So two weeks ago, if you’ll recall, I walked you through a legitimate sci-fi classic called Planet of the Apes, its first totally bonkers sequel (yes, it was an Apes movie with upside-down crucifixions), and its second kinda stupid sequel (the villain was preoccupied with a distant, distant future). To recap what we have learned: Apes will come to replace man by 3955 (or perhaps 3978). The world will end that same year when Charlton Heston uses a millennia-old bomb to blow up the planet. We know there’s a stable time hole somewhere above Earth, and it can be passed through in both directions. And, thanks to a speech made by Dr. Cornelius, we know that apes will come to speech and dominance in the next 500 years or so. The chronology of the films was already kind of dodgy, and we’re about to really mess things up in a few films that take place in the near-future. Strap in, my lovelies. We’re going to complete our polite and baffled stroll through these monkey movies, even if it kills us. Welcome back to the latest in The Series Project here on CraveOnline.
The fourth film in the Planet of the Apes series is dark and way too serious. Let’s take a look at…
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972)
Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
J. Lee Thompson had previously directed Cape Fear and The Guns of Navarone. This guy knows his action. Odd, then, that this film should seem so haphazard.
So we are now in the future. It is 1991. A plague has wiped out all the world’s cats and dogs, and apes (gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees) have been produced by the score to replace our beloved housepets. Okay, I’m going to address this right away. I can maybe see small docile chimps as house pets (I’ll mention Michael Jackson’s chimp Bubbles), but who, upon the loss of their golden retriever, would think to get a gorilla? Apes are large and unwieldy creatures. Sure, they’re much smarter than cats and dogs, but, from what I understand, require a heck of a lot more care and training. Now I can picture a future where apes have become such common pets that a care system, pet supply stores, and chimp clothing has been widely distributed amongst the people, but it has been less than 20 years since the events of the last film. I don’t think such a system could really be implemented.
What’s more, apes are not merely pets, but are now being trained to do menial, minimum-wage tasks. They mop floors, make beds, mix drinks, wait tables…
Wait. What? What sane society would employ an ape workforce? Apes are not beasts of burden. They’re primates. I should point out here that all the apes in this movie are actually human actors in ape suits, so they look like the apes from all the previous films. The sociological parallel is, of course, plainly obvious: The apes represent an oppressed racial minority, and the film is rife with slavery imagery. Apes are black people. Plain and simple. This world is also seeing a kind of labor crisis. Many humans are protesting the rise of an ape workforce, and they resent that apes are keeping them out of a job. The better, more intelligent apes are auctioned off to wealthy families, and lesser-trained apes are given janitorial tasks. There are several scenes of picket lines.
The film was shot in the then-brand-new Century City office complex in southern California. Most of the original complex is still standing, and you’ll find that it does look clean, white and kind of futuristic. L.A. natives will have a grand time trying to spot the actual locations in the movie, and may even make the trek to see them. Any Apes fan should make this a vacation destination.
Our story kicks off with Armando (still Ricardo Montalban) still secretly hiding Cornelius and Zira’s now-adult chimp son. The son, named Milo after Sal Mineo’s character from the third film, is also played by Roddy McDowall. Milo looks a lot like Dr. Cornelius, but is swarthier and more mean-spirited. All apes are essentially slaves, and have to wear special jumpsuits. Milo has been instructed never to speak in front of people, as he is still wanted by the same administration that would have killed him in the third film (this time, the government is represented by prolific Tony-winning actor John Randolph). Again I have to wonder, why are people concerned with the centuries-hence legacy of this one chimp? The world won’t end until the mid-3900s, and apes aren’t scheduled to become intelligent for another 488 years or so. I think we’re kind of in the clear here. And now that they know about a nuclear war, and they’ve seen intelligent apes from the future, don’t you think world leaders would be a little more careful about where they put their nukes?
