Kevin's Watch

Not sure why but my family and I recently watched all six Planet of the Apes films within the space of a couple of weeks.

1. Planet of the Apes - remake
2. Planet of the Apes - Original
3. Beneath the Planet of the Apes
4. Escape from the Planet of the Apes
5. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
6. Battle for the Planet of the Apes

I've been a fan of the movie franchise since I was a kid and managed to collect all the vhs versions of the first 5 films several years ago. (Haven't sprung for the dvds as yet.) I also bought the Tim Burton adaptation when it first was released.
It's been years since I watched all 5 of the original films in one clump and until just this week have never included the remake. Now I've experience a close side by side comparison of all of the films and have been left with a few impressions. First and foremost is the unsurprising conclusion that the original 1968 film is superior in most respects to any of the other films. I originally remembered watching the Tim Burton remake and thinking "Hey that's pretty good. Not terrific but..." and just based on my fading memory rating it in most respects as better than the original. I have since change my mind about that in almost every aspect. The original film is IMHO a better effort all around (with the exception of creature makeup) it features a much more coherent story, better all around acting, Roddy McDowall establishes himself as "THE" ape actor (Charlton Heston draws your attention to him in every scene where Mark Wahlberg tends to blend into his environment in an unspectacular way. I realize that these are two very different roles but I couldn't help but notice the difference in each actor's presence and performance. And of course the original film boasts a shock ending equal or surpassing that of the Sixth Sense or the final episode of Newhart...wait forget I mentioned Newhart. No one on earth or on any of the nearby planets could have guessed or predicted how Newhart was going to end. It in itself is a masterstroke of utter genius. But I digress.
Now the sequels to the original film.

Beneath is not up to the standard set by its predecessor. Though it features Heston in little more than a cameo, the film is pretty clumsy though you can clearly tell that intelligent and creative minds are trying to work here. The execution isn't close to spot on but you get what the story tellers are trying for and for that I applaud them. Beneath also sets a kind of standard theme for the next few movies. Leave them sad and upset. The end of Beneath is (since it's been around since 1970 I won't worry too much about spoilers) features the end of the entire planet after a rather bloody battle. I won't go into the details but our human protagonists are machine gunned to death even before a doomsday bomb is intentionally set off by a mortally wounded Taylor (Heston). Pretty grim.

The next film Escape is at first surprisingly light hearted as three Apes manage to do the impossible and salvage Taylor's crashed space ship and escape before the earth is destroyed in the previous film. Escape is a better directed effort than the previous film with moments of surprisingly intelligent reasoning and dialog but is spoiled somewhat by large doses of the exact opposite. The Apes travel back in time to the point where Taylor and his crew had left earth. Once the shock of finding talking apes instead of the human crew in the ship wears off, the apes are paraded around as celebrities, being treated to fancy hotels and a new wardrobe. You wouldn't guess that the film would end with the adult apes shot to death and their newborn son hidden away in the care of a circus. Pretty grim.

Conquest is a grim story from start to finish, a stark contrast from the previous film. There is nothing positive in the story though the film is competently directed and features Roddy McDowall,s Caesar as its main character. The world established in Escape was that of typical early 70s America or at least hollywood's view of it. Conquest begins several years later and something terrible has happened. Just about every human being on Earth has suddenly turned into a colossal butt hole. Something resembling the Nazi party has taken over the country and Apes are openly used as slave servants, enduring constant brutality. None of this is explained to the audience's satisfaction and you simply have to accept it if you plan to watch the rest of the film. Inevitably the Caesar character (the offspring of the two parent apes killed in the previous film) somehow manages to orchestrate an ape uprising. What isn't explained in the film is exactly how he does it outside of just staring at certain apes at certain times. Does Caesar possess some kind of mind control power? WTF? Needless to say at the end of the film just about all the humans are dead and the city is in flames. Pretty grim.

