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Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Movie #9 of 2024:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

[Edited version of my original review from 2017.]

After decades languishing as a punchline in the wilderness of popular culture, Planet of the Apes got a long-overdue update in this 2011 feature, which is best understood as a quasi-canonical reboot for the franchise. Specifically, I would argue that this title is a prequel to the very first movie, going back to the original timeline — that is, ignoring the parallel version of history that branched off from the time-travel in Escape — to show how Earth started down the path towards eventual ape domination. There are still some plot holes to that approach, like how the future apes were taught that their ancestors were slaves and Aldo was the first of their kind to rebel against the masters, but it seems generally in line with what these filmmakers intended. (For example, a running thread in the background involves regular news reports about the Icarus spaceship going missing, and that was the name of the vessel that went off-course to bring Taylor and his crew crashing down to the planet where he met Dr. Zaius and the rest.) We’ve shifted focus from the threat of nuclear war to the risks of genetic tinkering, yet the moral thrust of the work still places humanity’s downfall as a consequence of our own misdeeds, with the apes serving as more of a lucky bystander recipient than the active agent of our doom.

But this is an intentional refresh for the series, so you don’t necessarily have to have seen any of the other films to follow along and enjoy it, fun as it is to spot the familiar lines of dialogue or the parallels to Conquest in particular. On its own terms, it’s a thrilling and heartfelt adventure that definitely carves out a distinct place for itself within the wider Apes narrative. If anything, its tale of a miraculous serum unlocking a worthy protagonist’s advanced powers recalls the superhero movies of the early 2000s, complete with the supporting presence of both Brian Cox and James Franco.

The storyline is pretty grounded compared to previous installments, especially once you accept the overall premise that an experimental superdrug to treat Alzheimer’s could boost the intelligence of its chimpanzee test subjects to the level of planning and carrying out a grand escape from captivity. (It’s a Rats of NIMH retelling! Kinda. And did I mention this came out the same year as Limitless?) Despite the title of the flick, the apes aren’t trying to launch a revolution to overthrow their oppressors at this point, merely to gather their brethren and reach the safety of the nearby forests across the Golden Gate Bridge. But a subplot neatly depicts how the viral treatment that’s made the apes smarter is also starting to spread throughout the human population, where it’s both highly contagious and fatal — rather chilling to rewatch now post-2020 — and thereby charts a plausible course from our reality to that of the ape-dominated future in the first movie. If the franchise had ended here, it still would feel like it had managed to come full circle and tell a complete story.

The characters are great too, with this Caesar getting more of a personal arc than his namesake in the 70s films. Both chimps are Moses figures, raised apart from their people and only belatedly learning the depth of their plight and taking on the mantle of saving them, but this one undergoes more of an obvious evolution in his growing disillusionment with humanity. In his final destructive charge across the city, he spares a few humans who have done him no harm, but he pointedly refuses to extend mercy to the actively abusive ones and in the end he coldly rebuffs the family that abandoned him. Throughout it all, the motion-capture CGI is a welcome change from the old makeup and masks and an impressive achievement even over a decade later, bringing him and the other apes to life in a way where you often genuinely forget that you’re not watching trained animal actors at work. (The 2001 Tim Burton film, to its shame, remains the only entry in the franchise to utilize any actual non-human primates.) It’s a bold new start, and one of my absolute favorites.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★★

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Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (2001)

Movie #8 of 2024:

Planet of the Apes (2001)

The Planet of the Apes franchise went dormant in the 1970s after five films and two short-lived TV shows, but was brought back to the big screen for this Tim Burton production several decades later. It’s best understood as a reimagining of the first movie — or as an even looser adaptation of the original French novel — rather than a further installment in the same continuity. The piece thus revolves around Mark Wahlberg as a new human astronaut in the old Charlton Heston role, crash-landing on an alien planet where talking apes reign supreme over our own species. (Heston himself gets a cameo appearance as an ape, which is fun, and a few of his more famous lines of dialogue are repurposed.) This version eschews the classic twist that the world is Earth’s future, but it does spring a similar reveal midway through: humans and apes from the protagonist’s time were the progenitors of intelligent life there, and he’s fallen across millennia to reach their descendants.

The story is alright, for the most part. Burton’s main attention seems to be on the visuals and background details, which range from impressive in the case of Paul Giamatti’s orangutan character to extremely off-putting in the case of Helena Bonham Carter’s chimpanzee. Tim Roth as the villain growls and bellows and jumps around a lot, though his motivations and the exact cause of his rage go unexplained. Meanwhile, the underclass of local humans have retained the power of speech, but they don’t do much with it; this is definitely one of those Hollywood pictures that designates a woman as the love interest by default simply for standing near the leading man.

