Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

(On Blu-ray, September 2020) I hadn’t really explored the later instalments of the original Planet of the Apes series, but now that I am, I realize how little the rather good 2010s remake series actually invented. In Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the story takes a time skip into the near-future (from 1972’s perspective) and tells us about how apes replaced cats and dogs as pets, learned to talk and eventually rebelled thanks to the leadership of the baby ape born of its time-travelling parents. Conceptually, the Big Idea is intriguing, and some of the smaller ideas work as well. On-screen, however, the film is hampered by a low budget, dialogue-level silliness, and a lack of expertise in deploying science-fictional devices. (A compliant common to most of the later movies of the series.) While the film does build to a haunting climax, it seldom makes a lot of sense getting there—the idea of future-ape being the catalyst barely makes sense, considering the sudden intelligence of the apes kept as pets and servants—and that’s not even getting into the unimaginable logistics of getting so many apes as pets in a decade or two. But as with many SF movies of the early 1970s, the point is more about the allegory than the nuts and bolts of the plot: there are a lot of parallels here between the apes and the civil rights movement and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes doesn’t even try to be subtle about it. It does add a layer of additional respectability to a film that wouldn’t be so admirable on purely technical grounds. Of course, the recent remake series has redone all of this except much better and with a far better tonal control. The original series may still be worth a look, though, if only to show the kernel of the idea being worked out.