Those Damn Dirty Apes: Our Guide to 40 Years of "Planet of the Apes," Part 1

By Matt Singer

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of one of the most well-remembered, metaphorically rich, penny-pinching, bare-chested, temporally impossible movie series of all time, IFC News looks back at "Planet of the Apes" and all its ape brethren. Stay tuned for installments two and three in the upcoming weeks.

Please note: Most "Planet of the Apes" films have a "shocking" twist that everyone at this point already knows. However, if you have somehow extricated yourself from forty years of pop culture references, by all means be wary of SPOILERS ahead.

Synopsis: Three Earth astronauts from the 1970s crash land on a mysterious planet in the year 3978 after thousands of years in suspended animation. After days roaming a desert wasteland they stumble on a primitive, non-verbal human civilization and then a society of intelligent apes. Captain Taylor (Charlton Heston) is captured by the apes; within their Ape City, he encounters the kind scientists Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) and the powerful and paranoid Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans). Cornelius and Zira befriend Taylor and help him escape his captivity. Taylor and his chosen mate, Nova (Linda Harrison), ride off into the sunset of the Ape Planet's "Forbidden Zone"...

Until! ...they chance upon one of the most iconic final shots in all of cinema, the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. A crestfallen Taylor realizes he is, in fact, on Earth, one that has apparently been destroyed by an unrevealed cataclysm. Drag.

Metaphors of the Apes: The elaborate ape makeup, by John Chambers -- who was rewarded with an Honorary Academy Award for his impressive efforts -- is all there to quite literally mask a story about racial prejudice in 1960s America. Obviously the apes enslave the humans (who, in an ironic role reversal, are all white-skinned) but even within the simian society there is friction and persecution; Zira, for instance, notes how Dr. Zaius, an orangutan, looks down his nose at the chimpanzees, who are disallowed from taking part in the ape government.

People Forget: that Charlton Heston's Taylor is a total dick. Granted, he's treated poorly by Dr. Zaius and the rest of the apes, but that's no excuse for the poor manners he frequently displays throughout the film. He flies off the handle with alarming speed; any bit of bad news is liable to send Heston into a sweaty, profane frenzy ("You cut up his brain, you BLOODY BABOON!"). The fact that the embittered Taylor is an astronaut, that great symbol of 1960s optimism and heroism, only enhances his status as a surprisingly dislikable protagonist, one we often side with on the basis of species loyalty alone. That said...

Charlton Heston's a Friggin' Badass: You have to love a movie star who isn't afraid to look like a douche. Taylor isn't just brutal to his enemies; he's not even civil to his friends! When his fellow astronaut plants a symbolic flag in the Forbidden Zone, the cynical Taylor -- who took this doomed mission to try to find something in the universe "better than man" after becoming disillusioned with society -- mockingly laughs at the gesture. I'm talking cackling-like-a-madman laughter. Later, when Cornelius tells him to stop holding Dr. Zaius at gunpoint, the grumpy human shoves him aside and yells "Shut up!" (despite the fact that Cornelius has risked his own freedom to give Taylor his). Cornelius, someone should have told you: nobody messes with Chuck Heston when he's got a rifle.

After 40 Years, It's Easy To Seem Dated: Cornelius and Zira's nephew Lucius (Lou Wagner) gets to spout all sorts of hilarious youth movement slogans, as if Ape City had its very own Haight-Ashbury. "How are you feeling?" Taylor asks him after the final battle. "Disillusioned!" he replies, "You can't trust the older generation!" The racial component of the film still works; the hippie ape, not so much.

Continuity Boo-Boos: As author Eric Greene observes in his text commentary track on the "Apes" DVD, Taylor should have been clued in to the fact that he's on Earth well before he spots what's left of Lady Liberty. Why else would the apes speak English?

