Marathoning the Planet of the Apes Pentalogy in 2021
In the immortal words of legendary NOFX front man Fat Mike,
“I’m startin’ to feel a lot like Charlton Heston
Stranded on a primate planet
Apes and orangutans that ran it to the ground
With generals and the armies that obeyed them
Followers following fables
Philosophies that enable them to rule without regard”
While these lyrics were primarily written to rail against Bush-era politics, they also perfectly encapsulate the universal appeal of the first Planet of the Apes film. Even watching it today, a strong, almost primal drive surfaces in terms of rooting for and identifying with the protagonist. Absolutely everyone has felt like an outsider. Everyone has felt mistreated. And most disturbingly, purely on the basis of who you are. Heston’s situation in the film creates and calls back to an intense feeling of being bullied as a child, where there’s no logical reason for abuse to take place, but it does none the same. Most frighteningly, Heston has no avenue to reason with the Apes responsible for his mistreatment. Even when he regains his speech, the Apes in charge treat him not as an intelligent individual, but a mongoloid anomaly that can somehow string words together. This fear of not being listened to, of being thought of as crazy, is an anxiety deeply ingrained in all humans. It appears as the driving force in other films too, like Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, where a normal woman is committed into a mental institution, and can’t convince anyone in charge of her sanity.
But possibly the most interesting facet of the original Planet of the Apes film is the pliability of it’s themes and messaging. It’s most commonly accepted that the film is a comment on 1960’s American race relations, placing Heston, a typical white man, in the role of an abused minority. But others hold strong that the film is an allegory for the struggle of Jewish Americans. Some contend it’s actually about America’s involvement in Vietnam. Another popular school of thought is that the film depicts the dangers of a society based on faith and led by religious zealots. Or quite possibly it’s all of the above, depending on the viewer and the time period it’s watched in.
With all this focus and discussion still happening around the first film, it can be easy to forget that there’s four sequels, all released between 1970–1974. There’s Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest for the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and Struggle for the Planet of the Apes. All are unique and interesting attempts to continue the story and expand the mythology of our Ape future (except the last title, I made that one up). So to better understand the sequels, I attempted to do what no man (or ape, for that matter) has the guts to do. I set out to watch them all back to back.
And so after rewatching the first film and having a great time, I was brought face to face with Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Beneath picks up right where the first film left off, with Heston wandering the forbidden zone, a man lost in a world no longer his own. But before the first act is halfway over, Heston disappears into a mysteriously shifting landscape. It happens abruptly, but makes a lot more sense once you learn that Heston had no interest in doing a sequel, so his screen time had to be limited as much as possible. All told, Heston only appears in the film for roughly 17 minutes, in the opening and reappearing for the climax. To fill the leading man gap they brought in James Franciscus, who plays another astronaut that crash lands in the same spot Heston did. Franciscus does a fine job, but bringing him in as a surrogate for Heston brings along a few narrative problems. Because he’s new to the planet, we have to retread the ground of him finding out about the apes and coming to the same realization as the twist in the last film, that he’s actually on Earth. Besides the retreaded ground, the film tries to build up a mystery of its own, and the question is right in the title: what exactly is beneath the planet of the apes? Well naturally, the answer is a race of evolved telekinetic super humans that worship and sing hymns to a doomsday bomb. Oh and they all wear normal human masks, but have veiny goblin-like skin underneath. I’m starting to understand why Heston may not have wanted to star in this one. Heston’s dislike for sequels also allegedly lead to the climax of the film, which sees him detonating the doomsday bomb, bringing an end to not only his character, but the entire Earth. Apes, mutants, and all. It’s quite a head-scratcher ending, but at the same time it almost fits perfectly for as bizarre a sequel as this is.
