The Worst of All Worlds

I have to report another outbreak of the Twilight phenomenon, in and around cinemas as far as the eye can see. Now, as you can imagine, this is not without consequences. One of them is that – if all I hear of the plot of the new film is correct – I shall have to retire my Twilight limerick, which runs thusly:

‘There once was a vampire named Edward

Reluctant to lead his girl bed-ward

When she found herself faced

With a boyfriend so chaste

She said ‘Maybe he simply can’t get wood.’

(Farewell, good and faithful servant.)

The other is that, as the new movie is infesting the majority of theatres in town, and many of the others are occupied with precipitously-released Christmas children’s films, there isn’t really anything on worth going to see at the cinema (yes, this from the man who spent money watching The Three Musketeers, Immortals and The Future). And so I have decided to take this opportunity to snip off a particular dangling thread and conclude my look at one of my favourite SF movie series with a review of J Lee Thompson’s 1973 movie Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

A dangling loose end is perhaps a not inappropriate metaphor for this least impressive cinematic product of the Planet of the Apes phenomenon. Opening with a brisk recap of the previous film-and-a-bit, it finds North America in the early 21st century in agrarian post-holocaust mode: the ape revolution fomented by Caesar (Roddy McDowell) has indeed culminated in nuclear war (apparently on a fairly limited scale) and now the survivors, both human and ape, are living in peace, though life is not without tensions – the humans are uneasy with the dominance of the apes, while the militaristic gorillas are chafing under Caesar’s rule…

Apropos of pretty much nothing (but they have to get the plot started somehow) Caesar’s human aide Macdonald (Austin Stoker, playing the brother of Hari Rhodes’ character from the previous movie) persuades him to mount an expedition to the ruins of Los Angeles in search of secret documents that may reveal the destiny of the planet (relics from the third film in the series). However, in doing so they attract the attention of xenophobic and paranoid humans also living in the ruins.

Not entirely unexpectedly (but they have to get a climax from somewhere) the humans assume the expedition’s intentions were hostile and decide to launch a counterattack in force against Caesar’s settlement. Matters are, inevitably, complicated by an ill-timed grab for power by gorilla leader Aldo (Claude Akins).

Battle for the Planet of the Apes is perhaps not quite as unremittingly awful as some reviewers would have you believe, but compared to the quality of most of the other films in the series it is a deeply unimpressive offering, built around sentimental melodrama and underpowered action where the other films had genuinely interesting ideas and engaging characters to drive them along.

What’s particularly galling is that, at every step of the film’s production, the makers seem to have chosen the least interesting, least challenging option. The series’ main screenwriter, Paul Dehn, had his concept for the movie rejected and was replaced by John and Joyce Corrington, whose work is only competent at best – the plot is uninspired, and while some of their dialogue raises a smile – ‘We may be irradiated, but at least we’re still active,’ says chief bad guy Severn Darden, enjoying a promotion from assistant villain in the previous film – some of it is… well, look, I just feel sorry for Paul Stevens, playing pacifist human Mendez, who at one point gets the choice assignment of delivering the following monologue: ‘This bloody chain reaction has got to stop. A destroys B, B destroys C, C destroys A and is destroyed by D who destroys E. Before anyone knows where they are there won’t be anyone left to know anything, anywhere.’ Er – yeah. No wonder he doesn’t get taken along for the war.

Paul Dehn’s original treatment for the movie – or at least something claiming to be it – is, inevitably, available on t’internet, and while still flawed the tone of the piece is much more recognisably part of the same series. Knowing this was to be the last film, Dehn set out to close the circle of the series by showing the beginnings of the situation to be found in the first film – the on-line treatment features the nuclear attack that destroys Los Angeles, the origins of the Forbidden Zone and the human mutant society within it, and the human population being rendered mute through primitive surgery. Pretty heavy stuff, and given how young the films’ core audience was by this point perhaps it’s understandable why the producers shied away from it.

