Terror on the Planet of the Apes

I'm probably done posting thoughts about Planet of the Apes for a while, but I'm certainly not done enjoying stories about it. If you're not either, check out Diversions of the Groovy Kind for the first part of Gerry Conway, Doug Moench, and Mike Ploog's "Terror on the Planet of the Apes" from Marvel in 1974.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes serves two purposes. It’s a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but – now that two potential sequels have been announced – it also reboots the entire series. It does both of these things excellently by taking advantage of its ability to learn from the mistakes of the original movies.

Whenever I start getting geeky about continuity while talking to my wife, she usually has the same response. Since I'm often trying to think through a continuity hole while I’m talking, the conversation goes something like this:

“If people knew that there’s a danger of the apes’ taking over one day, why did they bring apes into their homes after the Pet Plague? And why did the government let them?”

“Because the writers needed it to happen, of course. Otherwise they couldn't have had their sequel.”

“No, I mean in the story. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, when they wrote Escape from the Planet of the Apes, they didn’t know what they were going to do for the next movie yet. They just made it up as they went along.”



That exact conversation never happened, because Diane has yet to appreciate the finer qualities of movies about talking gorillas and hasn't been watching these with me, but we’ve had lots of variations on it about lots of movies and TV shows from Star Wars to How I Met Your Mother. She just doesn’t care about fixing continuity mistakes like I do. And that’s cool. She doesn’t have to enjoy this stuff in exactly the same way as me.

What's more, I bring this all up because she’s right, of course. The real explanation for any continuity goof is that the writers screwed up. The Planet of the Apes series was obviously written from film to film with no long-range plan. I mean, look at Beneath. There was no thought for a sequel after that movie, so when they decided to make one, they pulled out the time-travel scenario. That was good, but it also created a lot of problems. Of course, those problems weren’t as noticeable when the movies were originally made and shown. The only way to see them was in the theater or when a network chose to air them on TV, so there was no creating your own marathon or going back to see if you caught a particular detail right. The original audience for Conquest of the Planet of the Apes saw a statue referring to a plague that wiped out all the cats and dogs and thought, “Oh, yeah. I remember something about that from the last movie.” And for most of them, that was all the consideration they gave it. The writers didn’t have to be that careful.

The advantage that Rise’s Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have is that they get to plan a trilogy from the get-go. And not only that, they get to use the original five movies as a template; borrowing what worked and changing what didn’t. Without having to extend the series beyond the destruction of the entire planet in the previous film, there’s no need for messy time-travel. They can tell Caesar’s story without that; tightening it up and focusing more on the relationship between Caesar and humanity. That relationship is what makes Rise so good. There are problems with the movie – as hilariously pointed out by cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt – but I was able to overlook them because I cared about Caesar and what happened to him. And not just him, but James Franco’s character too.



Watching the trailers, I knew it was going to come down to how well they did that, but I figured that even if they blew the first two acts, I’d at least get an awesome ape uprising at the end. I certainly did, but it was made powerful by all the groundwork the film had laid earlier. It wasn’t just apes in revolt; it was characters I cared about finally pushing back against their oppressors. It was cathartic as hell.

And on top of that, there was all this stuff that I loved about the original movies. There were several famous lines repeated and – unlike in Burton’s movie – they worked. I found it especially fascinating that Charlton Heston’s quotes were given to Dodge (Tom "Draco Malfoy" Felton), a sadistic kid who works at the ape shelter run by his father (Brian Cox). Heston’s prejudice against the apes has a different, darker tone when it’s embodied by a human in power over them. And it subtly increases the tension between the audience’s allegiance to its own species and its wish to see the more noble beings prevail. Again, unlike Burton’s version.

I also loved the blink-and-you-miss-them references to Taylor’s rocket launch and its disappearance. Very smooth way to hint at a future story, even if that story is just the one told in the 1968 movie. Fortunately, it's not.

I saw Rise without knowing that it was the first of a planned trilogy. I should have known better – knowing about the importance Hollywood places on tentpoles and franchises – but I went into it just hoping for one, good film. What I got was a great film that tells a complete story and I left the theater satisfied that if this was all there was, I would be happy just to have seen it. Of course, I’m even happier knowing that there are going to be more, so long as they’re as awesome as this one.