In the end, Captain Leo escapes as Colonel Taylor was never able to, and the apes and humans he leaves behind have committed to reconciling and living in peace. But then the plot closes on a bizarre sequence that cribs off the ending of the book, with the hero arriving back on contemporary Earth to find that apes are now the dominant lifeform. The idea that they took over in his absence would be fine, and in line with what happens in the source material, but somehow the Lincoln Memorial in DC has also been changed to depict Roth’s General Thade, which is significantly harder to explain. (My best attempt would be to theorize that the antagonist at some point traveled back into Earth’s past, beating Marky Mark there, and altered the course of history so that his people overthrew ours. But that doesn’t really account for how all the familiar trappings of our culture like specific architectural landmarks, the design of police cars, and so on remain identical, and it’s certainly not spelled out in the script.)

The striking visual of Thade in place of Lincoln is a surface-level twist that’s plainly meant to recall the 1968 Statue of Liberty scene, and perhaps to set up a sequel that never materialized before the series was rebooted again in 2011. But it just fundamentally doesn’t make much sense, which is a frustrating but apt way for this curiosity to resolve.

[Content warning for gun violence, slavery, and torture.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Movie #7 of 2024:

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

A perfunctory conclusion to the original Planet of the Apes movie series, although the franchise would live on in television shows, comic books, an odd Tim Burton reimagining, and an eventual big-screen reboot in 2011 that’s still ongoing today. In this film, the uprising in Conquest has won the apes their freedom (at least in this one small area of the world), and they now dwell in a tentative peace with their former masters, who have been relegated to second-class citizens and taught never to use the word “no.” Off-screen between installments, a nuclear war has helped destroy much of human civilization, and all apes have apparently learned to speak like Caesar. The chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans believe they are naturally better than humans because they are not as prone to violence, although it’s clear that this attitude is entrenching old divisions and hiding the corrupting role of social privilege, even for audiences who haven’t seen Charlton Heston on the receiving end of ape brutality.

Our returning chimp protagonist is worried over whether that future that his parents came from is inevitable or not, and so he decides to seek out the archived recordings of them still housed in the ruins of a nearby city, in order to hear their words for himself. There he runs afoul of an old enemy and his servants, all of whom have been mutated by radiation (presumably on their way to becoming the ancestors of the underground psychics in Beneath). Though most individuals on both sides would rather not fight, misunderstanding ensues and the conflict of the title soon breaks out.

Meanwhile, an aggressive gorilla named Aldo is seething under Caesar’s imposed pacifism and plotting to seize power. In the process, he kills the leader’s son for eavesdropping on his schemes, which causes the rest of his society to realize that apes are perhaps not so morally superior to humans after all. The hero has also learned from his father’s tape that Aldo was the name of the ape slave who stood up against humanity in his timeline, supporting his friend Virgil the orangutan’s theory that history can indeed be changed. Caesar renews his commitment to peaceful coexistence, and a framing device with the legendary ape Lawgiver 600 years hence suggests that his efforts are working out and that the oppressive situation encountered by Taylor the astronaut may not ever come to pass.

As a finale it works, but it’s bland and plodding storytelling overall, with lots of scenes of generic forces running and exchanging gunfire. Not the worst of its era, but hardly a highlight either.

This movie: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Movies ranked: 1 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 2

Movie Review: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Movie #6 of 2024:

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

By this point in the initial Planet of the Apes series, viewers had seen a future world where our species had been overthrown, its apocalyptic destruction, and a tragedy wherein the only surviving refugees of that dystopia, having traveled back in time to our day with expressions of friendship and pacifism, wind up getting brutally murdered due to local xenophobia. In that last installment, we even learned details from ape history about humanity’s downfall in their original timeline: a plague wiped out other animals like cats and dogs, humans enlisted apes as pets and then slaves, and the mistreated underclass ultimately rose up against us.

This next sequel thus turns naturally to depicting that particular conflict. It’s not quite how Cornelius and Zira described it — either because their arrival in the past changed things, or because the account hadn’t been passed down faithfully to them in the first place, or just because the continuity across these films isn’t really as airtight as one might hope. But generally speaking, the state of Earth’s society a couple decades after Escape is in line with what those visitors said. Their son, swapped with a regular chimpanzee at birth to protect him, is now fully grown (and played by his late father’s actor, Roddy McDowall). He’s been brought up away from civilization by a kindly circus-owner, and is shocked at the start of events to finally see his people’s plight firsthand. When he reveals his power of speech by yelling out, “Bloody human bastards!” — which his friend tries in vain to claim was his own comment of “inhuman” — he’s forced to flee and hide amongst his mute peers, helping them strategize and slowly build a movement towards revolution.

