Planet of the Apes series

(On Blu-ray, September 2020) I expected to dislike the original Planet of the Apes series the more I went into the later much-derided instalments, but on the contrary, I find myself unexpectedly impressed by how much the series was able to put on the table even then—the inspiration for the 2010s remakes is clearly seen in the last few films of the original series. But even I struggle to find anything more to say about the last film of the original series. The fifth instalment Battle for the Planet of the Apes certainly feels like an epilogue looking for something to say—it repeats points of previous episodes, looks as if it was filmed with enthusiastic LARPers on a weekend getaway and tortures itself by staying close to the previous films despite an obvious time skip. It’s worth a look for the material it laid out for the later remake series, but it can be a slog to get through thanks to the slow pacing, rough dialogue and meaningless plotting. There are a few extended battle scenes later on that highlight where the meagre budget has been spent, and it’s hard to stay mad at a film that ends the series with an ambiguous message of interspecies harmony. Still, it’s a whimper of a conclusion rather than a bang: the earlier instalments had much more to say.

(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.

(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.