Planet of the Apes

When Charlton Heston died in April it spurred an interest to see just a few of his films. One of them was Touch of Evil, which I'd seen before and is discussed two entries below. The others are what has been termed the "Charlton Heston Dystopia Trio," three films set in a particularly bleak future. They were certainly interesting choices for Heston, who had been up to then a square-jawed hero in historical epics, who was now called upon to play antiheroes representing the last gasp of mankind.

The first of these is Planet of the Apes, the wildly successful sci-fi film released in 1968. Netflix describes it as a "camp classic," but I think that's a disservice, and certainly Heston wouldn't have considered it camp (I don't think that word was in his vocabulary--I have the feeling he acted every part with grave sincerity). It is really a political satire and allegory, and was quite groundbreaking for its time.

I saw the film in its initial release, and may have been the first film I'd seen that wasn't a children's film. Who knows how long it's been since I've seen it--when I watched it last night there were whole chunks I had forgotten (mostly from the film's first half-hour). I did not know, for example, that is was co-written by Rod Serling (surely the film's ironic ending must have been his, it has Twilight Zone written all over it) and then revised by Michael Wilson, who also wrote Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

For the two or three of you who don't know, the story concerns a team of American astronauts traveling through space at light speed, thus they age significantly slower than the Earth they left behind. They spend 18 months in hibernation (beards grow, but interestingly the hair on their head does not) and crash land in a desert on an unknown planet. Heston surmises they are several hundred light years from Earth, and two-thousand Earth years have gone by, meaning everyone and everything they knew back home is dead and gone. This seems to delight him, as he something of a misanthrope.

When they make contact with humans they are mute and primitive, and then we get the big reveal (of course the title gives it away)--the ruling class on this planet are apes, and humans are considered beasts. Heston is captured, his throat injured so he can't speak, but soon enough shows his handlers (some sympathetic chimps) that he is intelligent.

Much of this film delights in satirical views of religion and law. In a scene where Heston is put on trial, the elder orangutans view him as some sort of freak of nature, and state that their sacred scrolls warn apes to be wary of man. In a parallel to the U.S. during the civil rights era, it is rather pointed that the apes, who give lip-service to universal equality, have a distinct class structure, with orangutans on top and gorillas on the bottom (the trivia track points out that in an earlier draft there was a fourth class, the baboons, who were treated even worse, and contained scenes in which they carried signs advocating their rights).

There are also moments when the minister of science, the memorable Dr. Zaius, dismisses Cornelius, the chimp archaeologist, and his beliefs in evolution. The scene is a take-off on the Scopes Monkey Trial, but has relevance in the age of so-called intelligent design.

The film spawned four sequels, Heston appearing in none of them. His character is last seen realizing where he is, in front of a damaged Statue of Liberty, one of the most resonating final scenes in film history. The author of the source novel, Pierre Boule, hated it (his ending was more like the ending in Tim Burton's misbegotten remake of 2001). But of course the clues are there for anyone with a brain. First of all, that the apes speak English would have been a pretty good signal to Heston's character that he might be on Earth (the screenwriters knew this was a problem but couldn't come up with a workable solution).

The film holds up pretty well today. The makeup, which earned its creator, John Chambers, a special Oscar, even looks pretty good after forty years of innovations. Planet of the Apes continues to be one of the better and more iconic science-fiction films ever made.