Going Ape

Ah, the joy of having a DVR: the Fox Movie Channel ran all five of the original Planet of the Apes movies over Thanksgiving weekend (sorry, Tim Burton remake from 2001) and I was smart enough to record them all. I hadn't yet seen the first sequel and it had been a long time since I'd seen the others (probably not since high school), so I figured it would be a good time to watch them all in a relatively short span.

Planet of the Apes is easily one of the best science fiction films of all time, taking us to another world (well, sort of, everyone knows the big reveal at the end) to tell us about ourselves here in the present. It also has the most badass opening I've seen in some time: Charlton Heston's Colonel Taylor smoking a cigar on a spaceship nearing the speed of light, saying good riddance to the 20th Century. Beyond the obvious point about mankind's greed and destructive tendencies, the film raises questions about just what makes us human, the balance of faith and science, what our place in the universe is, and how we construct our own realities. Top all this off with some sweet simian makeup effects, Linda Harrison in animal skins as Nova, and the revelation that Taylor is not on a planet in the constellation of Orion but on Earth all along, and you've got a Classic with a capital C.

The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, is something else entirely. To call this one dark is an understatement. Another spaceship from 1972 on a mission to find Taylor (who disappears in the Forbidden Zone) crashes on Earth (even if it estimates the year differently than Taylor's ship did), and the only survivor is Brent. He finds the ape city and overhears the gorilla General Ursus delivering a speech on the need to expand ape territory, exterminate the human race ("The only good human is a dead human!"), and conquer the Forbidden Zone. Turns out the Forbidden Zone is home to a society of mutant telepathic humans that worship a Doomsday Bomb - I found it pretty disturbing, but it still made me think. In the end, Brent and Nova find Taylor, the apes shoot just about everybody, and Dr. Zaius' refusal to help a wounded Taylor drives the astronaut to detonate the bomb and destroy the world for once and all. Some of the commentary was kind of heavy-handed, but then this wasn't really a subtle setting. Turns out that Dr. Zaius was right when he delivered his final words to the wounded Taylor: "You ask me to help you? Man is evil, capabale of nothing but destruction!" but this could be more of a self-fulfilling prophesy than lucid insight. The final voiceover, so matter-of-fact and unsympathetic, hit me like a kick in the teeth.

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.

Way to go, humanity. This was almost as brutal of an ending as the conclusion of Fail-Safe.

Of course, this leaves the question of how there can be another sequel if the world is a cinder and everybody is dead. Don't worry, where there's a will, there's a way.

Beware the beast, Man, for he is the Devil's pawn,
Regis