"Somewhere out there there has to be something better than man." - Taylor (Charlton Heston)
The film opens in the cockpit of a spacecraft, the ultimate antiseptic, finely controlled environment. This is human civilization at its peak. All of the crew are asleep, in cryogenic stasis, save Taylor, the misanthropic captain played by Charlton Heston. He's entering a log, Captain Kirk style, but being considerably more introspective because he's got time to kill and themes to advance:
"Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me though. Does man that marvel of the universe that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?"
That's the set up. High tech ship soaring through the stars, mankind's best aboard, pondering the meaning of life. Mankind is on top and in charge.
All is right with the universe.
Then the rug gets yanked out and we enter free fall.
They didn't have enough money to show the ship crash landing, so they shot it from the ship's POV, using footage taken by an airplane. The camera spins and yaws, then careens down into a lake, pulling the viewer along with it.
It's a stunning, delirious sequence, born of necessity, but it works fabulously, establishing an eerie, artsy vibe, thanks to the fantastic cinematography, the magnificence of the Arizona desert, and the unnerving score.
If it weren't for the title, the last thing you'd expect is for the astronauts to run into a bunch of talking gorillas. It starts out posing as Hard SF.
Heston and two bright-eyed, bushy-tailed comrades, Landon and Dodge, escape their sinking spacecraft, but the fourth member of their expedition, a woman who would be the new eve, dies before landing due to a malfunction in her cryotube.
The barren Arizona desert makes for a wonderful alien world, lifeless from horizon to horizon. The cast is framed against the vast landscape, without a single plant to be seen.
Eventually the stranded astronauts find a weed, which fills the crew with hope, despite Taylor razzing them every step of the way. Soon the wastes give way to lush forest and grassland. They find a pool right out of Doctor Doolittle and jump in, only to have their clothes and equipment mysteriously stolen before they can get out.
They encounter a herd of mute humans, who have been reduced to the level of animal intelligence.
Heston figures they'll be running the place in short order.
His ambitions are quickly dashed as they hear hunting horns sound.
Because these human beings are being hunted like animals. The pursuers are at first unseen. We catch glimpses of poles thrashing the cornfield, rifles firing, horses charging. Humans are flushed like birds, herded like cattle, shot like dogs.
Finally Heston catches sight of the horsemen and realizes... they're apes!
One of the astronauts is killed, a second captured, and Heston wounded in the throat.
As the hunt concludes, trophy photos taken over their corpses. By making apes the oppressors, Serling set into very sharp relief man's barbarity to man, and comments on racism and colonialism.
Granted, it's pretty obvious what planet this is, as the apes speak perfect English. There was some talk of having the apes speak a kind of gibberish at first, which becomes intelligible (English) as Heston picks up the local language. But this was abandoned as being too complicated for audiences of the time.
Heston is injured and separated from his friends, and gets thrown into the upside down world of ape politics. It's a simplified mirror of our own world, of course, with ape society broken up into three castes: orangutans are authority figures, gorillas are soldiers and workers (presumably farmers as well), and chimpanzees are the middle class and ineffectual intellectuals.
This class based view of society fits with Wilson's Marxist leanings, and actually enriches the picture, adding further depth to the social messages and sharp witted satire.
In fact, the ape actors so took to their race / class based roles that they all ate by group: gorilla with gorilla, chimp with chimp, orangutan with orangutan.
Taylor is paraded around on a leash, threatened with castration and lobotomy, and kept in a cage. The world is now fully inverted: privileged astronaut and American hero Taylor is now a mere animal. From top to bottom in under thirty minutes.
Due to his throat injury, Taylor cannot speak, and his attempts to try are mocked by apes as mere mimicry.
For such a man as Taylor, the fall could not be greater.
The threat of having his balls lopped off compels Taylor to escape. He leads the apes about in a merry chase around their village and gets pelted with rotten fruit and finally snagged in a net. As the gorilla guards move in to apprehend him, Heston utters the classic line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"
He's quickly rushed to trial. Dr. Zaius, the orangutan Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith (in a nice satirical touch), is hell bent on having Taylor put down, and his chimp patrons censored.
This anti-human attitude just makes Taylor, the devout misanthrope, earnestly wonder why Dr. Zaius fears and hates him so. He should just ask his earlier self.
Taylor views man as weak and pathetic; everything he says about humanity drips with scorn, from his disgust for his fellow astronauts to his sneering contempt for the weakness of a long dead man who once possessed ancient artifacts (a pacemaker, spectacles) that the apes unearth.
Near the end of the film, Cornelius, at the behest of Dr. Zaius, reads from The Sacred Scrolls:
"Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair for he is the harbinger of death."
Whereupon Charlton promptly goes out and discovers his destiny, and the truth: he was home all along. Man is indeed the harbinger of death, and by the megaton.
Taylor is an arrogant, smug narcissist. A self-made God. As Grouchy Marx might say, he is someone who 'would never belong to any club that would have him.'