Nothing doing, Milo is still under suspicion, and it’s early in the film when Armando is taken into custody and interrogated about the possible whereabouts of his potentially talking chimp son. Armando, just before his arrest, hides Milo in the work force, and Milo, silent all the while, sees first-hand – and for the first time – the inside workings of the ape training facilities. Apes need to become used to fire if they’re going to be cooking meals, so humans put them in a room and fire flame-throwers at them. Milo, being intelligent and civilized, it scoped out by his new human masters, and is auctioned for a high price. Milo also begins to form a kind of kinship with his animal brothers, sharing bananas with them, and teaching them to be polite. He becomes especially militant when he learns that Armando was killed by other humans. Eventually, too, the very government agent that’s looking for Milo buys him as a servant. Milo is asked to open a book and select a name. Milo opens a Bible and selects “Caesar” as his name.
Let us now render unto to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Caesar breaks out of his home every night, and makes his way back to the ape training facility to train the apes how to steal from their masters (guns and weapons mostly), and how to screw things up in the kitchen (he trains one ape how to replace cooking oil with kerosene). Caesar feels that if apes become incompetent enough at home, then they’ll be shipped back to the ape training facility to be re-conditioned. Once they are there, they can mobilize, and stage an ape uprising. It’s in Caesar’s scheme where the true weakness of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes begins to show: the film assumes we have much too much sympathy for the apes. It was easy to sympathize with the apes in the last film, as they were intelligent creatures whom we had grown to know over the course of three movies. In this one, even though the apes are played by human actors, we know that they are not intelligent. They are animals. Caesar’s plan is to sort of force them into human intelligence by force of will over the course of a few weeks. It doesn’t work that way. I, for one, felt a certain anarchy in training an ape how to start fires. Indeed, were it not for the serious music and dialogue, this film might play as a comedy.
Caesar also takes a girlfriend in the form of another chimp. Does that count as bestiality? If a human were thrown back in time and had sex with a protohuman of some kind, say a neanderthal, would that count as bestiality? We’re of the same genus, sure, but we’re not technically the same species. These are important questions to ask.
Anyway, Caesar ends up staging his ape uprising, and the final 30 minutes of the film are devoted to an extended riot scene wherein humans and apes have gunfights and storm various buildings. The film’s tone is dark and dour and dead serious, but the sight of the apes screaming and fighting with people is undeniably campy. Unlike in the first Apes film, this one doesn’t bother to transcend its silly imagery. The film ends, as all the Apes films do, on a staggeringly tragic note, as Caesar, standing on a staircase, the city burning behind him, declares that apes are now going to be man’s superiors, and he fully intends to enslave all of humanity. People and apes look on in horror, shocked at his lack of remorse. Chimps are pacifists, huh? Wasn’t this uprising supposed to happen in a few centuries time?
Conquest of the Planet of the Apesis, despite its darkness and aggression and illogic, kind of the center of the series. What is, after all, the central question behind the Apes movies? How did apes become intelligent, and man dumb? It is the eventual rise of the apes that all the films have been kind of pointing to. Here we finally get to see it. I still much prefer the implication in the first film that apes kind of grew to become intelligent after humanity had wiped themselves out. I like the pleasantly apocalyptic idea of a new ape civilization growing from the ruins of ours. That the humans had dealings – and even started wars, as we’ll see in the fifth film – with intelligent apes, kind of demystifies the series for me.
Well, we have a solid legacy now, and the apes have risen. What of Earth now? Let’s find out in…
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
This was the cheapest of the Apes films, and it kind of shows. The bulk of the film seems to have been shot in a large field in the mountains of California. The story is insular, and the chronology doesn’t make much sense again. Or maybe it does. Let’s see where we are.
The film is told in flashback from the year 2670. The Lawgiver (John Huston, yes, John Huston) is telling ape history to a group of ape and human children. He recounts the first turbulent days of ape and human interaction following the great war. He flashes back to about AD 2002. Between this film and the last one, humans have indeed blown up the Earth. Apes have indeed enslaved humans, although it’s much more a respect thing than a forced labor thing. Humans can speak and work alongside apes, but are deferential to ape laws, and must address apes with respect. Other humans who have survived the war are still living in the ruins of New York, paranoid about radiation. My guess is it’s these guys who will turn into the skinless ghouls from the second film.