Planet of the Apes (2001)

Like I said last week, I was sort of looking forward to this one. My only memory of it from the last time I saw it ten years ago was that the ending felt corny and forced. Like they wanted to do a twist ending to compare with the 1968 film, but didn’t know how to make one properly. My disappointment at the ending combined with the general loathing that fans throw at this movie to create a recollection that I hated it, so I was curious to see if that was still true now that I knew what kind of ending to expect. Turns out, I don’t hate it, but it’s very flawed. Not as flawed as Return to the Planet of the Apes, but certainly more so than the other live-action versions.

That doesn’t have a lot to do with the story, though the script isn’t anything that the screenwriters should be proud of. I did like a couple of things about it – they came up with an interesting way to get the hero into the future and they also get to the apes much more quickly than the ’68 version – but for the most part the plot is paint-by-numbers. An unheroic protagonist, Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) finds himself in a dangerous world and has to hero-up in order to lead the oppressed to victory against their oppressors. The main bad guy, Thade (Tim Roth) is irredeemably rotten and the hero’s main ally, a chimp named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) is insufferably good. There aren’t a lot of gray areas in the movie. The closest it gets is Paul Giamatti as an orangutan slave-trader named Limbo and Michael Clarke Duncan as Thade’s second-in-command, Attar, but even then…

Limbo gets thrown with the humans against his will and is forced to their side when Thade and his army think he’s betrayed them. So even though he reconsiders his position against the humans, there’s no real thought behind it other than survival, and later, “I guess you guys aren’t so bad after all.” The message of his story is that you’ll like us if you get to know us. That’s not very deep, but it’s still better than Attar’s motivation.



Attar is a religious zealot whose faith crumbles once he realizes the truth about the apes’ origins. I’m not saying that that’s not a realistic motivation for changing his mind. It could even be an interesting one if the script had the courage to explore it. Instead, it simply tells us that Attar’s changing sides because he feels lied to. Like most things in the movie, his transformation is too quick; too easy. Leo's another example of that. He spends most of the movie telling everyone that he’s no hero until the climax when of course he decides that he is.

But you know, the banality of the script’s not the biggest problem. It’s a movie about talking warrior-gorillas; I don’t need Shakespeare. Had the apes been as cool as the ones in the ‘70s movies, I could have overlooked the deficiencies in the story. I mean, I liked Battle for the Planet of the Apes for crying out loud. Unfortunately, Burton tried to improve on the apes and wound up with a mess.



I appreciate his trying. I really do. I understand where he was coming from. The ‘70s apes don’t look much like real apes. That’s not so much a problem in the first three movies, but it becomes one in the last two. I can see why it would be tempting to try to fix that. The thing is though, even in the movies where it’s a problem, I cut the ape designs a lot of slack, because they just look so cool.

Their closeness to human shape and posture makes them that much more disturbing. It drives home in a subtle way that the apes have replaced us. They’ve become us, and in many ways, they’ve become better than us. I don’t get that feeling looking at Burton’s apes. They still look like real apes, but worse than that, they act like real apes. There’s a thin surface of civilization over them, but in times of stress, they revert. The subliminal message that delivers is that humanity deserves to retake the planet from these creatures. And that takes away an important layer of the story.

One of the biggest themes of the original movies and the live-action TV show is that neither humans nor apes are inherently better than each other. As human viewers, we’re naturally inclined to side with our own species, so it’s very important that we understand that - in many ways - the apes have built a culture for themselves that has improved on ours. That keeps some tension in our allegiances. Of course I don’t want humans to be mistreated, but I also like the ape way of life better than what humans came up with by the twentieth century. By making his apes more beast-like, Burton robs his movie of that tension. Like all the rest, it’s too easy; too black-and-white. The humans, we're told, should win and the apes should fall.



There are exceptions to the animalistic apes, but I’m not sure what to make of them. It may be important that they’re female chimpanzees, especially Helena Bonham Carter’s Ari and Lisa Marie’s blasphemously-named Nova. (Sidebar: The various references to the ’68 film are irritating. The filmmakers take classic lines, characters, and actors that were originally human and hand them over to the apes. That only reminded me that I like the original better and made me resent the apes even more.)

