Planet of the Apes: A Brief History of Cinema Issue #3

A Brief History of Cinema: Planet of the Apes series

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the follow-up to 2011’s unexpected hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, hits theaters this week, continuing the rebooted franchise and perhaps exceeding the sky high expectations.

Looking back on the Planet of the Apes franchise, the series has had its fair share of highs and lows, but what everyone can agree with is the first film which launched the franchise, remains one of the most influential and significant sci-fi films of all time. It’s time to take a look back on this simian series, so peel a banana, fling some feces, or just go ape shit, because it’s time to recount Planet of the Apes in this edition of: A Brief History of Cinema!

Going back to the beginning, Planet of the Apes, which was based on the novel La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle, came out in 1968: the same year Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi adventure 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. Interestingly enough, 2001 also has a segment devoted to apes. It seems ’68 was the year of sci-fi simians (I promise, that’s the last bad simian pun).

Planet of the Apes stars Charlton Heston as the Astronaut George Taylor, who ends up stranded on an unknown planet with the rest of his small crew after their ship crash lands in a lake. Uncertain about what planet they’re on, they find a group of mute humans in rudimentary cave-man-like clothing, and just as they suspect there will be no problem in establishing dominance over this primitive culture, a band of apes on horseback coming riding in, guns ablaze. Taylor and the rest of his crew are quickly captured or killed, along with other mute humans. The apes—gorillas to be precise—are a hunting party, and hunt the humans for sport, taking some as slaves back to Ape City.

Taylor is treated like an animal, but he remains strong and tries to figure out just what the hell is going on and how apes could be so intelligent and have such a sophisticated society. He befriends Nova (Linda Harrison), the hottest mute human of the bunch. Taylor is put in a cage and studied by the Chimpanzee scientist Zira (Kim Hunter), who discovers Taylor can speak—something thought impossible for humans to do. Along with her husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira gets Taylor free and finds out where he’s from, but has a hard time believing any of it. One ape who refuses to accept any of what Taylor, Cornelius, Or Zira claim to be true is Dr. Zaius, an orangutan who believes the day a talking human reveals itself will be the day their society takes a turn for the worst. Zaius orders that Taylor be castrated, but Taylor escapes and goes on the run, eventually being captured by gorilla’s an uttering the film’s most famous line: “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!”

After a tribunal, Taylor escapes with Nova, Cornelius, Zira, and her nephew, and the fugitives head to the Forbidden Zone, an area of land not yet fully explored by the apes. Taylor seeks answers, but Dr. Zaius seeks to keep him from finding them out, so intercepts him at a beach. Taylor is on the cusp of finding out the truth, and though Zaius warns him that he may not like what he finds, Taylor and Nova ride off down the beach on horseback, where Taylor makes a horrific discovery. The ape planet is none other than a future, post-apocalyptic earth, made clear by the Statue of Liberty submerged in sand and rock. 

With a cliff hanger ending as severe as that, it was inevitable that a sequel be made. Beneath the Planet of the Apes followed a different lone surviving astronaut from a different ship, which crash lands just like Taylor’s did in the first film, only this time it’s on land not water. Astronaut John Brent (James Franciscus) was sent to look for Taylor’s ship, but ends up on the future earth the same as he did. He discovers the city of apes, a lone Nova, and the friendly apes Zira and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall was replaced by David Watson this time around). They discover Brent was sent to find Taylor, who disappeared in the Forbidden Zone and left Nova on her own.

While Zira and Cornelius help Brent and Nova escape Ape City to go look for Taylor, the apes are planning to send an army into the Forbidden Zone, led by the gorilla General Ursus (James Gregory). Dr. Zaius is against the idea, but he’s ignored and the apes move out. Brent and Nova are captured by gorillas, but they escape and hide in a cave, in which Brent makes the realization that he is on a post apocalyptic earth rather than an alien planet as he (and Taylor) first thought. He also discovers an underground society of mutant telepathic humans who worship a gigantic atomic bomb as their deity. Brent discovers Taylor is being held prisoner, but they break out and narrowly avoid killing each other when one of the mutant telepaths takes over their minds and pits them against each other. They discover the A-bomb these freaks are worshipping is an Alpha and Omega bomb—an ultra-powerful doomsday nuke capable of blowing up the entire planet.

