and
The Appropriate Tune: "Apeman", by The Kinks
You never really know where something is gonna go it’s been set loose into the world, huh? When Stephen King wrote that one story about a dude getting killed by a lawnmower or whatever, cocaine is a hell of a drug, I bet he never thought it would end up a multi-film franchise based on virtual reality. Similarly when noted Frenchman Pierre Boulee penned his now famous short story about a simian-centric future I doubt he would have expected it to be the premier science fiction film franchise after the demise of Universal’s Horror line. In fact he probably would have hated it. Sure Star Wars gets all the love and all the big bucks these days, but years before Death Stars and droids and what have you, it was Charlton Heston yelling that we about how we blew it all up that got the blood a pumpin’. So now that we’ve taken our step into The Undiscovered Country over on Star Trek, it’s about time we did the same for our favorite set of flicks involving people in rubber ape masks.
Released by Apjac Productions through 20th Century Fox, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is the fifth and final film in the original Apes series, directed by J. Lee Thompson (who did Conquest of the Planet of the Apes a year prior), with the story by Paul Dehn and the screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington. It is several years after the events of the previous film, when Caesar formed an army of apes and led a revolution against the humans, and civilization as we once knew it has been destroyed by nuclear fire. Now Caesar (Roddy McDowall, one last time) is tasked with building a new society on the ashes of the old with the remaining apes and humans, one built peace and freedom. Not an easy task, in large part because humans now occupy a servile position not unlike the ones the apes lived in under the humans, when gorilla general Aldo is not actively campaigning for their extermination. Caesar is flummoxed over what to do, wishing he could get some clue on what to do from his long-dead parents, when Macdonald (same character as Conquest, played this time by Austin Stoker) reveals that he can: Just check out the interview tape made by the government when they first arrived back in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, conveniently located within the underground archives of the destroyed Forbidden City just a couple days away from the village. Which is exactly what Caesar decides to do, taking Macdonald and orangutan scholar Virgil (Paul Williams) along for the ride. Of course that ruined city might not be as deserted as it might seem, and enemies can take many forms. It may be October, but the Ides of March might be fast approaching.
Well we’ve reached the bottom of the cash barrel this time folks. Planet of the Apes as a series has never been cash-flush, Rod Serling wanted a futuristic city in the original and they gave him some adobe huts instead, but never understood just how cheap movies can get. Technically speaking Battle has the same budget as Conquest, 1.7 million, but at least Conquest spruced things up a bit so it looked like they were in a future city rather than just a normal ass. Battle gives us one decent looking matte painting of the Forbidden City and some blackened, melted wreckage, but the rest of it is dark dusty corridors in a boiler room and a state park with some wood huts in it. Our film’s secondary antagonist, horrifically mutated humans living in the wreckage of a once great city, are ‘mutated’ in the least possible manner; A gray splotchy ‘scar’ that half the time you don’t even notice. Even the famous ape masks, which you could argue was a large part of what made the original film such a success in the first place are showing their limitations, looking really stiff on anyone who isn’t Roddy McDowall. It’s a good thing that those masks are there though, because it’s the only thing keeping a million dollar movie from being outclassed by an average episode of Doctor Who. The old Doctor Who.
Of course there’s the question of whether there even needed to be another film in the first place. The first four movies did a decent job of telling how and why the Planet of the Apes came to be, and I think ending things at Conquest would have fit in science fiction’s penchant for downer endings (for the humans anyway). Most of the things you might have wanted to see you don’t get anyway because they can’t afford it; The moment human society is destroyed, the Ape-Man War, how those psychic weirdos from the second movie got that ICBM, etc. The only thing they’ve really got left to work with is addressing the time loop, and I think they manage to do so in a way that pairs well with the original film. However the scale of the film is so small because of the budget that it really damages the suspension of disbelief. The titular Battle has a certain dramatic appeal, two sides consumed by hate throwing what little remains of themselves at each other, repurposing automobiles as war machines like a prototypical Mad Max, but when you actually get there it’s like the Road Warrior if George Miller could only afford three cars. Then there’s the fact that the one tape involving an interview with fucking talking apes from the future just so happens to be a day or so away from the village our characters are located, which apparently suffers no ill effects from being downwind of a city obliterated by nuclear fire (it’s a tiny ass city by the way), and that the mutants just so happen to be able to identify Caesar on site despite him looking and dressing exactly like every other chimpanzee in the movie. Also the amount of Apes that actually live in this village wouldn’t even fill your average convention hall by, so by the time Planet of the Apes rolled around it’d look like a hairier version of The Hills Have Eyes. Just a whole mess of narrative convenience because they can’t afford to do anything else, and I can’t help but feel disappointed.
Does that make it a bad movie? No, I wouldn’t go that far. As I said, I did like how they addressed the time loop, and tied all the films together. It also has a decent amount of action for those interested in that, and the drama between the Humans and the Apes felt like it was built well. Way better than Escape that’s for damn sure. Does that make it a good conclusion to the series? On a certain level yes, but the reason The Undiscovered Country worked for me despite not being the flashiest film was because we followed the cast (who most watchers were familiar with already) across five films before that one. The only character that really works with here is Caesar, and he starts off Battle as a fairly reasonable guy and he stays that way throughout the entire film, so his arc is more of a straight line. Moreover, while both films deal heavily in previous films, Star Trek VI does it in such a way that it is unobtrusive and so works better as its own film than Battle. So it’s a part of the tapestry, but maybe a bit frayed on the edges.
If you’ve gotten this far in the Ape game, then there’s no point in not recommending Battle for the Planet of the Apes, but it helps that it’s not complete dog shit. If you haven’t, then similarly there’s no point in seeing it. So now we find ourselves in much the same predicament that we did at the end of the last review: Will we see an Apes film covered next year? Furthermore, will it be the critically panned Tim Burton Planet of the Apes, or will we be digging into the much more acclaimed modern Apes trilogy. As it was with Trek, only time will tell. Pour one out for Caesar and the gang if you’ve got ‘em, and let’s move forward.
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