Ari and Nova and a couple of other female chimps look less ape-like than the other simians in the movie. They even have distinctively human hairstyles. My initial suspicion was that Ari’s looks were meant to endear us to her since she’s a friend of humanity, but that doesn’t explain the others, who are all disposable characters. Even Nova’s only there to give Burton’s then-girlfriend a role in the film as he’d done in all of his other movies back to Ed Wood. She’s nothing more than the wife (concubine?) of one of the apes’ leaders. If you take her out of the movie, you change nothing.

The only common denominator between the two, main, female chimps is that they’re both played by attractive women. And if we’re being especially cynical, we can note that both of them are attractive women with whom Tim Burton has had long relationships: Lisa Marie prior to Planet of the Apes and Helena Bonham Carter ever since. Is the answer really as shallow as Burton’s wanting them to look hot? I don’t know, but I can’t figure out another explanation that makes sense.



And speaking of things not making sense: there’s the ending. Actually, that’s not true. That’s what I wrote on Facebook Tuesday night right after I watched it, but as Snell pointed out, it’s not that the ending can’t be understood. I’m assuming that everyone reading this has already seen the movie, but in case you haven’t, I’m about to spoil it: Leo makes it back to his own planet and time and finds that Earth is now controlled by apes as well. His first hint at this is that the Lincoln Memorial now carries Thade’s face (APEraham Lincoln, as Jamie Baker says, rescuing the concept) and an inscription about Thade’s decisive role in helping the apes take power.

It’s easy to imagine how this happened. There were two space capsules on the ape planet (which is not Earth in this version). Leo took the working one, but it’s conceivable that Thade escaped custody of the new ape/human regime, raised Leo’s sunken capsule from its watery grave, got it working again, and piloted it into space and through the temporal storm back to Earth’s past. It’s conceivable, but not at all set up by anything in the movie (other than Thade’s knowing where Leo’s capsule was). It’s out of nowhere and I feel cheated by it. It’s like getting to the end of The Sixth Sense and learning that Bruce Willis was actually an orc or something.

It wouldn’t have been hard to foreshadow it either. In less than a minute of screen time we could have seen Thade escape his prison and return to the sunken capsule. They still could have had their “shock” ending, but instead of throwing my hands up and wondering, “What the hell?” I would’ve thought, “Oooh! I want to see the next one!” Though I still would’ve hoped the sequel was better.

Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975)

I sometimes mistake reboots and re-imaginings for a recent phenomenon. In fact, one of the earliest reboots that immediately comes to mind when I think of the concept is Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That’s certainly not true though. I mean, look at all the Tarzan movies. How many times have they rebooted that franchise? And Tim Burton’s not even the first to reboot Planet of the Apes. That would be Friz Freleng and David H DePatie.

I mention Friz Freleng first because he’s the one I’m most familiar with from his work on Warner Bros’ classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. That I’d never heard of DePatie before says more about me than him. He was the executive in charge of Warner’s cartoon studio when they closed it down in 1963. He and Freleng then formed DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and went on to create the Pink Panther cartoons, What’s New Mr. Magoo, and all those Dr. Seuss specials from the ‘70s. So these are guys who knew what they were doing. There was no reason for Return to the Planet of the Apes to suck. It must have been the director’s fault.

To be fair, Doug Wildey was no slouch himself. He’s best known as the creator of Johnny Quest, but he was also an artist for Atlas Comics (Marvel’s precursor) and several other comics publishers in the ‘50s. So if he’s a decent writer and a none-too-shabby artist, what went wrong with the Planet of the Apes cartoon? I’m guessing it has something to do with budget. The ‘70s were filled with cost-cutting, crappy animation and Wildey knew something about that. His only directing credits outside of Return to the Planet of the Apes are for those barely-animated Marvel “cartoons” from the ‘60s. The ones that everyone rightly compared “motion comics” to when those tried to get off the ground. I’ll come back to this later, but the cheapness of Return to the Planet of the Apes was its chief creative failure.



I’ve spent a lot of time in this series writing about reconciling timelines and building a dependable continuity, so it’s maybe a little odd that I’m not bothered by the extreme inconsistencies presented by Return. Rich Handley makes an attempt to bring it together with the live-action versions in his Timeline of the Planet of the Apes, but even he admits that that’s just for completeness. Writing about the most immediate, glaring difference between Return and the others – the apes’ advanced technology and culture – Handley says that sometime during the events of Beneath the Planet of the Apes the apes had to either experience a major technological growth-spurt or somehow stumbled across an un-ruined human city and moved in. In the same breath, he admits that this is extremely far-fetched, that there’s simply no time for it in Beneath, and that he’s grasping at whatever straws he can. Return, he says, is simply incompatible with the movies and earlier TV show.

