Sam Christopher's DVD Picks - The Planet of the Apes (1968)

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Full disclosure: I love the Planet of the Apes. As Bill Miller of Still Standing once said, “People running—boring; people running from talking apes—fantastic!” But more than that, it’s also nostalgia on my part, as PotA is the first film I have a clear memory of watching. It was on television, and I’m pretty sure it was at my Grandmother’s house, probably on a holiday when the whole family was there. I watched and was mesmerized by what I was seeing. I didn’t know then that I was watching great actors like Charlton Heston or Roddy McDowell, or Kim Hunter, or Maurice Evans—the latter three I wouldn’t have recognized at any rate—and I didn’t realize I was watching a story conceived by the great Pierre Boulle, who had also written The Bridge on the River Kwai, and first adapted for the screen by Rod Serling, whose work I had seen and knew even the (the very first thing I remember watching ever on tv was an episode of The Twilight Zone, "Stopover in a Quiet Town"). I just knew it was cool, and the ending threw me even then. Even though I didn’t really get the full importance of it.

The story in the film begins with a monologue by Taylor (Charlton Heston), the somewhat misanthropic commander of the first Earth expedition into deep space. They are traveling at relativistic speeds such that time slows down for those aboard the spacecraft—in accordance, we’re told, with “Haslein’s theory”—although they do have a handy-dandy clock which can pierce that veil and give them “real” time. This is a lonely speech, all about the magnificence and wonder of space “squashing a man’s ego” and a thought that there has to be something better than Man in all of this. Taylor then joins his fellow astronauts, Landon (Robert Gunner), Dodge (Jeff Burton), and Stewart (Dianne Stanley), in a cryogenic stasis for the rest of the trip. They ostensibly sleep peacefully until the ship crashes into a lake and begins to sink. The three men awaken to find that an air leak in Stewart’s stasis tube has left her by all appearances long dead. They escape in a raft and paddle to the shore only to find themselves in the middle of a seemingly uninhabitable desert. Landon, by far the most soldierly and patriotic of the trio—Dodge is a scientist who cares only for knowledge-- , takes the time to plant a US Flag in the sand, causing Taylor to laugh derisively at the futility of the gesture. The trio begin to walk, wondering where they are, and when; Taylor estimates they are somewhere in the constellation of Orion and says the clock put the year at around 3900 AD. The three men hike until they come upon a plant, the first sign of any life they’ve found, and then, a little later, they see what appear to be scarecrows on the mountains around them. They find a lush oasis and strip off their clothes to take a rejuvenating swim, only to find that their clothes have been stolen. They then find people dressed in animal skins, people who appear to be mute. Just then a horn sounds and the others begin to run.

Following the lead of their “hosts”, Taylor and crew also attempt to evade the riders on horseback who have arrived and are shooting at the humans on foot. Dodge is killed while Landon is captured in a net. Then Taylor sees something that makes him stop in his tracks. The riders are apes! Apes wearing military uniforms, riding horses, and shooting guns! Taylor runs and falls into a pit with several other humans and upon climbing out he is shot in the throat and captured. Later, he awakens in a cage, having been saved by the veterinarian Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter), a female chimpanzee whose kindly nature and unrelenting thirst for scientific knowledge is shared by her archaeologist husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowell). Finding that the apes speak English, Taylor tries to communicate, but he can’t speak and his efforts to write something out are at first foiled by his fellow inmates, most notably a very beautiful young woman who will later be called Nova (Linda Harrison). There is also the Minister of Science, who doubles as The Defender of the Faith in this basically theocratic society, a orangutan named Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), who appears to know more than he’s telling. Eventually, Taylor convinces Zira he’s intelligent, leading to a hearing before the ape’s tribunal and subsequent finding by Taylor that Landon has been lobotomized by Zaius and that Taylor is slated for the same fate. But Zira and Cornelius have other plans.

Enlisting their nephew, Lucius (Lou Wagner), Zira and Cornelius break Taylor and Nova out of the zoo and they all head off to The Forbidden Zone, the stretch of desert that the astronauts landed in and a place that is forbidden to apes by The Sacred Scrolls except through special permission of the leadership. Cornelius has been here once before and found strange things that seemed to contradict the Scrolls but Dr. Zaius refused to allow the publication of his findings. They are chased by a military contingent of gorillas—orangutans are the administrators, chimpanzees the intellectuals, and gorillas the military—led by Zaius, who is subsequently captured by Taylor and taken into the cave where Cornelius found the artifacts of a civilization that appears to be older than the Sacred Scrolls. Taylor finds false teeth, eyeglasses, a human doll, all of which Zaius dismisses, until it’s found that the doll speaks. This proves that Man had a civilization before the apes, and we are then told by Zaius that there are secret Scrolls that speak of this, saying that Man should never be allowed to breed in large numbers “for he will make a desert of his lands and yours.” Taylor and Nova are allowed to ride off down the shoreline while Zaius goes back on his word and destroys the cave, saying that he “takes no pleasure in this” but that it must be done for the preservation of the society. Later, Taylor and Nova come upon a decayed piece of the Statue of Liberty, proving that Taylor has arrived not on another planet but on Earth some 2,000 years hence.

This ending was a twist on the novel. In Boulle’s book, the astronauts are on another planet and the lone survivor, a French journalist name Ulysse Merou, escaped from that world to travel back to Earth, arriving roughly 70,000 years after he left. He lands to find that apes have evolved into the masters of this world as well. The funny thing about sf to me, and this story in particular, is that I always read that the creators are commenting on our world. The less-intelligent gorillas running the military is a comment on military men being limited, that the stuffy orangutans in charge are an analog to our own government and societal leaders, etc. The funny thing is that, while I see the artists’ point, it also shows us in a strange way that this world, as screwed up as it is, is just as good as any other. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what species is in charge, or, in other venues, how much technology they have, they’re going to be just as bad as we are. Not a very cheery end to a review, but there it is.

-Sam Christopher

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