Planet of the Apes (1968)

By Mr. Tropnevad

Summary

Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) crash lands on a strange planet light years from his own. He discovers that the dominant species on the planet are talking apes who do experiments on humans and use them for sport. Now he is in a fight for survival as he tries to learn where he is and how this has happened to the human species.



What I Expected

A few weeks ago I noticed that this was available on instant Netflix and since it has been over ten years since I have watched it, I decided to see how cheesy it is as an adult. Then it led to me watching the entire series. So this means at some point this month I am going to have reviews for all of the movies.

The Bad

Planet of the Apes is dated for its time and for anyone to say it isn’t they are just lying to themselves. If this was made exactly the same way today and with the same dialog it would go straight to video. Don’t get me wrong though the movie is enjoyable but that also depends on how much cheese you are willing to deal with if you have never seen it before. I loved this as a child and even into my early twenties I enjoyed it. Being older and seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes does make me want to see a remake of this.

In the beginning I found numerous flaws but I am not going to name them all because I am not here to teach you about space travel. In saying that if you have never seen this or would like to see this movie you need to realize that the film makers were not very intelligent in the late 60s. There are numerous flaws throughout the film that made me question the movie and how it would live up to today’s standards and I even had to pause it a few times to remind myself that I should be trying to have fun with this movie. After all this is a cult classic and I will save the horribleness for later on in the series.

I am going to make a few complaints though because these two things need to be pointed out. At one point Taylor is held in ape court and is not allowed to speak. I know I shouldn’t get mad at this but if he is an astronaut he should have a high level of intelligence to inform these apes why he is there. Take for granted he has Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) there to speak for him and he could inform them of what to stay. I mean seriously your fighting for your life and you can’t even find a way to convince the apes that you are intelligent. I just couldn’t accept this scene. Not to mention the scene is drug out to where I believe the film makers used it just to make the movie longer. The chase scene with Taylor is unbelievable, too. I can't accept that none of the apes are going to stop him in the city and the ones that are chasing him can't catch him. The film is almost two hours long and the director (Franklin J. Schaffer) should have not been afraid to shorten it. I know most Apes fans would complain but do you really think this movie should be two hours long when the others are about ninety minutes or less.

The Good

Honestly I don’t know who could play a better Taylor than Charlton Heston. He looks good with his shirt off and he has that mainlines about him that says hell yeah I’ll take all of you on without a hint of fear. His movie career was already established before this but I believe Planet of the Apes helped make him a science fiction star. His dialog is cheesy at times but you can’t fault him or the writer (Rod Serling better know for The Twilight Zone). I blame the 60s for the dialog and while I know some people will say there is nothing wrong with the dialog there are problems. I don’t care who you are at some point in your life you have heard “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape! ” Even that is a little cheesy to today’s standards but it is still awesome. Overall I would praise him for his role.

As far as the rest of the cast goes they are good and they are a reason besides Heston to why this movie has held up for so long. Roddy McDowall plays Cornelius and while he could have taken the idea of being an ape a joke he did an excellent job playing the character. Not to mention he goes on to play an ape several more times after this. Kim Hunter plays Zira, Corneliu’s love interest and a reason why Taylor is looked at as different. Then there is Maurice Evans who plays the evil Dr. Zaius. Wait maybe I shouldn’t use the word evil and more like maleficent after all he isn’t completely evil. Dr. Z will make you want to hate him and he has his reasons and this is something that is done extradoniarly. I seriously wanted to reach through the TV and choke this ape at certain times. Then we have Linda Harrison playing Nova. Nova is Taylor’s neanderthal love interest. At the time of this film, America had movies such as One million years b.c., Trog, and EEGAH which always had a sexy woman in it. Due to her wearing almost nothing could have been a draw for some of the non sci-fi male audience to come to the theater. After all they didn’t have a computer to look up their women on back then. So yeah she was used for eye candy and that was it. But if you are going to repopulate the planet with intelligent humans why not get the best looking of the group, right?

Not just this movie but the entire Apes series does something that is very interesting and that is show racism between the apes. It might be hard for some to notice it at first but throughout the series you learn that each type of ape has an issue with another. While it is odd that they have it in the movies it just shows that even with intelligence a certain group can hate another. To make this even more interesting since the actors did not take their masks off between takes it was noticed by the crew that the three different ape species were not mingling between themselves, but just like in real life they were separating themselves by classification. In other words orangutang actors with orangutang actors, chimp actors with chimp actors, and gorilla actors with gorilla actors.

Overall Thoughts

I know this review is short but this is because I am reviewing the entire series. This is available on Instant Netflix and I do think it is worth the two hour time limit to watch. Granted this is not for everyone but if you found Rise of the Planet of the Apes interesting I do think you owe it to yourself to watch this one. Before I go though I would like to point out that for every question you have about the series the answers will eventually be answered. I will hint to you now though that I do believe some of the movies do need to be skipped, but you will have to wait to see which ones.

If this was not available to stream I would say buy it because you won’t go wrong for the right price. Amazon is selling the Blu-Ray for $11 and the DVD for $7. Personally I would prefer the blu-ray because I would like to learn more from the special features.

Overall- Buy

I will be posting links to each of the reviews as they become available on this page.