There are other examples too. Brent’s experience on the Planet of the Apes is completely different than it is in Beneath. In Return, he landed on the planet when Nova was a young girl and it was he – not Taylor – who named her. Shortly after that he either got lost in the desert or became a hermit on purpose (I was losing interest by then and didn’t pay close attention) and didn’t even learn about the apes until years later when three new astronauts – the main characters of Return – showed up and found him again. Cornelius and Zira are also out of character from the movies, and the show replaces Beneath’s General Ursus with the live-action TV show’s General Urko. The mutant culture from Beneath has also been dramatically changed into a group of robed people called the Underdwellers. In short, Return gets extremely close to its source material, but changes important details to the extent that it can’t be considered part of the same timeline. It’s got to be a divergent timeline or an alternate reality.

And that’s okay. Once I accepted that this wasn’t my Planet of the Apes, I was ready to judge Return on its own merits. And there are some nice things about it. Some of the still art – the backgrounds and other elements that aren’t required to move – is really creative and lovely. I imagine that Wildey may be responsible for that with his comics background. The writing isn’t half bad either. Having not only excused, but also learned to enjoy the drastic changes that the writing staff made to the characters and their world, I was also able to appreciate the stories filled with giant spiders and sea monsters and other things impossible on a live-action budget.



Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end. What the animation staff did with those scripts is unbearable. Literally, because I didn’t even finish the series. The voice actors – if you can call them that – read their lines in monotone; even Austin Stoker, who plays one of the new astronauts and was also MacDonald in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Stoker’s the only PotA veteran in the cast, but one other voice was recognizable: Henry Corden (General Urko), who’s been the voice of Fred Flintstone since the ‘70s. Actually, Corden did a pretty good job. It’s just hard to tell once the other actors have lulled you to sleep.

The biggest crime though – as I said earlier – is the animation, but it’s not just that it’s cheap. Like I also said, the ‘70s were filled with cheaply animated cartoons, but many of them were awesome. I’m a huge fan of Filmation, Hanna Barbera, and Ruby-Spears and none of those guys spent a lot of money. Return’s sin is that it’s boring. The good ‘70s cartoons recycled animation all the time, but at least it was exciting animation. Return shows action by having static characters move across the screen in some kind of equally-static vehicle, then draws the scene out by showing you that sequence over and over and over again until you’ve been watching it for what feels like an hour-and-a-half and your eyes are so glazed over they’re forming cataracts. I watched about eight of the thirteen episodes before I realized that I spent most of the last two playing on my iPod instead of watching the show. After that I just gave up.

Fortunately, this isn’t where the series ended. Early next week I’ll talk about Tim Burton’s attempt at a reboot and then the following week I’ll discuss Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which comes out today. I’m hoping Rise is worthwhile, but I’m also eager to see Burton’s version again. I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters and my distaste for the ending is all I really remember about it. Now that I’m prepared for that ending, I’m curious to see how I feel about the rest.

Planet of the Apes (TV series; 1974)

Blastr recently included the Planet of the Apes TV show on their list of 5 Awful Movie-Inspired Sci-Fi TV Shows. I read that list before I’d dug very far into watching the show for myself, but even then I knew that I disagreed with them. For the record (and if you don’t feel like clicking links), here’s what writer Krystal Clark said about it:

How many different ways can you show us a world dominated by apes? By the time this show hit the air there had already been five Planet of the Apes movies. Not two or three, but five that harped on the same premise! This show, along with the animated series that was released the following year, really beat a dead horse. (Or should we say ape?) They beat it, skinned it and burned it alive before they finally let it go. (Oh wait a minute, we forgot Rise of the Planet of the Apes is heading to a theater near you! Sigh.)

You’ll notice that Clark never actually says what’s wrong with the show. In fact, she’d never have to have even seen it to write that paragraph. (I’m not saying that she hasn’t seen it, just that you can’t tell it from reading her “criticism”.) Her first sentence is a rhetorical question that assumes an incorrect answer. It assumes that not only is there a limit to the number of stories you can tell in the Planet of the Apes universe, but that that limit is decidedly less than six. That’s ridiculous.



