Planet of the Apes
Time Out New York Project: Issue #820, July 7-13, 2011
★★★★★
Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. 1968. N/R. 112mins. Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter.
We all know how it ends: on a beach with a loincloth-clad Charlton Heston bellowing to the heavens before a despoiled Lady Liberty. It’s such a pop-culture touchstone — the most famous poke probably came from The Simpsons (“I hate every ape I see / From chimpan-A to chimpanzee”) — that the rest of this seminal science-fiction feature tends to get overshadowed. Seen now, the film is no less of a mind-altering beast than Kubrick’s similarly simian-featuring 2001, which was released only a few months after Apes’ premiere.
The leisurely paced first half hour, in which Heston’s light-years traversing astronaut hikes through the desolate Forbidden Zone, is practically avant-garde in its reliance on alienating wide shots and a percussively atonal Jerry Goldsmith score. When those damn, dirty apes show up, Planet gets even more oddball and incisive: The satirical jabs are either wittily on the nose (“Human see, human do”) or disturbingly under the radar (a never explicitly acknowledged pecking order from light-skinned lawgiver orangutans to dark-skinned warrior gorillas). And Heston makes for a fascinatingly shifty onscreen surrogate, alternating his perspective — longing for the traditional with Linda Harrison’s savage Nova, inciting a young ape to progressive teenage rebellion — as it suits his character’s perceived evolutionary correctness. To ultimately see him so humbled is no cheap narrative twist (look to the mostly terrible sequels for that), but as illuminatingly bleak a statement on human hubris as a Hollywood superproduction has given us.—Keith Uhlich