Caesar is there, is still played by Roddy McDowall, and seems to be fostering a new philosophy of peace and togetherness. He leads a society of intelligent apes. Apes, it seems, have all become clothes-wearing intelligent beings by this point. Maybe the radiation mutated ape minds and made them smarted. Heck, radiation has done crazier things in the movies. Apes also may not have many laws yet (Caesar is constantly reminding apes of the non-violence rules), implying that the society is new, and they’re working out the kinks.
A human assistant named MacDonald (Austin Stoker) tells Caesar that there may be old film reels of his biological parents somewhere in the ruins of New York. Caesar. MacDonald also implies that Caesar should know about the events of 3978 (’55?) for some reason. Quit obsessing about the end of the world! It’s still too far afield to do anything about it! If you received an accurate prophecy that Earth would be blown up in 2000 years, what would you do? Caesar has less reason to be concerned than even the humans, too, as he has already staged the ape uprising. His society is not in imminent danger. But go to the Forbidden Zone they do, provoking the ire of the humans who live there, and accidentally setting off a chain of events that will eventually lead to a 30-minute climax where the apes and the humans have a violent gun battle.
The gorillas, as we know well by now, are a violent lot, and a certain gorilla named Aldo (Claude Akins) wants to war with the humans. The bulk of the film is devoted to discussions on how to prepare for the inevitable climax, as both sides prepare and hem and haw over the battle. Battle for the Planet of the Apes is kind of dull, and any sort of social rhetoric is totally gone. I guess after you’ve already passed by (in between films, mind you) the big poignant nuclear war that so colored the ending of the first Apes film, there’s nowhere else to go. Aldo also accidentally kills Caesar’s young son Cornelius, violating the first ape commandment, “Ape must never kill ape.” When the truth comes to light, there’s a weird scene where a bunch of apes chant “Ape has killed ape!” for a good solid three minutes.
The only real virtues of these last two Apes movies are their afternoon serial end-of-the-world thrills. Their glorious and trashy reveling in honest-to-goodness apocalypse porn. Sure, they’re silly, the dialogue is goofy, the tone is somber, and the chronology is often fudged, but their sheer audacity earns them a lot of points. One can be forgiven, I think, for loving the campy glory of Conquest and Battle.
There is then an epilogue where they haul John Huston back, and we see him teaching humans and apes alike. Maybe the implication is that the events of the fifth film has altered the way humans and apes interact, that they are truly equals, and that the end of the world is no longer nigh. If that were the case, Battle would be the only film in the series that doesn’t end on a horrifying note. Of course, maybe the implication is that The Lawgiver was incorrect in his historical story, and the events of the fifth film were the result of misinterpretation of historical documents. If that were the case, well, then the ending tone is ambiguous. We know there is an intelligent ape Lawgiver, and that he teaches children. That is all. Sorry about the film, guys.
Roddy McDowall would also play an ape in the short-lived 1974 Planet of the Apes TV series. The series followed two human astronauts lost in the distant future, and took place probably between the first and second movies. It was a one-hour show, and it lasted 14 episodes. If you’ve heard of a 1981 feature film called Back to the Planet of the Apes, then you’ve been duped. Back was a TV miniseries which reedited two episodes of the TV series together. In 1975, there was also an animated Apes series called Return to the Planet of the Apes, and was made by the same studio that put together that 1978 Fantastic Four animated series that no one recalls with clarity. Return lasted for 13 episodes, ending in 1976. Ape fever had, by then, entirely died down, and the Apes movies would take a hiatus for 25 years. It’s likely that the spectacle of 1977’s Star Wars had put the damper on wacky, thoughtful and comparatively low-key films like Apes.
And, wouldn’t you know it, before the remake trend began in earnest, we’ll have…
PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
Directed by: Tim Burton
Non-canonical, and perhaps most closely resembling the fifth film, Tim Burton, the master stylist behind famous films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, decided to make his first semi-serious science fiction film with this remake. The 2001 Planet of the Apes is immensely unpopular today, and is often seen as one of the more misguided remakes in a long Hollywood tradition full of misguided remakes.