The five movies all have their individual flaws, but none of those flaws have anything to do with repeating earlier films. In fact, one of the biggest strengths of the series is that each installment presents a snapshot of a different period of the planet’s history. That allows for different tones and themes from film to film.

In response to my Battle post, Mitchell Craig commented that “the series should have stopped after Conquest, but this last film just spins its wheels.” I don’t disagree. As I wrote in reply, there’s no demanding need for the story that Battle tells. It’s possible to watch only the first four films and get a satisfying, complete story about the history of this world. But on the other hand, I enjoyed Battle. Even if it’s ultimately unnecessary, I’m glad they made it, because I love the PotA world and love watching stories set in it, so long as they’re good stories. For all it’s flaws and inconsistencies (and there are lots), Battle has a good story at its heart.

That’s where I’m at with the TV show too, although it’s a much better creation than Battle. In fact, I enjoyed it more than any of the individual films. It’s exactly what I wanted from a Planet of the Apes series: humans being chased by talking apes every episode with some social commentary drizzled on top. It’s an entertaining adventure show immersed in the best parts of the PotA world, but without the self-importance of the first two films.



The premise is simple, two more astronauts (three actually, but the third dies in the crash) go through a time warp and arrive in the ape-dominated future. Alan Virdon (Ron Harper, who also played Uncle Jack in the third season of Land of the Lost) and Pete Burke (James Naughton, who’s currently on Gossip Girl) are discovered by the ape council. The apes' leaders know that humans once dominated the planet, but they're keeping that information secret from the general population. Afraid that the astronauts’ presence will subvert ape domination by proving that humans can be intelligent and valuable, the council decides to kill the two men before anyone finds out about them. Fortunately, Virdon and Burke are helped to escape by a sympathetic chimpanzee named Galen (the pleasantly ubiquitous Roddy McDowell).

Like most adventure shows from the ’70s and ‘80s, Planet of the Apes has an overarching plot that drives the series without dominating it. Other examples are David Banner’s searching for a cure while being pursued by Jack McGee in The Incredible Hulk or the A-Team’s constantly being hounded by the military for a crime they didn’t commit. In the first episode of Planet of the Apes, Virdon retrieves the flight recorder from his spaceship before the apes blow the vessel up, hoping that one day he'll find a functioning computer with which to analyze the data and reverse-engineer a way home. It’s a long shot, but he’s got a family back in his time and the hope of returning to them keeps him going. Burke – a ladies’ man with no family – isn’t any happier about being stuck in the future, but is fatalistic about their chances of returning home. Galen, now a fugitive from his own people, just wants to be supportive of his new friends.

Virdon’s quest keeps the trio moving from place to place, but there are only one or two episodes that even mention the recorder disc. Most of them simply feature the three characters’ encountering a new village and having to deal with whatever situation’s going on there. Usually, the ape council’s gorilla squad – led by General Urko (Mark Lenard, who’s even better in this than he is in Star Trek as Spock’s dad, and that’s saying something) – shows up in hot pursuit of the trio, increasing the stakes and the tension.



I’m so fond of the show that I’d be inclined to ignore its inconsistencies with the films. I would be, that is, if there weren’t explanations that make it easy to reconcile the show with the movies. I can’t take credit for all of these – Timeline of the Planet of the Apes was very helpful – but most of it’s easy to figure out.

The only glaring contradictions are all established in the first episode and I mentioned a couple of them in the post on Battle. There are dogs present when – according to Conquest – dogs are supposed to be extinct. Also, Virdon and Burke find a book that has a photo of a thriving New York City from a couple of centuries after it was supposedly destroyed.

There’s another apparent problem, and a glaring one, but a closer look at the series reveals that it’s explained right there in the show. That’s all the talking humans. Humans are treated by apes the way African slaves were treated in the United States during the nineteenth century, with no rights and barely any acknowledgment that they’re even sentient, but they’re not the speechless brutes we see in the first PotA film and Beneath. However, the title sequence to the show reveals that it takes place almost a century before the first movie, plenty of time for humanity to degenerate into Nova and her pals.



How then to explain the presence of an orangutan councilman named Zaius? That’s also easy. Like Galen – a name that Staz Johnson reminded me also appears in the first movie – it must be a common ape name. Like John or Michael. If the extreme time difference wasn’t enough to differentiate the characters, the TV show also makes it clear that it takes place on the West Coast, complete with maps and specific mention of San Francisco. The Planet of the Apes move (and – I assert – the rest of the film series) clearly takes place on the East Coast.

