet of the Apes, scavenged from the literal detritus of the preceding two films.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Ted Post. Written by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams. Starring James Franciscus, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison, James Gregory, David Watson, and Charlton Heston.

April of the Apes: Planet of the Apes (1968)

I can’t believe it took me five years and a Blu-Ray box set to remember that Planet of the Apes is one of my all-time favorite movies. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spending more time of late with my Cinema King crown atop my regal head, but when I assembled The Personal Canon in 2016, I left Apes off the list. A year later, I reviewed War for the Planet of the Apes, the third/final in the Andy Serkis trilogy, but still the original Apes skipped my mind. Well, no more – one of the reasons we’re doing “April of the Apes” is to remind me how much I love Planet of the Apes.

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.)

 

Of course, no Planet would be complete without its apes, and even though the make-up lacks the technical precision of the 2001 remake or the photorealism of the Serkis trilogy’s CGI effects, there is something very charming about the ape prosthetics as designed by John Chambers. Having just spent a month going through the Universal Classic Monsters franchise and all those lurid make-up effects, jumping into Planet of the Apes almost feels natural. Chambers creates an illusion that never looks phony – hokey, perhaps, compared to its successors, but the film proceeds with such level-headed sincerity that there’s scarcely a chance to question the simian verisimilitude.

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.

 

Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling. Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle. Starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

In War of the Planet of the Apes, the special effects are so good that even the characters themselves have to comment on them. “Look at your eyes,” Woody Harrelson’s Colonel says from behind polished sunglasses to the ape leader Caesar; “Almost human.” Where most films go for either exceptional storytelling or digital animation of the first order, War for the Planet of the Apes manages to juggle both.

Caesar (Serkis) and his ape clan are recovering from the attack of the humans in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes when The Colonel (Harrelson) arrives with his sights on killing Caesar to save the planet from the apes. Filled with bloodlust at the sneak attack, Caesar sends his apes away and pursues The Colonel in search of vengeance.

As the third film (whether it’s the last in the franchise seems to be a subject of some debate, though franchises never really die these days), War does seem to be the best of the bunch in terms of narrative craft and technical dexterity. The storytelling in the first half of the film recalls Wall-E, with long nonverbal sequences that nevertheless advance the story and the characterization. Of course, this is to say nothing of the success of the computer animation itself, which brings the apes to life in a way that is frankly astonishing. While there might be some cognitive dissonance in knowing that these are rendered by computer, there are disproportionately more moments where that edifice fades altogether, and the simian characters are as human as the ones played by live actors. One must acknowledge, however, the human performers like Harrelson, who do equally pivotal work in performing opposite characters that are not actually there, going a long way to selling the conceit to the audience.

Where the first two films had gone for an epic scope, showing the state of the world degenerating toward the dystopia glimpsed in the 1968 original film, War does well to restrict itself to a singularly personal narrative. Early in the film, Caesar strikes off on his own, allowing the film to breathe without the burden of cross-cutting between plotlines. And while some filmgoers might find these scenes unpleasantly protracted, there’s a certain delight in seeing the film play out at its own pace, particularly as it toys with themes left dangling from the last film. Indeed, I greatly appreciated the way this film wrestles with the violent resolution to the Koba plotline, which rightly continues to haunt Caesar. It’s that sort of attention to detail that makes this film seem more thoughtful; I recall, for example, thinking that Dawn had very little connective tissue to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but this one feels properly of a piece with its predecessors, revisiting both Koba from Dawn and the simian flu from Rise.

Gratefully, however, this film diverges from its predecessors by dint of its utopian vision. Rather than continue to amble toward the dystopia of the Charlton Heston original, War instead imagines a happier ending for the shifting paradigm of men and apes. The Colonel’s fear, that men will become cattle on a planet of apes, was seen in 1968, with Heston’s ability to speak alarming his ape captors, but these apes are different; the particularly affective scenes between orangutan Maurice (named for Maurice Evans, he of Dr. Zaius fame) and the mute human girl Nova (get it?) go a long way to imagining a better world, particularly when contrasted with the internecine and self-perpetuating violence the humans enact on the apes and on themselves.

If there is a fourth film, fair enough, though it’ll take a bit of thread-pulling to get us closer to the 1968 Planet of the Apes. If this is the last, however, it’s a fitting conclusion to the trilogy, framing Caesar as part Noah, part Moses, surviving a great flood and leading his people closer to a promised land. And if we get a spin-off, can it please be the story of Bad Ape, the scene-stealing simian?

War for the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, thematic elements, and some disturbing images.” Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Mark Bomback and Matt Reeves. Starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, and Terry Notary.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is now the eighth “Apes film,” the second film in the third franchise since 1968.  I list off the pedigree because I am feeling a slight sense of ape fatigue.  Though the film is tracking in the low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, my take on it is a little less enthusiastic – there’s nothing the film does incorrectly, but I do have a distinct sense of having seen all this before.

A decade after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, apes and humans live in isolation from each other.  The apes, led by Caesar (motion-captured by Andy Serkis), want to live in peace in a semi-civilized state; the humans, led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), want to reclaim a hydroelectric dam in the middle of ape territory.  While Malcolm (Jason Clarke) tries to broker a peace with the apes, Caesar faces a dissenting faction from within, led by his advisor Koba.

Rather than go toward the fantastical apocalypses provided by the Heston and Burton eras, Dawn continues in the realistic vein of its predecessor, with a marked focus on the verisimilitude of the special effects.  Assessing solely these visual effects, Dawn is a triumph; between the movements and the digitized facial expressions, it’s heroically easy to forget that you’re not watching real monkeys.  There’s rumbling about Serkis being up for an Oscar for his lead performance – well, I’m not sure about that, mostly because it’s hard for me to tell what’s Serkis and what’s an animator, but I do think he’s courting a well-deserved “Special Technical Achievement” award.

There’s a lot of other moving pieces in the film that are also successful, though they’re far outshined by the technical fakery.  Oldman and Clarke are compelling enough, though Oldman’s role is roughly equivalent to Bryan Cranston’s in Godzilla – he’s there for a plot mechanism, and you’ll probably leave the theater itching for more screen time from an actor as talented as he is.  But the slightly undercooked quality of the human characters really emphasizes the fact that this is first and foremost the primates’ show.

When it comes to the story, though, I’m not convinced that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is particularly visionary.  It is certainly more subtle than Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (an obvious inspiration) in that it isn’t reductionist in its approach to protagonist/antagonist relationships.  But once it does establish Koba and Dreyfus as antagonists of a sort, the film proceeds in a fairly predictable manner.  What ultimately emerges is a very unsurprising allegory about cooperation in spite of differences, open-mindedness on the subject of diversity.  Forgive me for saying, I’ve seen this movie several times already.

With a very different movie, I’d have spent a long time on the matter of the familiar plot, but in the case of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes this is less a misstep and more of a non-step.  The filmmakers don’t strike any false notes here; rather, the melody is quite familiar (no pun intended, though Michael Giacchino’s score does recall early Apes soundtracks).  The visual effects are the standout feature – the apes are strikingly rendered, the sequences in which they attack are appropriately terrifying, and the internecine struggles feel astoundingly human.  It’s not the second coming of science fiction, but it is a well-told iteration of a classic tale.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief strong language.”  There is some amount of blood seen, mostly during fights between apes.  Fight scenes between humans and apes proceed with more gunfire but with less blood; some of the scenes of attacking apes may be frightening for younger viewers.  The film also includes one F-bomb and several scatological S-bombs.

Pop back here on Thursday when The Cinema King tackles Transformers: Age of Extinction!