I will, however, defend this film to a degree. Tim Burton has said in interviews that he honestly can’t tell the difference between a good script and a bad script. He reads a script, and his mind immediately jumps to impressive design, and how individual scenes may work in themselves. The script for Planet of the Apes (by William Broyles, Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Marc Rosenthal, who wrote Superman IV and Star Trek VI) feels slapdash, and is most likely one of those over-processed modern blockbuster scripts that was co-written by several dozen uncredited writers, studio heads, and other tinkerers. I don’t want to pooh-pooh the system, but I can say for certain that this Apes screenplay didn’t manage to transcend its mandates; it has the stink of studio interference all over it.
Tim Burton, meanwhile (and working kind of in his own creative bubble), rather than trying to make his film feel like any of the previous Apes films (which, I believe, he had not seen all of), chose instead to make a proper modern-day homage to the alien invasion flicks of the late 1950s which he watched on TV as a child. The kinds where white guys with Brylcreamed hair would fly around space in unconvincing metal spacecraft. Burton clearly has an affection for old clunky sci-fi films. He did make Ed Wood after all. In his world the human astronauts are all dressed in white, are all kind of boldly lunkheaded, and the alien world they stumble upon only happens to be populated intelligent apes; in Burton’s version of things, the aliens could have been anything, really, and it would have only changed up the design.
Oh, and that design. Planet of the Apes, I have to openly admit, is the best looking of all the Apes films. The set design, the costumes, the ape makeup on the actors, these are all first rate artistic achievements. The actors all actually look like apes. They were all given movement classes on how to move like apes. The armor, weapons and buildings were all specially designed with ape hands in mind. And this was in 2001, before everything was achieved with CGI, so all the sets and costumes and makeup were practical. Man, is it gorgeous. Hurl whatever insults you like at the story, the film is awesome to behold.
About that story. We start in the near future (I think 2040), where humans have been sending chimps (played by real chimps) into spacecraft in order to examine mysterious spaceholes. Our hero is the none-too-bright Leo Davidson played by Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg is an intense and naturalistic actor, which is, I think, all wrong for the part. Someone like Leo needs a more clunky blowhard quality. Leo sends his chimp Pericles into a spacehole where he vanishes, much to the consternation of his boss. Leo goes in a second pod, and lands on a mysterious distant planet that may be in another dimension or in another time. I’m going to destroy all suspicions here, and point out that this Planet of the Apes is actually not Earth in the distant future. It’s just a distant planet in a random year. It could even be the distant past. I don’t think it’s ever really made clear.
Anyway, Leo lands on the same planet Pericles did, and finds a society of apes. In this universe, there are savage humans wearing skins like in the first film, but they can speak. The humans are represented by Kris Kirstofferson and his comely daughter Daena, played by wispy model Estella Warren. Remember when I said that Linda Harrison looked too dainty to be a cavewoman who had to climb over rocks and fight for a living? Yeah, double all those sentiments for Warren. Her hair is feathered out, her lip gloss is impeccable, and she looks pouty and urbane, as if she missed her pedicure appointment. Warren is a beautiful woman, but a forest-dwelling savage she is not. Anyway, humans are hunted as slaves on this planet by lithe apes. In this version of the story, apes can leap great distances, can still scream like monkeys, and are comfortable climbing in trees. They are more ape than the apes we’ve seen previously. They capture Leo and take him to the ape city.
It’s here that we meet our main characters. There is the violent chimp general Thade (Tim Roth), there is the human-rights organizer Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), and there is the fast-talking dealer in human slaves Bongo (Paul Giamatti). We are also introduced to a bubbling rivalry between the gorillas Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). A word on Ari: Helena Bonham Carter has a reputation as a gorgeous woman and a talented actress, but I have heard some people state that she is actually hotter in her ape makeup than she is out of it. You know what? I can kind of see it. Her hair, expressive eyes, and little smirk can make one kind of attracted to an ape.
Where does the story go from there? Let’s see. Leo eventually escapes his ape masters and frees the humans. Thade has been organizing his own ape insurrection, and there’s a great battle between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists later in the film. Apes pound on each other with their fists, just the way real apes do. No, the slavery angle is not played up. The big mystery of the film is, like the films before it, how the apes came to rise.