Which reminds me of the answer to something I wondered about at the end of Conquest: how widespread Caesar’s rebellion was. If all you’re watching is the movies, you have no clue what’s going on in the rest of the world outside of the New York area. According to Timeline, the various comic book series fill in those gaps (even explaining that the worldwide nuclear war was in response to the ape rebellion instead of human vs. human), but the TV show also helps explain things. It shows a culture very similar to those we saw in the films, but very removed from the movies’ events. There are no references made to Caesar or any other elements from that series and perhaps the apes in the TV show aren’t even aware of them.

Back to the contradictions that need explaining: the dogs aren’t that hard to explain either. Obviously the world-wide plague that supposedly wiped out all canine (and feline) life wasn’t as universal as everyone thought. It’s not a radical thought that some animals may have survived. And as for 22nd century New York, Timeline suggests that perhaps what's depicted in the book we see is an artist’s interpretation of a future New York rather than an historical depiction of the real place.



All said and done, there ain’t a thing wrong with this show. The three leads are extremely likable and pleasant to watch. Virdon’s the level-headed, capable, and inspirational leader. Thanks to his growing up on a farm (and still living on one as an adult in Texas) he knows a lot about agriculture and handling animals, subjects that come in very handy in his ape-planet travels. Burke starts the series off as something of a complaining hothead, but he mellows out after a couple of episodes into someone who’s still interesting and vibrant, but not negative. He’s totally the guy you want watching your back and he and Virdon make a great team. It also helps that there’s a ton of chemistry between the actors.

That’s something that can also be said of them and Roddy McDowell. There’s a reason that McDowell’s the king of Planet of the Apes. Even though he’s instantly recognizable in his chimp make-up thanks to his distinctive voice and some recurring mannerisms, he played three entirely different characters in the Planet of the Apes world and played them as entirely different characters. Caesar is not interchangeable with Cornelius, who is also not interchangeable with Galen. Cornelius and Galen are close (even to their both working for orangutan council members named Zaius), but Galen’s much more adventurous and loyal to his human friends than Cornelius. And in spite of his fugitive status, Galen’s got a greater sense of humor too. He’s absolutely charming.

Unfortunately, there were only fourteen episodes of the show. Wikipedia blames its being scheduled against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man for its low ratings and quick cancellation and that sounds reasonable to me. Those were crazy popular shows.



It did return later though in the form of a series of five TV movies in 1981. Each film was actually two episodes from the original show, but presented with a framing sequence in which Galen told the stories to an unseen human, another time-traveling astronaut who had arrived in Galen’s era. In these scenes, Galen explains that Virdon and Burke eventually did find a working computer and were able to get home. That opens up a whole other can of worms about why they didn’t warn the people of their time, but we can close it up again without too much trouble. After all, if humanity didn’t learn its lesson after Cornelius’ story in Escape (I mean seriously, the pet plague he described occurs and the government does nothing to stop people from bringing apes into their homes as replacement pets?!), why would people in the ‘80s change anything based on Virdon and Burke’s stories? I love the idea that Virdon and Burke eventually made it back, so I’m accepting it, but obviously no one believed their tale.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

When I first started this marathon, I anticipated thinking mostly about the social themes in the Planet of the Apes films. That’s because I was most familiar with the first two films, in which the social themes are so important that they often overshadow the adventurous plots. As the series progressed though, those themes became…well, not less important exactly, but simplified.

The first two films addressed several issues in order to explore the complex variety of problems in how people treat each other. They talk about war and prejudice and overpopulation and technology and other issues that I’m not remembering right now. But starting with Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the intricacy of these issues began to be eroded by familiarity. As the series kept going, it ran out of ways to talk about so many specific things at once and instead began to focus on a general message of tolerance.

Not that I think that was a bad move. It was absolutely the right thing to do. It didn’t contradict the first two films, but by jettisoning the biting commentary in favor of a broader message the series gained some flexibility that served it very well.



Now, I’m also not saying that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes are better movies than the original film or Beneath the Planet of the Apes. They’re not (though some will disagree with me about Beneath). Any five-film series is going to start experiencing some diminishing returns and PotA is no exception. But I was surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed the movies, right up to – and including – this last one.