The apes reach the Forbidden Zone and attack the underground city of mutants. It’s chaos as they all battle, and the mutants try to set off the doomsday device, but they are killed, and so is Nova, along with Brent. Though mortally wounded, Taylor activates the doomsday device and the most depressing ending to a sci-fi film ever occurs, as a voice over declares: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”

How could they make a sequel to that? 20^th Century Fox found a pretty clever way. Before the world blew to smithereens, Zira and Cornelius (again played by Roddy McDowall again) along with Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo) escaped in Taylor’s space craft, which they repaired, and went through a time warp that sent them back in time to earth in the year 1973. And so begins Escape from the Planet of the Apes!

Dr. Milo is accidently killed by an angry gorilla while they’re being held in a zoo, but Cornelius and Zira are not harmed. In almost reverse fashion, the apes are discovered by humans to be intelligent, and that they can speak. They become celebrities, but Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) is concerned about what their presence on earth means for the future of humankind. He discovers not only that Zira is pregnant, but in the future humans become slaves to the apes, and that Zira experimented on humans like guinea pigs. Both apes are put into confinement, and eventually deemed dangerous. Zira and Cornelius escape with the help of some scientists and take refuge at Armando’s (Ricardo Montalban) Circus. There, Zira has a baby boy, whom she names Milo after their deceased friend.

                Dr. Hasslein suspects Zira and Cornelius took shelter at a zoo or circus because of her pregnancy, so he orders a search for them. The family of apes gets trapped on an abandoned ship in L.A. Harbour, where Hasslein shoots Zira and her infant several times, then is shot by Cornelius and dies, and then Cornelius is shot by a sniper and also killed. Zira crawls to her dead husband and dies on him. The ending isn’t much happier than Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but a final scene reveals Zira swapped her baby with another baby chimp at the zoo, and Armando is looking after the infant chimp, who can speak.

Taking place ten years later, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes follows the intelligent speaking ape child of Cornelius and Zira, Caesar (played by Roddy McDowall). Formerly known as Milo, Caesar was thought to have been killed along with his parents, but Armando has been caring for him in secret. In this world, a disease wiped out cats and dogs, so apes became the new house hold pet, and were trained to carry out tasks—essentially becoming slaves. Caesar is appalled by the way humans treat his own kind, and when he yells out at the mistreatment of an ape, Armando covers for him, but people suspect the ape spoke.

Caesar is inducted as a slave, and after Armando dies from falling out of a building, Caesar starts using his wits and cunning to overthrow the human race and begin an epic ape revolution. Recruiting fellow apes from all three castes—gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan—Caesar gets his hands on weapons, and successfully initiates the conquest that the title indicates.

The fourth sequel/third prequel/final film in the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes takes place a few years after Conquest. Although the world has been destroyed by nuclear weapons, the apes have won the power struggle, and now Caesar is their all-powerful leader. Humans still live amongst the apes, but not as their equals. They teach apes how to read and write English, all living in Ape City which is much more primitive here than it was in the first and second films. Caesar sets out on a personal mission with a human, MacDonald (Austin Stoker), and a Dr. Zaius-like orangutan, Virgil (Paul Williams), to the ruins of the city in search of a record of his parents. Caesar finds what he’s looking for, but their presence becomes known. The underground mutant society discovers Caesar and his comrades, and they suspect the apes plan on overthrowing them and that they must be stopped.

                Back at Ape City, Caesar’s son, Cornelius (that’s not confusing in the least, I know), accidently finds out that the ruthless gorilla General Aldo (Claude Akins) plans on killing all the humans in Ape City, as well as Caesar himself and taking control of the ape population. Cornelius is spotted and gets badly injured, eventually dying from his injuries.

