At the time I write this, War for the Planet of the Apes has been out for a little bit, capping off a primate trilogy that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of Apes, and continued in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I haven’t had the chance to see it yet but by all accounts it seems to be pretty damn good, as are the previous films in the series. Seems weird that in this modern age we can have successful sci-fi franchises without spending a billion dollars a movie and one running story, rather than trying to stitch ten different movies with dozens of different characters and plotlines into one cohesive narrative, but it appears that the Apes movies have got us covered.
Have I mentioned how I’m tired of the cinematic universe concept yet?
War of the Planet of the Apes’ success shouldn’t really surprise anyone though. After all, the very first Planet of the Apes film, directed by Patton’s Franklin J. Schaffner, written by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and starring Ben-Hur’s Charlton Heston, was one of the most successful science fiction films in Hollywood history, at a time when the genre was relegated to oversized bugs and pie plates on strings. It spawned 4 sequels, a TV series, an animated series, multiple comic book series, video games, a shitty movie directed by Tim Burton and now this new reboot series. People just can’t enough of talking apes doing stuff, especially if it involves the utter destruction of the human race and everything we’ve ever built. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are like our fetish or something.
Although movie studios aren’t always the smartest knifes in the drawer, at the very least they understand the concept of ‘if something makes money, make more of that thing’ (sometimes too well), and so two years later we got a sequel: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Set directly after the original film, in fact Beneath actually opens with the ending of the OG Apes, because we needed to devalue that twist as soon as possible, you would think that Beneath would focus on our doomed astronaut Taylor, wandering across the desolate ruins of an Earth devastated by nuclear war and inhabited by intelligent, murderous primates, but you’d be wrong. Instead we focus on Brent, another astronaut who was sent to find Taylor and the original rocket and who also happened to crash land on this ‘alien planet’. Of course Taylor conveniently fell down a hole at the beginning of the movie, and so it is up to Brent to navigate the peril of Ape City, driven to imperialism and conquest due to an ongoing famine, and somehow find his missing compatriot. However, finding Taylor means journeying into the heart of the Forbidden Zone, the forsaken, hellish remains of Earth’s former rulers, only barely more tolerable than the Richard Elfman film. Which might not be as inhabited as was once believed…
As far as sequels go, Beneath doesn’t stray too far from its source material, and from the overarching ‘talking apes doing stuff’ motif. Generally speaking that’s a good thing, you don’t want to fix something that ain’t broke, but I think there’s an argument to be made that Beneath takes that advice a bit too literally. Up until the third act, in fact, Beneath seems content to just do Planet of the Apes again, with little to no difference. Astronaut crash-landing on what he originally believes to be an alien planet? Check. Scene where astronaut gets thrown into a cage with a bunch of other humans? Check. Scene where astronaut discovers some artifact that proves he’s been on Earth the whole time, throwing in a bitter, recriminatory one-liner as he does so? Check. Zira and Cornelius being basically useless? All there, only with no sense of wonder and danger attached because we’ve been through all this before. We know it’s a planet of the apes guys, we saw the last one, we read the title of the movie, you’re not blowing any minds on that front.
That is not to say that Beneath doesn’t make its own mark in the Apethology, however. Although the apes occasionally feel like ancillary characters in their own movie (it ain’t called Planet of the Humans), we do get a deeper look into their civilization and social dynamics, including some anti-war commentary that was no doubt very familiar in those Vietnam years. Perhaps more importantly though, at least in the context of the film is the introduction of the other intelligent race on the planet, a society of telepathic Mutants living in the ruins of New York City who worship an active nuclear missile. I’m not a fan of the inclusion of things like psychic powers into the franchise, as fantastical as the concept of the films are, Schaffner’s execution of it in the first film was fairly grounded, which I thought gave it a more serious, if not realistic, feel. The scenes of the Mutant city however, the subterranean bunker carved out of the melted corpse of downtown New York, and the towering golden ICBM that acts as their god, is easily the most iconic imagery in the Apes franchise, right up there with the destroyed Statue of Liberty. Kind of surprising how little of it you get, considering how much it’s been referenced since then.
It’s a bit of a bummer too, you know? I mean the original movie was pretty grim in that classic Serling style, but Beneath is just flat out depressing. You got the astronauts, who are stuck in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the only remaining humans a bunch of feral slaves to some damn dirty apes. You got the Mutants, sterile lunatics who worship the world’s most dangerous phallic symbol and a proclivity for mind control. Even the Apes, the stars of the show, are showing positively human levels of barbarism as a famine is driving them towards extinction. And that ending… Man, break out the Valium. A bit of a pain to have to follow up too, I imagine.
Planet of the Apes is a movie that never really needed a sequel, much less 4 of them. Still, if there needed to be one (and money demanded that it be so), Beneath the Planet of the Apes does a pretty good job of it, capturing the essence of the original while pushing things forward. If you liked the first one, then it’s a good bet that you’ll like this one. If you hated it, or just hate apes in general, then I’m sure you’ll be able to find something else this Halloween. Also if you live in the NYC area, you might want to consider moving out. Seems like it's going to get a bit hairy in about two thousand years.
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