When I reviewed Boom’s current Planet of the Apes comic for Robot 6, I explained that I hadn’t at that time seen the last two movies “partly because they’re not generally regarded as any good.” A commenter took me to task for that, saying that my statement “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, given that Conquest is widely regarded among fans as being one of the best films in the series. For many people, it’s the best of the sequels. Very few people, in fact, would say that film wasn’t any good.” He went on to suggest, “It would be a good idea for CBR’s writers to at least do a little research before posting articles.”

I admit to feeling a bit defensive about that last bit, so in response to him, I let Rotten Tomatoes defend my assertion. They give Conquest a 44% fresh rating from critics and a 49% rating from audiences. That supports my statement that audiences in general didn’t like the film; an entirely different statement from saying that it’s the worst of the bunch. For the record, the freshness rating for the movies suggest that critics liked them in this order (from best to worst):

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes



Audiences rated them differently:

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (tie)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes

Clearly, the commenter was correct in saying that Conquest is regarded as one of the best in the series. That isn’t the same thing as saying that a lot of people liked it, so I stand by my original statement. The irony is that now that I’ve seen it – and Battle – I’m in the 38-49% that liked those movies. And like I suggested at the beginning of this post, that isn’t the only surprise.

As you can tell from reading the posts on Escape and Conquest, my attention became much less concerned about the films’ themes and much more about their continuity. As the series streamlined its social message, its timeline got more and more clunky. I struggled to keep it straight, resisting the theory that the films depict different timelines, but Battle challenges that approach even more.



If Battle reveals how much time has passed between it and Conquest, I missed it. The only date I remember being mentioned in the film is in the framing sequence in which John Huston plays the legendary Lawgiver and relates the events of the film to his students. At first look, it doesn’t appear that much time has passed between Conquest and the main events of Battle. Caesar (still played by Roddy McDowell) and his wife Lisa look to be the same ages they were during the ape rebellion, but they do have a pre-teen son, so clearly a little time has passed. There’s a scene in Conquest where Caesar and Lisa are clearly about to mate, so my first assumption was that their son, Cornelius II, was conceived then, placing Battle 10-12 years later. That’s impossible though. Too much has changed. Which is the major continuity problem with the film.

The biggest change is that all of the apes have now learned to talk. That’s a huge difference from Conquest and isn’t easily explained by a ten-year time lapse. On top of that, one of the main characters, an orangutan named Virgil (Paul Williams) claims that he studied under another, older orangutan named Mandemus (Lew Ayres). Virgil’s not a kid (Paul Williams was in his 30s when the film was made), so ten years isn’t enough time for Mandemus to have learned to talk and then taught other students. Much more time has to have elapsed.

I’ve been reading Rich Handley’s Timeline of the Planet of the Apes and he suggests a thirty-year difference between Conquest and Battle to account for some of this stuff. That puts Caesar in his 50s, meaning that Cornelius II was born when Caesar was in his 40s. But it also creates new problems, like the age of Caesar’s human aide, MacDonald (Austin Stoker).



Battle’s MacDonald is the brother of Hari Rhodes’ MacDonald from Conquest who was the aide of the evil governor in that film before switching allegiance to the apes’ cause. The problem is that Stoker was only thirty years old when he made Battle, meaning that his character would have to have been born around the same time as the events of Conquest. And since Rhodes was 40 when he made that film, it makes a 40-year difference between the brothers’ ages. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely.

Regardless of whether Handley’s got the timeline right, you see the problem. Too much history has passed to allow for a short time frame, but MacDonald’s age (and possibly Cornelius II’s) don’t allow for a long one.

Sidebar: I do like Snell’s theory that the US government took genetic samples from Zira and the original Cornelius and used them to enhance primates and create the apes we saw in Conquest. That would explain why those apes look nothing like real ones. It might even explain how the new apes learned to talk so quickly. It doesn’t explain Mandemus though. A significant amount of time has to have passed for him to learn to speak.



According to Handley, Ty Templeton (who wrote Mr. Comics’ Revolution on the Planet of the Apes mini-series) had a theory that Mandemus had actually been part of Armando’s circus and had learned to talk by being around Caesar, making Mandemus – not Lisa – the first primitive ape to speak. That’s a stretch, because it doesn’t explain how Mandemus gained the ability unless Caesar had some kind of supernatural powers that gave it to him.