Even so, some of this material survived in a toned-down form in the Corringtons’ script, most notably in a number of scenes in the ruined city where it is revealed that the humans still have one nuclear weapon left: a very special one, which may explain their very reverent attitude towards it. This got filmed, but was then cut from the final movie on the grounds that it wasn’t really relevant to the plot and was simply a superfluous exercise in i-dotting.

So we’re left with a weary runaround, with only Roddy McDowell’s strong performance, a few other familiar faces in the supporting cast, and the trademark rotten continuity (no more than a decade or so seems to have elapsed since the previous film, yet someone claims to have lived in the post-apocalyptic settlement for twenty-seven years, for one thing) to really show this is part of the same series as the other films. On its own merits, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is a negligible, feeble little film, with nothing to suggest the real merits of the series which it represents. And viewed as a part of that series, it is inevitably a terrible disappointment – it’s difficult to imagine any future movie with the Apes name on it plumbing quite such depths of pointlessness.

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The Lives of the Caesars (Part One)

Constant readers may recall the fulsome praise I recently lavished upon the 1971 movie Escape from the Planet of the Apes, but unfortunately I cannot be so generous about J Lee Thompson’s follow up from the very next year, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. However, it is a film not without numerous points of interest: permit me to explain.

In defiance of ever-dwindling budgets, this film finds the ongoing story jumping forward to the ominously near-future year of 1991, and an America transformed. Viral plague in the year 1983 has wiped out most household pets and the monkeys originally used as substitutes have in turn been replaced by full-sized apes – chimps, gorillas and orang-utans. The apes occupy the lowest position in a society basically dependent on slave labour to function. The slave apes are horribly mistreated and kept in line by brutal police in jackboots – hell, the police are basically wearing Gestapo uniforms. Whatever virtues this film has, subtlety is not amongst them.

Arriving in a grey and impersonal Los Angeles are circus owner Armando and his ape ward Caesar, played by Ricardo Montalban and Roddy McDowell respectively. They have a dreadful secret, which they nevertheless share with the audience with unseemly haste and via some painfully obvious expository dialogue – alone amongst apes, Caesar has the power of speech, the result of his parents being time-travellers from the ape-dominated 40th century. This faculty would lead to his death were the authorities to learn of it, but just so he understands how awful everything has become Armando has decided to show him a city for the first time. Good plan, Armando. That’s what I’d do. Yeah.

Caesar inevitably loses his cool after being confronted by endless scenes of his brethren being exploited and abused, and draws the attention of the police. Armando surrenders to the cops to cover for Caesar, who infiltrates a shipment of apes arriving for slave conditioning and finds himself the property of the tyrannical governor Breck (Don Murray). Although some of the other humans are sympathetic to the plight of the apes, most notably Breck’s aide MacDonald (Hari Rhodes), the news of Armando’s death in police custody causes Caesar to vow a terrible revenge against the human civilisation, and he sets about fomenting revolution amongst the apes…

Well, where does one start with this movie? In many ways this is a turning point for the whole franchise, most obviously in that the three previous movies were all genuinely good and possibly even great, while this movie and (to date) everything that’s followed it have all been to some degree disappointing. But it’s also the case that this film is the first to be based solely around writer Paul Dehn’s own characters and ideas rather than those of Pierre Boulle or Rod Serling. Given that Dehn also wrote the previous two movies, you wouldn’t really expect this to be a problem, but where they were interesting because of their scripts, this one is somehow interesting in spite of it.

Possibly it was just Dehn’s misfortune to be writing this, arguably the key movie in the sequence, at a time when the budget cuts were really starting to bite – down to less than $2 million, only a third of that of the original movie. The film has to introduce and sell to the audience a radically-transformed version of American society, a new set of characters, the politicisation of the protagonist, and then an apocalyptic rebellion with epic scenes of violent struggle – and do it all very cheaply and within an 88 minute running time.