As we learn from a crashed human ship (that appears to be hundreds of years old), humans went looking for Leo, crashed there, and the test chimps on the ship eventually escaped and proliferated. They learned English from the ships’ still-operating computers, and eventually became intelligent. It’s not really made too explicit, and the science is severely fudged. They explain, for instance, why the apes can speak English, but don’t bother to point out how they learned to speak. There is then a big climactic battle. Just as Thade is about to kill Leo, a ship appears in the sky, and Pericles steps out. The apes think that this is their deity Simos, and they start to listen to Leo. The space hole up above, it turns out, is a hole in time that randomly releases you throughout history. Leo flies back to Earth in his pod, hoping to find it where he left it, and leaves the apes and Estella Warren to rest happily in their own dimension.
Not to be outdone by the original, this film has Leo landing on Earth to discover the face of Thade on the Lincoln Memorial! No! Wait, what? Yeah, it looks like Thade salvaged Leos’ ship and went back to Earth’s past and did something and… whatever. Few people care.
While I rant about how good the film looks, it is indeed sloppy, kinda dumb, and doesn’t have much of a theme. All of the other Apes films have a definitely feeling of apocalypse hanging over them. Some sort of dark cause-and-effect. This one has no such feeling. It just has a slot-machine style space hole that randomly leads our gentleness-free hero to a planet of apes. The big reveal that the apes were created by test chimps from Earth is not so shocking. The twist ending is arbitrary.
The film is, as I have said, widely reviled. It was a commercial and critical flop when it was released, and even Tim Burton has little affection for it. One would think this was a death knell for the Apes series.
But one decade and a powerful remake trend later, we’re treated to…
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011)
Directed by: Rupert Wyatt
This film just came out, and it’s likely you’ve seen it, so I’ll try to be brief.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which is an ungainly title at best; why not just call it Rise of the Apes?) was made in the post-CGI era, and all of the apes we see in the film were made with a complex computer animation process. The main chimp in the film, named Caesar, of course, was fully animated using the motion capture technique seen in Avatar. Actor Andy Serkis provided the facial and bodily movements, and hundreds of animators made the ape face and body. The effect is astonishing, and Caesar, despite occasionally looking like a computer creation, actually feels very real. Some people have even been trying to get an Academy Award nomination for Andy Serkis for his convincing ape performance. He doesn’t have the same sort of loping qualities that the actors in the 2001 had, but his ape movements were well thought out and convincing. Serkis had previously done the same motion-capture shtick for another ape in the 2005 version of King Kong. I don’t think he’ll get any acting awards for his adapted performance as Caesar, but what he did was rather impressive.
This film reinstates the post-apocalyptic feeling of the original films, and tells the story in the modern day, leading into the near future, and kind of re-purposes the events of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Rather than merely evolving intelligence, in this film an experimental Alzheimer’s serum imbues apes with human-like intelligence. The opening scene shows our largely personality-free scientist (James Franco) explaining the drug process to a board of moneymen, and the success they’ve had with a chimp named Bright Eyes (which was Heston’s nickname from the first film). Bright Eyes is shot when she escapes, and we find her child Caesar has the same qualities. Franco takes Caesar home and looks after him for years. Caesar is a friendly chimp who can understand English, and finds himself torn between the human and the ape worlds. Eventually he attacks someone on the street (it was revenge for an earlier act of violence), and Caesar is taken to a chimp prison.
Like in Conquest, Caesar begins to earn the trust of the other chimps. The entire second act, which is largely without dialogue, resembles less an Apes film and more a recent prison drama. The power play, the mob dominance, the old cons, they’re all here. For this portion, the film feels dynamic and pleasantly ridiculous. Caesar, hating the way apes are treated, sides with his animal brethren, and eventually breaks out of prison, finds the lab where the brain drugs are made, and feeds it to the other chimps. The brain drug also spreads like a virus. It also kills humans. Instant ape apocalypse. Just add MacGuffin.
