Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Movie #3 of 2024:

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Over half a century on, this first Apes film holds up remarkably well. It’s that tricky blend of smart and thrilling, the big-budget equivalent of Star Trek: TOS, which was airing on TV at that time. The ape costumes and makeup are believably immersive, while the worldbuilding details of simian society are likewise fleshed out enough to feel like a distinctive cultural environment. The script is also well-paced, building from a reflective philosophical tone to bursts of frenzied action and back in steady cresting waves. In fact, the title of the piece gives the premise away significantly in advance, especially for an audience familiar with the franchise that followed. For the first half-hour or so of this initial movie, the three astronaut characters believe they’re the only humans on the planet where they’ve crash-landed, and it’s even longer before any of the intelligent apes actually arrive on the scene.

Soon after, we’ve whittled our focal cast down to just Charlton Heston’s Taylor, subsequently joined by the important resident non-humans. The structure of the plot is brilliant here, as well — having received an injury to his throat in the hunt that occurs a quarter of the way through, he spends the next quarter of the text as an abused prisoner, as unable to speak out to prove his intelligence as any of the devolved chattel humans like Nova around him. It’s a kafkaesque nightmare experience that results in him recovering enough to finally shout his classic line, “Take your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” at approximately the halfway mark of the overall runtime.

The back half of the story continues the legalistic madness, and is where Planet of the Apes shines as a funhouse mirror for the racism and opposition to science of our world. While the chimpanzee researchers Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius are soon convinced that Taylor is telling the truth about his origins, the orangutan politician Dr. Zaius stubbornly refuses to accept it and instead moves rapidly against them. The astronaut is forced to defend his humanity — as it were — in open court, regardless of the inherent absurdity there.

Ultimately, of course, the finale delivers the infamous twist that the titular ‘planet of the apes’ has been Earth all along. Taylor and his new friends were right when they insisted that the evidence supported their heretical theory that the humans of this world had a thriving civilization before the apes did, but he’s been wrong to think that his spaceship traveled hundreds of lightyears away on its relativistic journey through space. In some fashion that the movie does not explain, the rocket apparently got turned around and deposited him and his crew right back where they started.

That reveal is so well-known at this point as to be baked into people’s general understanding of the series as depicting a future Earth where the apes are in charge, but it’s worth unpacking to consider in its original context. Parallel / contingent evolution was rather commonplace in science-fiction of that era, which often populated alien planets with human-like beings and other lifeforms that looked much like our fellow animals on Earth. By convention, the coincidence was typically ignored, much as this film ignores how the apes’ written and spoken language is somehow exactly identical to Taylor’s.

The original tension of Planet of the Apes, beyond the immediate plight of the protagonists, was the fear that if apes on that distant world overthrew the humans there, the same fate could easily happen to us back here (with a reasonable reading of the subtext being a strained metaphor for twentieth-century race relations). In fact, in the French novel that the movie is based on, the surviving astronaut races home in the end to warn his compatriots about the danger he’s witnessed, only to find that he’s too late and the same ape revolution happened while he was away. La Planète des singes was not our world, and contemporary audiences in 1968 had no reason to expect that the adaptation would shake out any differently. The twist in the Rod Serling screenplay plays brilliantly against that expectation, capping off the enterprise with that iconic shot of Lady Liberty, a moral about humanity’s fatal embrace of nuclear weapons, and Charlton Heston kneeling forlorn on the shore.

What a movie! It’s no wonder so many sequels and reboots have followed, loose as the ongoing storyline and franchise continuity have occasionally grown between them.

[Content warning for sexism, gun violence, and biomedical experimentation.]

★★★★★

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