Caesar returns from the city ruins, and the fate of him and his race are in jeopardy. The mutant army attacks Ape City, but they are no match for Caesar’s cunning and the ape’s clever military tactics. General Aldo goes against Caesar’s orders and kills the mutants who survive the skirmish. Caesar discovers it was Aldo who killed his son, which puts Aldo in violation of the apes’ most sacred law: ape shall never kill ape. Caesar pursues Aldo up a tree, and Aldo falls to his death. Caesar heroically frees the humans imprisoned at Ape City and deems man and ape as equals.

While things calm down at Ape City and the future looks bright, the mutants back at the ruined city decide to worship their Alpha and Omega bomb rather than detonate it—remember that doomsday device that will one day destroy the planet? So is the outlook on the future bright, or dark? It’s left to the viewer to decide, but the Apes series would take a darker—and much goofier—path in the form of a reboot almost three decades later.

2001—the actual year not the movie that came out the same year as the first Apes film—saw Tim Burton’s remake/reimagining of the original Planet of the Apes. In the near future, humankind uses chimps as space pilots to test out their advanced space technology. Something goes awry when an electromagnetic storm strikes, and astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) gets lost in the storm when he pursues a space pod piloted by Pericles, a chimp he’s grown fond of.

                Leo crash lands on the planet Ashlar many centuries ahead of his own time, and discovers a society of humanoid apes that speak English, enslave humans, and more or less do everything the apes have done in previous films. Unlike the previous films, however, these enslaved humans speak, and the apes use reworked quotes from the original film (the first ape to speak is a gorilla played by Michael Clarke Duncan, who says to Leo: “Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!”) Leo gets to see the humans work as slaves, carrying out domestic chores like the apes did in Conquest, and the audience gets to see some weird scenes such as ape foreplay and political primate discussions.

                Leo escapes the apes thanks to the female chimp Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who dislikes that apes abuse and enslave humans. General Thade (Tim Roth) and Colonel Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan) pursue Leo and the others, and Leo discovers in an ancient cave the remains of the space station he had been on before being lost in the electromagnetic storm. A video log reveals the apes on board the station took it over and made it crash on the planet he’s currently on, thus the intelligent apes are descended from those that rebelled, and the humans are descendants of the survivors of the crash.

                Remember Pericles, the chimp who disappeared into the vortex? Well he shows up on the planet in the midst of a war between the apes and humans—having been pushed to the future like Leo was—and only now did he find his way to the planet. The apes mistake him as the first ape ever, Semos, and think he has returned, so they stop the battle and bow to him. Of course Leo knows the truth, so after escaping the wrath of General Thade, he gives Pericles to Ari, gets in Pericles’ shuttle, and flies back to the electrical storm to go back in time.

                Leo lands on earth and gets out of the pod, but makes a disturbing (and wholly confusing) discovery: the Lincoln Memorial is now a statue of General Thade! W.T.F! Apes in police cars roll up and arrest Leo. It’s a cliff hanger ending that baffled audiences and was never resolved, because after Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake was not well received by critics or fans of the original series, 20^th Century Fox held off from making a sequel and chose to let the apes lay dormant for a further decade before bringing them back in a big way.

In 2011, Rise of the Planet of the Apes rebooted the franchise without remaking any of the originals, although it’s debatable whether or not Rise is a remake of Conquest, because the two share very similar characters and plot elements. In this take, a genetics lab is trying to find the cure to Alzheimer’s, and one scientist, Will Rodman (James Franco) holds an especially personal grudge against the disease, because his father (John Lithgow) has it. After making a break through with an experiment on a test chimp he calls Bright Eyes (a reference to the original, as that’s what Zira called Taylor), Will is on the cusp of curing Alzheimer’s. But an accident at the lab ruins a board meeting with potential investors and results in the death of Bright Eyes. A frustrated Steven Jacobs (Will’s boss, played by David Oyelowo) orders that all the chimps be put down, but chimp handler Franklin (Tyler Labine) discovers Bright Eyes gave birth to an infant while in her holding cell. Will takes it home and keeps the infant as a pet. His father names him Caesar.