"Beneath the Planet of the Apes" (1970)
Directed by Ted Post

Synopsis: After Taylor disappears into a bad special effect in the Forbidden Zone, another astronaut from his time conveniently crash lands on the Planet of the Apes looking for him. Our new hero, Brent (James Franciscus) hooks up with Nova, then completes a checklist of Taylor's activities from the first movie: he rides horseback with Nova, gets captured and brought to Ape City, receives help from Zira and Cornelius (now played by David Watson), loses his clothes, walks around in a loincloth, receives a bullet wound that requires a bandage, realizes that a)he's on a world full of talking gorillas and b)the world is, in fact, the Earth, and so on. Later, Brent and Nova find the remnants of New York City in the Forbidden Zone, and along with them, a race of telepathic mutants who worship a massive nuclear weapon called the Doomsday Bomb. Our heroes reunite with Taylor and all three escape just as the ape army, led by Dr. Zaius and General Ursus (James Gregory), attack the mutants' lair...

Until! the apes kill Nova and Brent and mortally wound Taylor. After Dr. Zaius refuses to help him, Taylor activates the Doomsday Bomb and destroys the entire world out of spite. Good to see Taylor hasn't mellowed since the last "Apes!" After the screen fades to white, a somber narration informs us that the earth "a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." And you thought "The Empire Strikes Back" was a depressing sequel.

Metaphors of the Apes: "Beneath" largely discards the previous film's racial component and instead depicts a twisted version of religious fanaticism. Though the apes' religion was discussed in the first picture, here it is given more screen time, and paired with the mutants and their intensely creepy bomb-based religion. In a truly disturbing sequence, Brent and Nova are forced to endure a mutant worship service ("May the blessing of the bomb almighty, and the fellowship of the holy fallout descend on us all!"). At the heights of the scene's delirium, five mutants peel off their faces, revealing the fact that they all look like Darth Vader without his mask on, and begin to sing in harmony to their "almighty and everlasting bomb." In a movie that is, to that point, mostly a harmless rehash of its predecessor, this chilling scene portends just how dark the ending will get.

People Forget: how much James Franciscus looks like Charlton Heston. The uncanny resemblance is almost certainly the reason the mediocre actor -- whose convulsions during his mental interrogation by the mutants is downright Shatnerian -- landed the role.

After 40 Years, It's Easy To Seem Dated: "Beneath" marks the series' slow backslide into low-budget hell, and it already shows in the more elaborate sequences, where extras no longer wear the full compliment of John Chambers' makeup and instead try to sneak by with cheap-looking ape masks. If you freeze-frame the scene where Ursus delivers his speech to the ape council, you can have a lot of fun spotting the bad applications. It's sort of like trying to find a guy in a crowd with a bad toupee.

Continuity Boo-Boos: Ooh, boy, there are a lot of them. First, the entire notion that the government would send a rescue mission to find a ship that's been tossed thousands of years into the future is totally preposterous. Even if Brent found Taylor, what would he do with him? Plus, Brent's ship tells him he's landed in the year 3955, 23 years before Taylor! Most amusingly, Brent knows to follow Nova because she's wearing Taylor's dog tags. The only problem is Taylor doesn't wear dog tags in the first movie and in the flashback scene conveniently added to explain their existence he nonchalantly pulls them out of his loincloth. So, what, his loincloth has pockets?

Charlton Heston's a Friggin' Badass: Heston didn't want to return for another "Apes" and he only agreed on the condition that his part was limited to about fifteen minutes of screen time and he got to die so he wouldn't be asked to come back again. But apparently that wasn't assurance enough for Heston that Fox wouldn't drag him back if they developed another sequel. So what does he do? He kills the entire planet along with his character. "It's DOOMSDAY! The END of the WORLD!" he sneers at Zaius in a bat-shit crazed whisper. His final words as Taylor: "Bloody bastard!" You would have thought there could be no further "Apes" movies, but, as we'll see soon, not even Heston could kill this series.

On to Part 2!

[Photos: "Planet of the Apes," and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," Twentieth Century-Fox, 1968 and 1970]

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Tags: Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston, Planet of the Apes