I watched or rewatched all of the movies in the Planet of the Apes franchise. Some went up in my estimation, but overall, I felt like I spent a lot of time looking at missed opportunities, crummy cash-grabs, and the frustrations of modern tentpole filmmaking.
My experience with the various Planets of the Apes is probably fairly common. I watched the very first movie a bunch of times, saw the sequels piecemeal on SciFi/SyFy, then saw the Tim Burton one in theaters because it was a Tim Burton movie and it was in the theater. Then I moved on with my life and forgot about ape planets except for the occasional eyeroll when the first film would be referenced on Family Guy or South Park or a ZAZ spoof movie. I was, in short, a Planet of the Apes (the singular movie) fan.
The era of new wave science fiction is generally my favorite in the genre, so soft scifi is my jam. Actors in ape masks, goofy premise, some thought-provoking ideas, that’s all cool with me. Star Trek (TOS), Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut: I think science fiction is a handy tool for recontextualizing social critique. By shifting your story about industrialization and capitalism into a future dystopia or alternate history (Player Piano, The Man in the High Castle), you can engage with readers in a way that may not be possible when using real-world examples that are full of demagoguery baggage and prejudices. Planet of the Apes is at once a prison break adventure and a facile allegory about institutional racism. Cool beans. A+. 10/10 would watch again.
The problem for me—as I went through the sequels and remakes and reboots and retoolings and sidequels and the blood-from-a-stone that is the disneyfication of intellectual propery—is that the fiction in your social science fiction needs to work on its own. And, conversely as is the case with the two most recent films, stripping all of the social commentary out of your social science fiction is like offering someone a slice of cake but there’s just icing. If there’s no deeper questions in your ape planet movie, and it is instead just a story about two factions fighting over scarce resources, why bother with the apes at all?
So yeah, I (re)watched all of the Apes movies thanks to a blu ray/4k collection that I picked up at Best Buy. And here are my general thoughts on each one.
The Planet of the Apes (1968)
This movie rules. The sound design is jarring and odd, and is the design element that most sticks with me. Charlton Heston was a brilliant choice for the lead as he has that biblical-epic gravitas even when he’s wearing a fur loincloth and throwing tridents. The performances by Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowell, and Maurice Evans (as, respectively, the apes Zira, Cornelius, and Dr. Zaius) is likely the reason that this became a multi-decade, nine-film franchise. They are really excellent at giving a performance that is mostly eyes, voice, and body language.
This film sets the tone for the entire series with how it portrays the commerce of slavery, the rationalizing of slavery, republicanism, and the ways that institutional religion can be wielded to stifle science and human rights. It isn’t saying much about these ideas, but some characters do confront some of their beliefs and some show growth. Hopefully viewers came away from the experience thinking about how the real world addresses these topics.
Planet is also a rousing adventure, as Charleton Heston’s Taylor has to not only escape the apes but also figure out how to be rescued from this strange planet. You already know the ending, so you know how that goes.
The part that has bothered me is that Taylor escapes and flees into the Forbidden Zone, but he doesn’t give a shit about all of the other human slaves. Even just a tossed-off line, like “we’ll find a way to help them somehow, someday,” would have made it a little easier to root for him.
Anyway, high point of the series.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
And now we’re at the low point of the series. Didn’t take long! This movie is a misfire from the get-go. James Franciscus looks way too much like Charlton Heston, so when we lose Heston ten minutes in, he is immediately replaced by a slightly thinner doppelganger.
This movie stinks. The underground stuff is schlocky (psychic humans, abandoned subway stations, etc.), and again it annoys me that these psychics didn’t use their powers to free the enslaved humans (nominally “good” people being complicit in the continuance of slavery is depressing but underexplored).
Back in the ape city, we have at least pieces of a narrative, as we get a little more of Zira and Cornelius and the ape societal structure. We see some warring factions and it almost seems like the scientists/warriors/etc. are in a caste system but it’s not explicitly stated. Anyway, there’s a bellicose general and he wins out in the shouting match of the senate, so the apes kind of attack the Forbidden Zone psychics.
None of it matters, because the planet is soon blown up. Good riddance.
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
The planet blew up, but we’re in a time paradox now, as some apes escape the destruction and go back in time to 1970s LA, starting the process toward the future ape planet that they will one day leave to go back in time to…
This movie is actually fun. It feels cheap (like 1970s TV cheap) but I don’t care at all because the actors are game and the story has good pacing. Zira and Cornelius are intercepted by the military and taken to be studied by some zoologists, and become celebrities. The themes are a little heavy-handed but it’s fine as it is a clever reversal to have the apes from the first two movies now in the hands of humans. This lets the narrative pivot into the idea of personhood and animal rights.
The movie has a massively downer ending, which is oddly the standard in this series. However, thanks to some sleight-of-hand at the circus, Zira’s and Cornelius’ son survives (kept hidden by no less than the titan of scifi, Ricardo Montalban), setting up the next couple of stinkers in the series.
I recommend this one very much. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is contemporary and the film smartly kept its best actor (Hunter), although good times weren’t meant to last.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Back to a bad movie. There isn’t a lot to like here. There’s a police state on Earth because of a pandemic, and for some reason, humans have enslaved apes? I get that it was a necessity to show the transition toward how Earth became the ape planet, but the screenwriters did understand that there aren’t tons and tons of apes on the planet, right? The expense it must have taken to accumulate every gorilla, bonobo, and chimp on earth is very silly.