Then there is Battle. The film opens about 1000 years after the end of the previous film but is suddenly thrust backward in time to only a few years after the end of Conquest due to the narration of an ancient tale told by the often referred to "lawgiver" character. You'll end up with whiplash if you aren't careful. Somehow the world has gotten worse than it was before. In the intervening years between the end of Conquest and the beginning of Battle there was a nuclear war that has destroyed civilization. (with the Nazi's in power I'm not surprised.) Caesar is alive and leading a tree village not far from the irradiated ruins of New York city. Now all the apes are talking. WTF? How is that? Some of the orangutans sound as if they had studied at an Ivy League university for years and posses intellects equal or surpassing that of Stephen Hawking. I think the creative team are taking huge liberties with circumstances here but we're talking far fetched sci fi channel level story telling so I guess you have to just roll with it. Anyway Caesar travels back to the city to have a look at video tapes of his parents and ends up stirring up a nest of mutated human survivors of the war. Yep, there is a battle as implied by the title. The humans attack with overwhelming force and end up being brutally machine gunned to death by gorillas as they try to flee for their lives. I guess this clumsy effort is supposed to setup the world that Taylor finds in the original film.
Pretty grim.

I'd like to have a look at the short lived live action tv series from 1974 just to see yet another take on things.
All in all I enjoy watching all of these films to one degree or another but to be honest I have to be in the right mood. The exception is the original film. If I stumble across it on tv I usually can't help but stop and watch it.

I came over during one of those movies, and I thought it was a GEICO commercial.....

Agreed: the original is very much a classic that holds up today. It is poinant, bold and with a surprising amount of wry humour.
Love it.

Charlton Heston is the man. I've never watched any of the others, and I don't think I want to. The ending of the original was enough for me.

The only way I could see anyone else playing Taylor is if he were Arnold and was the Terminator all along.

The only one I've seen all the way through is Conquest. Which I've seen twice, just because it happened to be on TV at the time. Funny how things like that work out.

The less said about the Burton remake, the better.

Otherwise, good analysis Tom.

The original is a sci-fi classic greatly diminished by its sequels. It is easy to forget *how* good the original movie was in the context of the series, and the constant parodies.

The Dreaming wrote:The original is a sci-fi classic greatly diminished by its sequels. It is easy to forget *how* good the original movie was in the context of the series, and the constant parodies.

I agree.

tom - did you ever see the tv series? i don't remember watching it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes_%28TV_series%29

sgt.null wrote:tom - did you ever see the tv series? i don't remember watching it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes_%28TV_series%29

Yep. I was like 9 or 10 years old and I watched every episode that aired.
I remember getting bubble gum cards that featured scenes from the show.

Thanks for the enjoyable summary, Tom!

The original I've seen in its entirety (it was a while back).

I've only seen parts of Beneath. I do remember the ending with Heston setting off the bomb - yeah, bleak stuff. Have never made the effort to sit through the other sequels, but the bits that I have seen here and there left me wondering what on earth was going. From your descriptions of their plots, it sounds like the writers were just as clueless.

I agree with JazFusion about Heston: he was the heart and soul of the Planet of the Apes.

I gave Tim Burton a chance and saw his remake at the theatre. At first, like you, I thought it was good...but that ending confused the heck out of me. Still does. Over time, my opinion of the remake has really lowered.

matrixman wrote:Thanks for the enjoyable summary, Tom!

The original I've seen in its entirety (it was a while back).

I've only seen parts of Beneath. I do remember the ending with Heston setting off the bomb - yeah, bleak stuff. Have never made the effort to sit through the other sequels, but the bits that I have seen here and there left me wondering what on earth was going. From your descriptions of their plots, it sounds like the writers were just as clueless.

I agree with JazFusion about Heston: he was the heart and soul of the Planet of the Apes.

I gave Tim Burton a chance and saw his remake at the theatre. At first, like you, I thought it was good...but that ending confused the heck out of me. Still does. Over time, my opinion of the remake has really lowered.

I think the Burton movie was trying to recapture the ending of the original, while still surprising audiences who are familiar with it. Honestly, it makes about as much sense as the end of the original

The Dreaming wrote:

matrixman wrote:Thanks for the enjoyable summary, Tom!

The original I've seen in its entirety (it was a while back).

I've only seen parts of Beneath. I do remember the ending with Heston setting off the bomb - yeah, bleak stuff. Have never made the effort to sit through the other sequels, but the bits that I have seen here and there left me wondering what on earth was going. From your descriptions of their plots, it sounds like the writers were just as clueless.

I agree with JazFusion about Heston: he was the heart and soul of the Planet of the Apes.

I gave Tim Burton a chance and saw his remake at the theatre. At first, like you, I thought it was good...but that ending confused the heck out of me. Still does. Over time, my opinion of the remake has really lowered.