If you thought that the planet blowing up would spell the end of the series, fear not, because Escape from the Planet of the Apes came out only a year later. The opening reveals that our two favorite apes, Cornelius and Zira, escaped the planet in Heston’s spacecraft before the explosion. Their journey somehow brings them back in time to a present-day, still human ruled Earth. Escape gets campy pretty quickly. By the halfway mark there’s fun montages of both apes trying on human clothes and hosting lavish parties with social elites at their posh hotel suite. The light tone makes it a bit odd when the film shifts back into semi-serious subject matter. Like when a government council decides whether or not to sterilize Zira to prevent her from having ape children. Or when Zira is sedated and the officials get her to admit that in her time she lobotomized and ran horrific experiments on humans. But if you’re not sold yet, the film also features the charming Ricardo Montalban (of Spy Kids fame) as a travelling circus owner. The prize of his operation is a new baby ape, and instead of a person in makeup they actually use a real baby chimp. The greatest joy I got from the film (and possibly the series) was seeing what was clearly a person in a modern day ape costume holding the real, seemingly confused baby chimp. But alas, the good times couldn’t last as the film ends on quite the down note. After killing an orderly and escaping the government’s clutches, Cornelius and Zira are hunted down and executed. As if that wasn’t enough, their newborn baby is also shot, with Zira then throwing its body into the bay before dying herself. But hold the tissues, there’s a final scene where it’s revealed that Cornelius and Zira switched their intelligent baby with the normal chimp at the circus. So it’s less sad.. I think?
By this point the Apes train had completely left the station, and there was no turning back. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes takes us to the far off year of 1991, where evolved apes are now commonplace on earth, and have been effectively enslaved by greedy humans. We follow the now grown up child of Cornelius and Zira, Caesar, as he covertly goes through the system and leads an ape revolution from the inside. The film follows the basic structure of a prison break movie. The best scenes feature Caesar meeting in secret with the other apes to gather weapons and plot their revolution. The film sheds a lot of the camp found in the last two entries, and brings a lot of the darker themes to the forefront. The apes are beaten, tortured, trained to perform household chores, and sold at auction. As if that was too subtle, the prison guards dress exactly like German SS officers. The horrors experienced by the apes build up such tension that when the revolution finally breaks out, it instantly becomes a highlight of the series. In fact, the end of that sequence would have been the perfect note to end the series on. It’s made clear that the humans’ time is over, and the apes shall begin their rule over Earth. It takes us full circle.
But they couldn’t leave well enough alone, so right on schedule only a year later we got Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Battle finds Caesar, now a husband and father, leading an ape colony years after the revolution set forth in the previous film. Humans are also a part of the colony, and while they’re not slaves, they’re not exactly treated as equals either. Tempted by the promise of finding footage of his mother and father in the archives of the old city, Caesar and two others go about a dangerous journey into the radioactive ruins. There, they are attacked by a group of mutated humans that have been dwelling beneath the city since the events of the last film. Caesar and his colleagues escape, only to have the humans come after them and wage war on their colony. What I came to realize is that this film has the same basic plot as Beneath the Planet of the Apes, except here the humans living underneath the surface are the ones that come to wage war on the apes, not the other way around. Battle ends with the apes winning the war against the mutated humans, and Caesar killing another Ape that tried to take over the city in the midst of the struggle for power. Much emphasis is put on Caesar’s decisions to kill this other ape, as he’s the first to ever break the “ape shall not kill ape” rule that’s repeated throughout the film. Frankly, this dynamic is far more interesting, and perhaps the film would have been more intriguing if it had axed the mutated humans and focused exclusively on the conflict between the apes.
And with the end credits of Battle rolling we’re brought to the end of our journey, and what a ride it’s been. My head is virtually spinning with talking apes, mutated humans, and one very confused look in the eyes of a real baby chimp. Would I recommend any of the sequels? Not particularly. Did I enjoy my visit to Ape land? Most assuredly. While definitely not as bad as most sequels of the time, none of them quite manage to reach the awe and intensity of the first film. Even still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the four subsequent Apes films. While some don’t quite hit the mark, you can tell that there was love, hard work, and dedication put into each one. At the very least, after marathoning the series I feel more than properly prepared for Earth’s imminent ape future.