Although... supernatural powers would help account for Mandemus’ being around early enough to teach a young Virgil. And actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s exactly the scenario that Templeton suggests in Revolution and it’s based apparently on some early production notes from Conquest that suggest that Caesar does in fact have otherworldly abilities (gained perhaps by going through the time-field while in the womb). Handley even suggests that there’s a way of watching Conquest so that Caesar’s communicating telepathically with the apes he’s inspiring to revolt.

All of which has probably given you a headache by now, because it has me. By the time we get to the Planet of the Apes TV series with its dogs (aren’t they supposed to be extinct?) and photos of 22nd century New York (shown completely destroyed in Battle), I begin to wonder if it’s worth trying to make this all fit.

That makes me want to reconsider Mike DeStasio’s take about the alternate timelines. Again, not only does his theory allow for infinite inconsistencies, it has the advantage of being advocated for not only by Hasslein in Escape, but also by Virgil in Battle.



In his Introduction to Timeline Handley describes Mike and my theories as a very old debate amongst PotA fans. “Do the films form a circular chronology, with three through five leading to one and two, then back to the last three…or does the final trilogy creat an alternate, more optimistic future, canceling out the dismal world seen in the first two?” I don’t know that that second view perfectly describes Mike’s theory, but the circular one does express the way I’ve been trying to see the series. Complicating the discussion – as it always does with popular, long-running series – is the question of which stories count. If I can make all five movies fit into a circular timeline, do I also need to make the TV shows fit? Or can they be an alternate timeline a la Mike’s theory?

The answer of course is, “Sure. Why not?” I can do whatever I want and so can you. Handley explains this too. Based on Hasslein’s theory, “every time someone crosses the time barrier – the Hasslein Curve – in either direction, it’s possible for history to become modified. If so, given the astounding number of time-trips in this mythos[…]this renders the whole 'circular vs. changing' debate a far more complex question, for instead of two or three histories, we now have the potential for many more – infinitely more in fact…

“Planet of the Apes history could very well be neither a circular loop nor an 'A or B' set of divergent highway lanes, but rather a Möbius strip embedded in an Escher landscape twisted up in a pretzel and tied in a sailor’s knot, continuously looping back upon itself, readjusting with each successive time-trip and enabling all of the various contradictory incarnations to occur on the same continuous, ever-changing loop. Sorting out one timeline from the next thus becomes virtually impossible.”



While that’s not at all satisfying for the me who digs neat, clean, organized stories, it’s extremely liberating for the me who – 1800 words into this post – hasn’t been able yet to say one word about the plot of the film because I’ve been focusing on continuity. I appreciate the permission to shut up about it and enjoy the stories.

As I said above, I liked the story in Battle. Following the ape uprising in Conquest, Caesar has started a new society in which apes and humans are supposed to be able to get along. But they’re not equal. Apes still don’t trust humans and have developed strict rules to prevent humanity’s taking over again. The humans are of course chaffing from the restrictions.

Complicating the situation, Caesar mounts an expedition with MacDonald and Virgil to go into the old city and look for archives that may have records of Caesar’s parents. He finds what he’s looking for, but that ends up being inconsequential. What’s important is that there are still humans living in the city, mutated by radiation fallout (the forbearers of the mutants in Beneath) and resentful of the ape uprising. They follow Caesar and the others back to Ape City and mount an attack, determined to wipe out the apes before the apes can (they assume) return with their own forces to destroy what’s left of the mutant population.



To make matters worse, Ape City’s chief military officer is a gorilla named Aldo (Claude Akins in a sad bit of miscasting; he doesn’t have the presence to play an intimidating villain) who hates humans and wants them all killed. There’s a whole subplot about Aldo’s trying to wrest control of the city from Caesar and he sees the mutant attack as an opportunity to declare martial law and seize power. Aldo of course is the name of the ape who first said “no” in Cornelius’ version of history in Escape. His role is very different here, but he certainly is an advocate for ape supremacy and an important historical figure. Perhaps by Cornelius’ time the details of his exact actions were lost. Cornelius might have invented a connection between Aldo and the story of Lisa’s “no.”

And here I am again, explaining contradictions. As I said when I wrote about Escape, it’s too fun not to. The difference now, thanks to Mike DeStasio and Rich Handley, is that I don’t feel pressured to explain everything. As we’ll see next week when we look at the live-action TV show.