I think the Burton movie was trying to recapture the ending of the original, while still surprising audiences who are familiar with it. Honestly, it makes about as much sense as the end of the original

I have to disagree. The original ending was shocking but concrete. What Taylor and his crew had assumed to be a journey to a distant star system, having supposedly traveled at speeds approaching light it followed that the chronometers on the ship would register a time factor which would place them 2000 years in Earth's future (where ever Earth happened to be at the time). What was clearly demonstrated at the end of the film was that not only did the crew indeed travel forward in time but that they ended up back where they started. They admitted in the beginning of the story that they had no way of knowing what planet they were on.

The end of Burton's Planet of the Apes is much more convoluted. Sure Leo discovers that the space station crash landed after looking for him but he assumed that his rescuers passed through the same spatial disturbance that he and the first pod did. Neither Leo nor the crew of the space station knew what planet they had landed on until Leo left in pod one, passed through the spatial disturbance a second time and ended up on what appeared to be Earth in the 21 century. EXCEPT! That Earth's reality had apparently been shaped by events that had happened some hundreds or thousands of years before that had just happened chronologically in the story as the statue of General Thade (which replaced Lincoln) implied.
So the question remains: Did Leo simply move through time to the same location having caused the Ape society to begin with in the first place but then to have again altered the course of their history to the point that they adopted a civilization similar to human Earth of 2001? OR is this all some kind of parallel development in another dimension in a wholly different location?
Come on! There are too many damn questions left to ponder in the remake. Burton left people scratching their heads instead of being shocked.
IMHO of course.

tom - would the staue of liberty last 2000 years? or any of that stuff in the cave? wouldn't the apes have progressed more in that time frame?

Good analysis, Tom! I saw all of the Apes movies about 12 years ago, but the ending of Planet was spoiled for me by a Mad Magazine spoof of the movie that I'd read years before.

sgt.null wrote:tom - would the staue of liberty last 2000 years? or any of that stuff in the cave? wouldn't the apes have progressed more in that time frame?

I'm not sure that Pierre Boulle was a chemical engineer. It's science fiction. You can make a few guesses about how long something might last. At least he selected something iconic that had at least the potential to exist 2000 years after it was made. As to the apes with their almost childlike avoidence and mis trust of technology I'm not really suprised by their level of progress.

I cant agree more about the 1st movie. It was the best of them and making sequels only took away from the original. Great analysis!

Heston was at his best in this film as an actor. He was truly believable. And dont forget the actor that played Dr. Zeas(sp?).

Taylor- Cornelius was right, doctor. He proved it. Man was here first. You owe him your science, your culture, whatever civilization you've got.

Zeas - Then answer me this. If man was superior, why didn't he survive?

Taylor- Wiped out by a plague, some natural
catastrophe, a storm of meteors. From the looks of some parts of this planet, I'd say that was a fair bet.

Cornelius- But we can't be sure.

Taylor -He is. He knew all the time.
Long before you found your cave, he knew.
Defender of the faith?
Guardian of the terrible secret.
That's it, isn't it, doctor?

(They end up reading some scroll of ancient text that tells about man.)

Dr Zeas - "You are right, I have always known about man. From the evidence, I believe his wisdom must walk hand and hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself."

I might have to go home and watch it again tonight.

I hate every ape I see, from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Zee!

I tell you, the second Planet of the Apes really takes the cake. Charlie was great in the first one, but you can tell he's just not into the second one. He shows up for a few scenes, then disappears until the film is almost over, and he's hanging out in a cell like he can't ecape or something. Not only that, but he lets a lesser actor steal his chick for most of the film, then lets her get killed. Like I said, he's just not in the mood, and it shows. To make matters worse, he gets killed himself, although he does manage to take out all those rat-bastard apes and the ugly psychics, too. But still, think about it; if one of the other iconic actors of the time had starred in it, it would have been a completely different flick!

Imagine Clint Eastwood, whispering "You've got the Apes on one side, the Telepaths on the other side, and me in the middle." They'd have named it "A fistful of Dead Apes" and Clint would have worked for and spied on both sides, killing them off a few at a time, setting up situations for them to kill off each other, while he dismantled the Alpha-Omega bomb and used the explosives in it to fashion several sticks of dynamite.

Or, maybe Sean Connery plays Taylor. He not only kills every Psychic and Gorilla in hand-to-hand combat and disarms the bomb with one second left, but he also pilots the bomb into space, where it flies through the time warp thing and back to real earth, and, before it crashes harmlessly in the Pacific he parachutes to safety with Linda Harrison, leaving the two of them all alone to make out until the British secret service can collect them.