                A few years later, Caesar (played by Andy Serkis, whose performance was rendered through motion capture) has grown in size and intelligence. He inherited the drug that his mother had been tested with, and Will discovers ALZ 112 not only works to restore brain function, but increases it. He tests it on his worsening father, and finds it cures him. For the next few years, things are good, but as Caesar matures, he becomes too much for Will to handle, and he takes Caesar to an ape refuge. Unbeknownst to Will, the refuge has poor conditions, abusive workers, and houses aggressive apes that turn on Caesar, who is a new comer and in turn an outcast.

                Using his sophisticated mind, Caesar learns the ropes of the refuge, finds a way to break out of his cell when he wants, and slowly starts earning the trust of the other apes. This all occurs while Will’s father gets Alzheimer’s once again and eventually dies from it, and his company continues to make breakthroughs with ALZ 112, however it shows to have a negative effect on humans, as Franklin becomes ill and dies. Caesar steals canisters of the drug and releases them on his fellow ape inmates, who all become intelligent like him. When Will is finally able to bring Caesar home, Caesar refuses to go with him, and instead waits until the perfect moment to overthrow the workers at the ape refuge and release his ape army. Caesar speaks for the first time, and assumes dominance over the other apes. They escape the facility and head for the San Francisco zoo, where they free the apes there and forge weapons.

                The police can’t stop the apes, as they rampage through downtown and swing along the Golden Gate Bridge. Reinforcements are called in, they form a blockade, and many apes die, including Caesar’s main muscle, a powerful gorilla. Caesar and most of the others make it past the blockade to the Redwood forest on the other side, and Will pursues him. Will encounters him and asks Caesar to come home, but he says: “Caser is home.” Will lets Caesar go, and in an end credits scene, it’s shown that Franklin passed the ALZ 112 virus on to Will’s neighbour, an airline pilot, who unwittingly spreads the deadly virus around the globe.  

So what are my thoughts on these films? I’ll give you some opinions in brief. 

Planet of the Apes 1968: it’s a true classic of the sci-fi genre, with rock solid acting, an engaging and creative plot, and a wicked twist ending. What really stands out are the special effects, which were not only revolutionary for the time, but stand the test of time and still look impressive today. 9.5/10.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes: considering how tough an act this sequel had to follow, it’s not too bad of a follow up, but does fail to be anywhere as classic or original. A reduced budget becomes evident in some scenes, James Franciscus feels like a discount Charlton Heston at times, and the plot takes some weird turns in the third act. The ending is overpoweringly depressing, and taints the overall experience for me. 6/10.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes: it’s lighter and fresher than Beneath, and it’s fun to watch Cornelius and Zira achieve celebrity status in our own world. It’s a little slow paced in the second and third acts, but it reaches an exciting conclusion where the stakes are high, and neatly sets up the next entry in the series. 7.5/10.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes: it’s darker and weightier than the previous film, and it’s exciting to see Roddy McDowall play a different ape than he had played previously. Having the apes rise to dominance is an exciting prospect, but inconsistencies (how did all the apes on earth suddenly evolve to be human-sized and stand nearly upright and be significantly more intelligent?) as well as questionable plot elements (a virus from space wiped out all cats and dogs? Seriously? Come on!) make it far from a truly great sequel. 6.5/10.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes: this final entry manages to be an exciting and worthy conclusion to the series, despite an evidently reduced budget. The ape characters are as interesting as ever, and the undetermined future is shaped by the events that unfold. It still suffers from a “been there done that” feeling once in awhile and is occasionally uneven, but generally suffices and entertains. 7/10.

Planet of the Apes 2001: Tim Burton’s reworking of the original classic is disgraceful and silly. Even though it boasts a talented cast, incredible makeup effects by Rick Baker, and a powerful soundtrack by Danny Elfman, the characters are weak, the plot is unremarkable, it’s plagued by bizarre Burton-isms, and the cliff hanger ending falls completely flat. A subpar remake that was never necessary in the first place. 4/10.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: I expected this film to fail, but it exceeded nearly all expectations. The plot isn’t all that special, but it’s well directed and makes some clever references to earlier films. But the show stealer is Andy Serkis as Caesar. His acting brilliance coupled with the flawless visual effects make it an exciting, tense, and visually thrilling reboot, worthy of the Planet of the Apes title and the sequel coming out this summer. 9/10.