This Apes film, more than any other, leans very strongly into the underlying racial allegory that’s always been a part of the franchise. (It’s also the entry that the later rebooted movies most clearly draw their inspiration from, whether relatedly or not.) The way the other primates are treated is specifically modeled after the worst abuses of historical slavery, with chains and auctions, beatings for disobedience, forced breeding, patronizing assertions of their inferior mental abilities, and beyond. The one Black character in the cast both disapproves of this treatment and is subjected to racist comments over his real and perceived sympathies, and the climactic struggle at the end of the movie is framed like a contemporary race riot, complete with armored police ordering the protesters to disperse.

It’s easy to root for the apes here like the script intends, but the conclusion pulls its punches a bit. After the simian forces have won and the cruel governor lies trembling at their feet, Caesar undergoes a curious change of heart and instructs them in sudden religious language that he’s never used before to show mercy and let the man go. It’s a whip-turn reversal in the middle of his closing monologue, which conspicuously plays out from there onward in voiceover, closeups of his eyes, and looping and reversed footage from earlier in the scene. The truth is that the intended ending made the bolder choice to commit to the triumphant hero overseeing the defeated villain’s death and crowing about the masters meeting their destined fate, but test audiences complained so much that it was reworked ahead of its release. That’s a bummer, but it’s still one of the better installments of its era overall.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

TV #20 of 2024:

Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

This six-part animated Star Wars anthology is pretty clearly modeled on the similar Tales of the Jedi project from 2022, and it inherits some of the same structural weaknesses. At least this time around, the story pushes forwards for one of its two focal characters — Barriss Offee, a former Jedi last seen getting locked up for bombing the temple during the Clone Wars — and doesn’t just provide general background filler, as was largely the case before. Here we learn that that protagonist subsequently became an Imperial Inquisitor for a while, before losing faith in their mission and returning to her old Jedi ways.

The other half of this season, though, is spent on Thrawn’s loyal servant Morgan Elsbeth from the live-action Mandalorian and Ahsoka shows, whose backstory proves not particularly revelatory. This is solid but unremarkable Star Wars for the most part, and although it isn’t the worst of the franchise, it never comes close to justifying its existence, especially as a separate series rather than Tales of the Jedi season 2.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Alien Scream by Chris Archer

Book #75 of 2024:

Alien Scream by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #3)

Easily the best entry so far in my reread of this 90s middle-grade sci-fi series. The formula is pretty firmly established by this point — a kid in the small Wisconsin town turns 13, develops strange powers, and winds up getting attacked by a shapeshifting alien assassin — but the teens have such different abilities and personalities that it hasn’t grown repetitive just yet. Our latest protagonist is a laid-back class clown who suddenly gains the ability to speak / sign every language fluently, and while that may not seem useful in a fight, by the end of this novel he’s learned he can also understand and command swarming insects like termites and ants and send faxes over the phone with only his voice. (Look, it was more impressive back when this was written, okay?)

What really elevates this volume above its predecessors is the stronger characterization, the fun of seeing both previous heroes from a new perspective, and the ensuing crossover / team-up vibes, although for now the group is simply sharing notes on their respective experiences and trying to decipher the sinister conspiracy against them, not actually joining together in combat. I also appreciate author Chris Archer’s deft hand at writing a teenage crush that’s obviously mutual — to this adult reader, at least — while keeping the first-person POV narrator oblivious and sweetly worried about embarrassing himself.

(Newsflash, Jack: she stopped by your table to wish you a happy birthday, walked you to the nurse’s office after you hit your head, and called your house later to check up on you. I know you feel like you can’t trust anyone, and that the version of her you saw near the end of the book was in fact an imposter who knocked you out and strapped you to a bomb, but I do think that the real girl might prove receptive if you ever worked up the courage to ask her out.)

Great genre silliness, carried off well. I remember very little of how the story goes on from here, but I’m totally on-board after this installment.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Picard, season 3

TV #19 of 2024:

Star Trek: Picard, season 3

The first two seasons of this Star Trek: The Next Generation sequel were generally at their strongest in those moments that reunited the cast of the original show, which is probably why this last year goes ahead and makes it a full-fledged reunion. As before, there’s a real thrill from seeing the old crew together again, but the plot mechanics to get us to that point are a little rough and coincidence-heavy. (Picard’s new friend Raffi is working with Worf even before they’re dragged into the admiral’s orbit? Why?) It’s also nice that this season doesn’t feel obligated to shoehorn in all the regular Picard characters like Elnor or Agnes, though that admittedly adds to the unevenness of the program at large.

