Get your paws off me you damned dirty ape.
The Planet of The Apes starts off with a four person crew on a sleeper ship heading into deep space. The Captain is the last one awake and has a few regrets about leaving his world behind. Due to Relativity, everyone he has known is already dead before he enters the sleep chamber. When the ship crashes into a lake, they find the one woman on the expedition has died in cold sleep and only three men are left.
They trek across deserts, over mountains, and finally find a wooded area and a pond where they all strip down and go for a swim. The locals tear apart their clothes and our three heroes find a world inhabited by humans, but very simple and primitive ones. While Taylor plans to rule the world in six months, something happens and the humans all start to run. It is then that we see the dominate species on this world-Apes.
One of the three astronauts is killed during The Hunt-another is captured and Taylor is shot in the throat so that he ends up in a veterinary clinic. Here he meets a kind hearted Chimpanzee who finds his intelligence worth studying. In a few weeks Taylor falls in love with a local woman, shows that he can talk, and threatens the very foundations of Simian Society. A man that talks is not to be tolerated.
I loved this movie when I was a kid, and I am still pretty fond of it now.
Planet of The Apes is a classic Sci Fi movie, in that it is science that sends our heroes out into space. But it is never made clear why they are being sent out into space or what they are to do once they arrive wherever they are supposed to be going. Even as a child I thought it was a bit odd that they sent three men and one woman-if the goal was to populate a planet this should have been reversed, shouldn’t it? Then there was the curious matter of there being no moon-not a problem since it isn’t earth, but then it turns out that it is earth. Can earth survive without the moon? Does not having a moon somehow make apes more intelligent than humans?
Flight is considered a physical impossibility by the Apes-this would mean there are no birds and no flying incests-again a world that could not exist as we know it and presumably one in which Apes could not exist either. Though the only food crop we see growing is corn, which is self pollinating. Of course, this is just another lie from the Ministry of Truth-still, nothing that flies is left?
How does Cornelius find the cave in the cliff wall in the Forbidden Zone? And how does he managed to build the huge scaffolding that leads up to the cave entrance? Once inside the cave he digs down until he finds artifacts-since the outside of the cave is much lower-shouldn’t there have been artifacts just sticking out of the side of the cliff face?
But all of the oddities and things don’t make any sense are dealt with in classic science fiction manner-we ignore them. It doesn’t matter how Apes came to be intelligent, or how our heroes managed to land back on Earth, or why humans stopped talking-that’s just the way it is. Taylor is never given any answers, and neither are we. The whole point of Planet of The Apes is to wonder what life would like in this upside down world where Apes are intelligent.
The great punchline of the story is that this Planet of The Apes is, in fact, Planet Earth-Taylor’s Earth that he sailed away from thousands of years earlier. The closing scene of Charlton Heston pounding the wet sand with his fists as he stares up in horror at the sad remains of The Statue of Liberty is a film icon. The Statue of Liberty has been used many times as a symbol for the Earth’s destruction, most recently in the posters for Cloverfield.
This is still a very fun movie to watch-though it is dated in countless ways-such as when Taylor tells the teenage Ape to Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty. There is also something quaint and charming about the idea of a bronze sculpture from the 1800s still standing in a few thousand years, even if it is half-buried in sand. There are no answers-not in this first of five Planet of The Apes movies, and maybe it should have been left that way.
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The ending of this movie will forever be etched into my brain – no remake could capture the pain on Charlton’s face. Thanks for the memories.
I’ll never forgive Tim Burton
My most vivid memory of this movie is some horrible scar on someone’s head?? I haven’t seen it since I was a small child, but I remember being terrified of a scar. Also, I had an action figure from the movie. 😉
Yes, I was a bit traumatized the when I was a child and saw the lobotomy scar on the other astronaut as well. There is something really terrifying about the fact that who we are is so fragile a thing.