Anyway, the slavery and fascism allegory is very heavy here. Caesar is an interesting character, but it’s such a downer of a story at this point that I don’t want to watch it any more. I mentioned earlier that I think idea-heavy science fiction should still function as fiction. It may be my personal hangup, but watching a bunch of onscreen war death just so the final bit can be “oh, but now let’s not kill any more [until the next movie]” isn’t enough payoff for all of the pain.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
I said that Beneath was the low point. This is almost worse. However, I like how we get a glimmer of hope at the end. Before that, though, it’s a lot of shooting and shouting. The dialectic hasn’t progressed in the series, which is the biggest sin for me: we’re on yet another movie where those in power are questioning the morality of keeping others enslaved. This was already featured in #1 and #3 and #4. Escape at least took it in a different direction, with the apes arguing for their right to self-determine and be considered as persons (even though the attempt was futile).
By this point in the series, we should be past armed conflict between the factions and into discussions of reparations and the struggle for the two groups to coexist. Instead, the buck is passed.
Planet of the Apes (2001)
This one is a miss for me, but it’s more frustrating because I feel like there are the bones of a possible good movie in here. This is a pretty direct retelling of the original (1968) film. Mark Wahlberg is miscast as the lead, but Helena Bonham Carter puts in work as the sympathetic ape. Kris Kristoffersen is amso randomly in it, and Tim Roth and Michael Clarke Duncan are pretty good villains.
The prosthethics look pretty damned cool. The actors’ faces are more expressive so the performances are more naturalistic (if that can be said about people playing chimpanzees riding horses while displaying almost no interiority). The palette is dull, though. Where the original opted for desert and earthtones, this is more leather and fog and sound stages. It is very much in line with Burton’s vibe in Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, but the movie doesn’t say or do anything that wasn’t done in the original.
Perhaps if they’d focused more on the intimated human/ape romance, we’d have something. Instead, this just feels like a dead end.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
I have two conflicting opinions on this film, which I think is indicative of my overall feelings about this franchise.
- This movie is interesting.
- I don’t ever want to watch this movie again.
I think this is the second-strongest of the ape planet movies. The cast is very good, with Andy Serkis putting in some work as Caesar, and James Franco (Rodman) and John Lithgow (daddy Rodman) being the most sympathetic humans since the zoologists in Escape. (Brian Cox is in paycheck mode. YMMV, but I prefer him being darkly funny in dramas.)
But it is emotionally exhausting to watch a movie like this. Franco and Freida Pinto play scientists working on Alzheimer cures (daddy Rodman is afflicted with the disease), and this requires medical testing on apes. I’m already dealing with two of my least favorite things from the real world (neurodegenerative disease; animal testing) and in film (neurodegenerative disease as plot motivation for another character; Franco doing drama). And my god does this movie feel longer than 105 minutes.
Anyway, I like how Caesar develops as a character and I like how Rodman is conflicted. He considers the benefit to humanity to outweigh the pain he inflicts on the apes, but this generates tension when Caesar becomes a surrogate child to him.
I also think that the catharsis of the apes’ escape is the emotional high point of the entire series. This is also the closest we get to an outright happy ending in nine films.
They should have stopped with this one.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
This movie is boring and frustrating, but is a visual feast. It feels far more like a high-budget Romero homage than it does an Apes sequel. Any of the themes of animal personhood or the cultural ramifications of slavery are stripped out. Instead, the movie is essentially “Group A needs item x but it is in Group B’s territory. Group B wants to be left alone. Group A forces their hand.”
So Caesar’s apes have created an entire civilization out in the woods of Northern California and a virus (stemming from the Alzheimer’s tests in the previous movie, I think?) has wiped out most of human civilization. Across the Bay a bunch of humans have settled into the ruins of a city and their next step in rebuilding is to repair the hydroelectic dam. So Keri Russell and Jason Clarke and some other humans head up into the woods to fix the dam. There they come into conflict with the apes. Then the rest of the movie is just Jason Clarke’s team and Caesar scrambling to prevent violence.
It goes poorly. Lots of humans and apes die.
I didn’t buy the central conflict, though, so I was left just cringing as horses and gorillas were exploded over and over again. To wit: the apes don’t need the dam at all. This kind of tragedy only works if both sides require the same finite resource. You feel the pain and futility of Caesar’s attempts at diplomacy only if the resource is existential for both groups. If the apes just let the humans fix the dam and then cede the road to them, the groups never have to interact again.
So because the dam is irrelevant for one side, the screenwriters create interfactional conflict in other ways. And unfortunately, most of this conflict comes from misunderstandings which could be solved by any of the main characters taking two extra seconds to talk to each other.
I guess there’s something there, in that even good-faith attempts at diplomacy often fail, but the story didn’t work for me. And the ending is dumb as dirt and ugly to boot: the movie has all of these incredible vistas and settings, yet the abandoned skyscraper finale looks like it was pulled out of an Iron Man movie.
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
And here’s the logical conclusion to stripping the interesting parts out of this franchise and leaning more on the computer effects and shootin’.
This movie is visually beautiful, with the winter setting especially nice as a contrast to tanks and fur and blood. But now the humans aren’t traumatized survivors, they are well-provisioned soldiers. The apes… are still apes. So there’s not really any way that this ends well, right?
I guess it is a testament to the writing that we still care about the apes and think they have a chance as we barrel toward the foregone conclusion. But it is still frustrating that the series always pivoted toward bombast when it should have gone introspective.
I’m just a bitter old thirtysomething, I guess, but I’d be content to never watch another tentpole film that is so Disneyfied / Marvelized. Audiences suspended disbelief of crummy latex masks because the story was interesting and weird. I’m a huge fan of special effects and technological advances in moviemaking, but it’s frustrating to see a $200 million budget that accounts for the animation of individual hair follicles but doesn’t care about whether the story is compelling.
Conclusion
Anyway, that is all nine ape planet movies. In summation:
Recommend: Planet of the Apes (1968), Escape, Rise
Recommend, but just for the cool CGI: Dawn
Not worth it: Beneath, Conquest, Battle, Planet (2001), War