The core of this new story is neat, offering a paranoid conspiracy thriller of Changelings infiltrating Starfleet, where no one is sure who else can be trusted. It’s a premise that Trek has already gone to in Deep Space Nine and other titles, but it’s still handled pretty well this time around. The fact that the enemies also want Picard and the adult son he’s just met is somewhat strange, however, with the eventual explanation and connection to the Borg not particularly satisfying. There’s no effort to justify why those two species would ever team up, or to reconcile these Borg with the redemption / evolution that another faction underwent last season on this show.

Plus, as fun as all the TNG callbacks are — we even get Ro Laren and holodeck Moriarty for some reason — they tend to draw attention to who hasn’t been included in this adventure. No sign of Wesley Crusher or Guinan, both of whom have popped into the Picard series before and presumably would have liked to see their old friends and family too, and no mention at all of Miles O’Brien! Heck, if Data can be brought back for the umpteenth time here — continuing to lessen the impact of all his previous deaths — then I really need an accounting of why Tasha Yar couldn’t be resurrected in some fashion as well, even if simply for a quick cameo as a Changeling taunt. Similarly, while Tuvok makes his first canonical Trek reappearance since Voyager ended, his emotional scenes with Seven of Nine only underscore how her stronger relationship was always with Janeway, who gets referenced but not actually shown.

This series has never come close to living up to its nostalgic potential, even / especially for a viewer like me with merely a passing fondness for the earlier Patrick Stewart show, but at least it manages to end on a surer footing than it began.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1

Movie Review: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Movie #5 of 2024:

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

A welcome bounce back for the series. Like its two predecessors, there’s a fatalistic darkness to this Apes film, but it’s carried off better here in balance with a certain comic playfulness. The producers wrote themselves into a corner by concluding the prior adventure with a bomb blowing up the entire planet (and presumably all our known characters with it, though several had already been shot to death by then), but this next sequel concocts an ingenious solution to that problem: time-travel! Since chimpanzee scientists Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius were conveniently absent from the final act of Beneath anyway, this script establishes that they were working with a genius friend on patching up the crashed spaceship from the first flick. Somehow, the three apes were able to launch it into orbit just before the doomsday weapon went off, and thus got to watch the world explode as they retraced Taylor’s trajectory backwards through space to modern Earth.

It’s a tad silly, but a great setup for the plot that follows. In a nod to the climax of the original novel — in which the hero flies home to discover that apes have taken over in his absence — this movie starts with contemporary humans swarming a spacecraft that’s just landed in the ocean, only for the astronauts to remove their helmets and reveal that they’re apes (and to cue up the title card with a funky 70s soundtrack). Though initially hesitant to disclose their intelligence and power of speech, the “apestronauts” ultimately do just that, setting them on an arc somewhat analogous to how Taylor was treated by their kind back home. Here, though, they’re welcomed as celebrity sensations after the initial disbelief and shock, and viewers get a rather glorious montage of their ensuing shopping spree and media blitz.

Cornelius and Zira have been staunch allies for the humans in the franchise all along, but their promotion to central protagonists is a good one. From this point forward, the Planet of the Apes series has its sympathies pretty firmly on the side of the apes, with humanity at large cast as the intolerant xenophobes (offset by the occasional exceptions in the role the chimpanzee couple used to occupy). Plus, by sending a small company of apes out of their home society and into the present day, this particular movie gets away with a significantly smaller makeup and sets budget, much like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or Galactica 1980.

The humans grow more worried about their visitors the more that they let slip about their own time and what they know of Earth’s history (some of which, unfortunately, seems to contradict the state of ape knowledge established in the first film). The new origin story for apekind: a plague killed off many animals, prompting humans to turn to our primate cousins for pets and then slaves. Eventually an ape named Aldo learned to say “no” and began a revolt movement, leading to the downfall of our species and its civilization.

Though those events are far in the future, the president’s scientific advisor Otto Hasslein — name-dropped in both previous movies for his theories on relativistic space travel — fears that Zira’s unborn child will represent a bridgehead force precipitating man’s early decline. The apes are interrogated more harshly, with a specific focus on the devastation they witnessed in the war and Zira’s confessed medical experimentation on live human subjects. Hasslein ultimately procures authorization to neuter the chimps and end their pregnancy, spurring them to break out of their government holding facility and go on the run before he can. Though the scientist is ordered to take the fugitives alive, he instead shoots Zira and her newborn baby and is subsequently killed by Cornelius in revenge, who then gets slain by sniper fire himself. So much for our heroes, once again.

