Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

(On Blu-ray, September 2020) I’ve never been a big fan of the original Planet of the Apes series, and Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the series’ last gasp of interest before sinking lower and lower into nonsense. There are still some undeniable strengths to this third instalment, starting with how the screenwriters found a way to keep the story going even after the all-destroying climax of the previous film. Now, apes get back to circa-1971 California through more time-travel shenanigans and we can see a reverted image of the first film in how they are welcomed, feared and destroyed by human society. The potential for social commentary here is rich, especially given the era Civil-Rights in which the film was produced, and it’s to the film’s credit that some effort is invested in making the ape protagonists likable, and to try to show how the world reacts to them. Unfortunately, the script seems to have been written with an impossible deadline and a compendium of dumb movie clichés because the first half-hour is so dumb that it becomes exasperating. The film flies from one implausible situation to another not because it’s trying to be funny, but because it’s deliberately avoiding logical plot progression out of a misguided intention to save some revelations for Big Scenes—it doesn’t help that the scientists in this film are among the more incompetent ones ever assembled for a first-contact situation. As a result, Escape from the Planet of the Apes exhausts all goodwill even before it gets where it wanted to go through that slap-dash first act. It leaves a bad impression that can’t be entirely corrected by later improvements in the film’s overall quality. The unrefined dialogue can’t do justice to the ideas that the film wants to explore, and the action doesn’t fly particularly high either. The actors are fine, but the limits of the film’s budget clearly show throughout—although it’s fun to see the 1970s brought to life so unpretentiously. Still, the beginning hurts, and so does the overly pessimistic ending (although this was now the New Hollywood grim-dark era, and it’s not as if the series do far didn’t already feature two of the bleakest endings in American cinema at that point). I’m glad I didn’t stop watching when the script’s stupidity was unbearable because Escape from the Planet of the Apes does improve significantly after a while. But it brings my appreciation to a muddled ambivalence rather than anything overly positive.