Caesar is also confronted at one point, and manages to speak for the first time. His first word? “No!” Just like in the third movie! The film’s final act is an elaborate breakout sequence where Caesar not only frees his fellow ape inmates, but also all the other lab animals in the city. The film, by the way, takes place in San Francisco. There is an ape riot, just like in part 4, and a gun-toting showdown on a bridge. Caesar even learns to ride a horse, which is cool. Sadly, that gorilla (the one who jumped from a bridge onto a helicopter) didn’t take control of the airship when it had a chance. I’m still upset about that. For a few moments, it looked like Rise of the Planet of the Apes was going to dip into the gloriously fantastic realm of a six-year-old boy’s imagination. A gorilla behind the wheel of a helicopter is an image out of a Calvin & Hobbes comic.
To the film’s credit, the apes are all treated like animals, and are never seen as human slaves, or cutesy half-human companions. The apes are just apes. Smart apes, but apes nonetheless. Only Caesar, who speaks a bit, seems to be approaching actual human intelligence. The other apes are just part of a big adventure story about their liberation. There is no protracted social commentary. The Apes films have, in the past, been all about the commentary, and the series has been defined by its political thinking. Maybe it’s a shame to see it go. As a result, we have an Apes film that is slickly made, way engaging, hugely entertaining, and largely without lessons. Treat your apes nicely, I guess. And don’t try to cure Alzheimer’s disease. That never works. Remember Deep Blue Sea? In an over-the-credits animation, we see that the ape intelligence drug (that makes apes smarter, but kills humans) is spreading all over the globe. And now the apocalypse is back. It’s not quite the same as how it’s been told in this series before, but that’s okay.
I thought chimps stopped growing at around three feet, but I have learned that chimps, when standing upright, can be as tall as 5’6”. So it’s okay that Caesar seems to stand at a proud 5’10”. Maybe the drug also mutated his body.
SERIES OVERVIEW
The Planet of the Apes series, for however weird it’s gotten, and however strange a premise on which it is based, has somehow proliferated popular culture in an uncanny way. It has provided cinema with some of the most striking images in sci-fi, and has shown, at least through the first five films, what science fiction was originally intended for: to explore human qualities and foibles using fantastical ciphers.
As a series, I think, Planet of the Apes strikes a perfect balance. On the one hand, it has imagery and concepts that are off-the-wall and kind of campy to look at (which can, if we’re honest with ourselves, be insanely entertaining). On the other hand, the films – with varying amounts of success – manage to squeeze in some social commentary. The first film asked questions about the place of intelligent thought, and ended with a bold and dramatic commentary on nuclear proliferation. The second film was about war protest (and psychic mutants, but that’s as may be). The third was about the moral weight of preventative crime. The fourth was… um… ape revolution. And the fifth was… um…. I got it: the birth of a utopian society. The sixth and seventh films don’t ask too many ethical questions; sci-fi with a political agenda isn’t too hot these days. But they are triumphs, at least, as genre entertainments.
As a canonical timeline, however, the Apes movies splatter all over the map. Even if the first film took place in 3978, that’s still not enough time for a species to evolve. Humans, after all, haven’t biologically evolved much in the last 2000 years. Maybe in 2000 years, humans would be come crazed, radioactive Morlocks, but apes would not become the Eloi in that society in the same amount of time. Perhaps if the year was 39,780. I accept the conceit of a time hole, and apes traveling back to the present. Sci-fi time hole. All fine. But apes couldn’t evolve in a mere 500 years to learn to speak. Some smart apes can learn sign language, but none, as far as I know, can talk and solve critical problems the same way a human can. But I’ll accept that 500 years after a plague, some chimps became smart enough to resist their masters in an organized fashion. I’ll buy that for now.
But then it all happens in 20 years. Sigh. This series could have easily had all its events transpire normally, if they were a little bolder with their math.
My favorite is still the original, although each has its virtues. Some are outright bad, but none are unwatchable. As a series, it works just fine.
There’s word that three new Apes films will be made. If they come out, I’ll be back to update The Series Project. Until then, I have a few great post-apocalypse Ape movies to keep me warm.
Until then, 2012 will be the year of James Bond. See you next week!