As a result the film does seem very rushed and struggles to make all of its ideas really convincing. All the structures of control and slavery we see in this movie have supposedly evolved within only eight years? Hmm. Caesar also only spends about five minutes setting up his revolt (which involves such terrifying acts of sedition as spreading shoe polish on unsuspecting people’s socks) before the secret police track him down (rather easily). Most seriously of all, this is a corny and melodramatic film where nearly every character in the film is a cipher, with but a single trait which they endlessly exhibit, and their behaviour is dictated by the demands of the plot rather than their personalities. The main villain here, Breck, is a cartoon, with nothing like the depth or borderline-sympathy of Hasslein in the previous film. To be fair, Roddy McDowell does his very best with a part that requires him to be mute for large sections of the film, and Caesar’s personal journey is not entirely unconvincing. Hari Rhodes, as the sympathetic human, has to project ‘decency’ a lot and actually does it rather well.

That said, if we’re going to talk about Rhodes’ character, then we have to talk about the politics of this film, which takes us into some odd and slightly uneasy territory. At this point when talking about Conquest I usually mention the South Africa episode of The Goodies. You what? I hear you ask. Well, in South Africa three well-meaning and intelligent guys set out to express their abhorrence of racial prejudice and the apartheid system, which is fair enough, but do so by putting on blackface make-up and affecting ‘yassuh boss’ accents, which to a modern viewer surely seems incredibly racist in its own right.

In the same way, it’s very clear that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is in some way trying to say things about America’s own history and the Civil Rights movement. It’s surely not a coincidence that Caesar’s only human ally at the end of the film is black – at one point another character suggests it’s only to be expected that MacDonald be sympathetic to the apes – and parallels are made more than once between the ape struggle for freedom and that of African Americans in the past.

So the film is pro-civil rights, which is great, but at the same time it’s an allegory in which the role of black Americans is played by apes. Something about that just makes me extremely uncomfortable – although this may just be my own liberal oversensitiveness, as this film was apparently a huge hit with coloured audiences, many of whom apparently saw it as a fictionalised retelling of some of the race riots which plagued America in the late 1960s.

By the end, of course, one is in the uniquely science-fictional position of rooting for a protagonist whose goal is to bring about the end of civilisation, more-or-less as we know it. The climax sees Caesar addressing MacDonald in the heart of a burning city, with Breck in shackles and at the mercy of a mob of club-wielding apes. Caesar, in the grip of a strangely triumphant rage, prophesies the day when the dominion of man will end and the apes will dominate the Earth, concluding ‘…and that day is upon you now!’ The apes set about beating Breck to death, the film cuts back to a striking wideshot of apes silhouetted in the fires of rebellion, Jerry Goldsmith’s original score crashes in, and one is left in no doubt as to how this will all end: with the twisted world into which Charlton Heston will crashland in the original movie.

However – and this may be the single most glaring problem with this movie – this probably isn’t the climax you’ll have seen. It tested very negatively with the young audience who were the main fans of the franchise at this point and so a horribly obvious and mealy-mouthed alternative was contrived, where Breck is spared and Roddy McDowell provides a new dialogue-track (dubbed over the original closeup, reframed to exclude his mouth) where he declares the apes will be humane and compassionate towards the humans they are violently overthrowing. Er, what? At which point we’re back to the wide-shot of the burning city and Goldsmith’s music, which both now seem rather incongruous. While this version does conclude with the killer line ‘Tonight we have seen the birth of the planet of the apes!’ on the whole I really prefer the uncompromising, unreleased ending.

(I suppose I could also grumble about the way the film fudges the issue of what ultimately causes the collapse of the human civilisation – is it an ape uprising, as the previous film and most of this one has led us to believe? Or is it a nuclear war, as the first two films and some dialogue in the climax here strongly implies? Does the former cause the latter? As I say, it’s a fudge, but then the continuity between these films is almost always ropey.)

It was all downhill from here, anyway, with Paul Dehn’s ideas for the fifth and final movie judged too dark and uncompromising and the assignment being given to other writers. Hamstrung by budgetary and narrative concerns it may be, but Conquest of the Planet of the Apes still has got just enough going on to make it interesting to watch – it’s much more obviously an example of unfulfilled potential than any of the other films in the series. In fact, if I were going to remake a Planet of the Apes film with a blockbuster budget and modern special effects, then… oh, hang on a minute…

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