It’s the third downbeat ending in a row for the franchise, but there’s one further twist before the credits roll. Earlier Zira and Cornelius had stayed briefly at a traveling circus where an ordinary chimpanzee had recently given birth herself, and it’s now revealed that the two mothers swapped babies off-screen. Milo — named for their companion who died in a mishap near the start of the film — is the infant who’s still alive, and the movie ends with him exclaiming, “Mama! Mama!” in a manner eerily reminiscent of the doll Taylor found back in the Forbidden Zone that proved ancient humans could talk. It’s not quite a Terminator-style causality loop, but it does appear that Hasslein may have inadvertently helped bring about the exact fate he was trying to prevent. All in all, a neat little piece of science-fiction.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Movie #4 of 2024:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

From one of the best movies in the franchise to probably its very worst. This first Planet of the Apes sequel is a real head-scratcher, and it’s a testament to the strength of the original (and the profitability of branded merchandise, one might imagine) that the series continued at all after this. Former star Charlton Heston reportedly wanted nothing to do with a followup, and only agreed to return for a minor role if his character Taylor could be killed off, presumably so that no one would ask him to be in any further installments. Accordingly, he’s there at the beginning of the script and then at the end — where he does in fact die — with the question of his fate in the meantime helping to drive the main storyline.

In his place, the film introduces Brent, another crash-landed astronaut from our time who looks hilariously similar to Heston, though with approximately half of the natural charisma. The logic here is strained: Taylor’s crew in the last movie was supposed to be on a colonization voyage at relativistic speeds, with no hope of ever returning to contemporary Earth, yet Brent now says that his own mission was launched to find out what happened to theirs. Whatever strange force sent the one ship hurtling back to our planet in the far future has apparently struck the second one as well, and so the newcomer finds himself retracing Taylor’s steps almost exactly.

He runs into the mute woman Nova, now wearing Taylor’s identifying dog tags, and accompanies her to the nearby city to seek out the chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius. They’re as delighted as they were over Taylor to meet another talking human, and they show him on a map the Forbidden Zone where the other man was heading. While there, he overhears that a gorilla army accompanied by Dr. Zaius will soon be marching into the same area to investigate certain illusions that have been reported, looking for the resources that they may be hiding and to confront any responsible beings who dwell there.

Just ahead of the soldiers, Brent and Nova stumble into a dilapidated New York subway station, and his reaction to the discovery that he’s back home again is pretty muted compared to Taylor’s anguish at the end of the previous movie. And here’s where things take a serious turn for the surreal, as the pair discover a civilization of mutated psychic humans there underneath the irradiated desert, complete with fleshy masks to appear normal and worshiping a giant doomsday bomb.

Most of this is far less interesting than the film imagines, with not enough runtime spent with the actual apes or the thorny philosophical and ethical musings that elevated the Heston feature. The returning characters all feel flattened into caricatures, and the mutants are too weird and uniform to stand out as distinctive personalities themselves. It’s a pale imitation of what made Planet of the Apes tick, and a dreary miscalculation of what divergences from the formula would be entertaining.

The simian army soon arrives underground, as the mood of the piece grows ever more nihilistic. Under the telepathic influence of his captors, Brent is forced to strangle and drown Nova and fight against Taylor, and although the three of them survive that particular encounter, they are each subsequently shot and killed as the gorillas open fire. As Taylor succumbs to his wounds, he curses at Zaius and presses the control panel to ignite the weapon, which blows up the planet as promised. Cut to a blank screen with an ominous voiceover declaring, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-size star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” Roll credits, where we see that the mutants have been listed under names like Fat Man and Negro. Somehow, the studio would go on to make another three direct sequels.

A lot of this seems like it might have worked on paper. Tone down the outlandish campiness of the future mutated humans, give everyone involved more sustained characterization, and tie back to the events of the first film more closely, and the basic plot points could have been sound enough. (Dr. Zaius, once a complicated antagonist who buried the knowledge that humans can talk and suspected Taylor came not from space but from a tribe in the Forbidden Zone, now gives absolutely no indication of that history here where it would seem highly relevant.) The new lore about the ape Lawgiver is nice, as is the mirage of his statue bleeding. I like that Nova gets to blurt out Taylor’s name before she dies, implying that the devolved humans aren’t a totally lost cause, and it’s nice to see the two chimp allies again, although they don’t get to interact with Taylor and disappear from the script well before the end without any particular closure.

Mostly, though, this is just a mess.

★★☆☆☆

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.]

★★★★★