And humanity, ages ago, delivered on Taylor's low expectations.
He ends the film pounding his fist helplessly into the surf, bowed before the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty.
It's an image laden with symbolism, and the scene is a slap in the face, a visual scream, a wake-up call, demanding us to do better, to not let the writers, and ourselves, down. To prove we're better than what Taylor believes us to be.
That's one heck of a political statement for a mainstream film.
The only film with a bleaker ending is the sequel.
The film opens in the cockpit of a spacecraft, the ultimate antiseptic, finely controlled environment. This is human civilization at its peak. All of the crew are asleep, in cryogenic stasis, save Taylor, the misanthropic captain played by Charlton Heston. He's entering a log, Captain Kirk style, but being considerably more introspective because he's got time to kill and themes to advance:
"Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me though. Does man that marvel of the universe that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?"
That's the set up. High tech ship soaring through the stars, mankind's best aboard, pondering the meaning of life. Mankind is on top and in charge.
All is right with the universe.
Then the rug gets yanked out and we enter free fall.
They didn't have enough money to show the ship crash landing, so they shot it from the ship's POV, using footage taken by an airplane. The camera spins and yaws, then careens down into a lake, pulling the viewer along with it.
It's a stunning, delirious sequence, born of necessity, but it works fabulously, establishing an eerie, artsy vibe, thanks to the fantastic cinematography, the magnificence of the Arizona desert, and the unnerving score.
If it weren't for the title, the last thing you'd expect is for the astronauts to run into a bunch of talking gorillas. It starts out posing as Hard SF.
Heston and two bright-eyed, bushy-tailed comrades, Landon and Dodge, escape their sinking spacecraft, but the fourth member of their expedition, a woman who would be the new eve, dies before landing due to a malfunction in her cryotube.
The barren Arizona desert makes for a wonderful alien world, lifeless from horizon to horizon. The cast is framed against the vast landscape, without a single plant to be seen.
Eventually the stranded astronauts find a weed, which fills the crew with hope, despite Taylor razzing them every step of the way. Soon the wastes give way to lush forest and grassland. They find a pool right out of Doctor Doolittle and jump in, only to have their clothes and equipment mysteriously stolen before they can get out.
They encounter a herd of mute humans, who have been reduced to the level of animal intelligence.
Heston figures they'll be running the place in short order.
His ambitions are quickly dashed as they hear hunting horns sound.
Because these human beings are being hunted like animals. The pursuers are at first unseen. We catch glimpses of poles thrashing the cornfield, rifles firing, horses charging. Humans are flushed like birds, herded like cattle, shot like dogs.
Finally Heston catches sight of the horsemen and realizes... they're apes!
One of the astronauts is killed, a second captured, and Heston wounded in the throat.
As the hunt concludes, trophy photos taken over their corpses. By making apes the oppressors, Serling set into very sharp relief man's barbarity to man, and comments on racism and colonialism.
Granted, it's pretty obvious what planet this is, as the apes speak perfect English. There was some talk of having the apes speak a kind of gibberish at first, which becomes intelligible (English) as Heston picks up the local language. But this was abandoned as being too complicated for audiences of the time.
Heston is injured and separated from his friends, and gets thrown into the upside down world of ape politics. It's a simplified mirror of our own world, of course, with ape society broken up into three castes: orangutans are authority figures, gorillas are soldiers and workers (presumably farmers as well), and chimpanzees are the middle class and ineffectual intellectuals.
This class based view of society fits with Wilson's Marxist leanings, and actually enriches the picture, adding further depth to the social messages and sharp witted satire.
In fact, the ape actors so took to their race / class based roles that they all ate by group: gorilla with gorilla, chimp with chimp, orangutan with orangutan.
Taylor is paraded around on a leash, threatened with castration and lobotomy, and kept in a cage. The world is now fully inverted: privileged astronaut and American hero Taylor is now a mere animal. From top to bottom in under thirty minutes.
Due to his throat injury, Taylor cannot speak, and his attempts to try are mocked by apes as mere mimicry.
For such a man as Taylor, the fall could not be greater.
The threat of having his balls lopped off compels Taylor to escape. He leads the apes about in a merry chase around their village and gets pelted with rotten fruit and finally snagged in a net. As the gorilla guards move in to apprehend him, Heston utters the classic line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"
He's quickly rushed to trial. Dr. Zaius, the orangutan Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith (in a nice satirical touch), is hell bent on having Taylor put down, and his chimp patrons censored.
This anti-human attitude just makes Taylor, the devout misanthrope, earnestly wonder why Dr. Zaius fears and hates him so. He should just ask his earlier self.
Taylor views man as weak and pathetic; everything he says about humanity drips with scorn, from his disgust for his fellow astronauts to his sneering contempt for the weakness of a long dead man who once possessed ancient artifacts (a pacemaker, spectacles) that the apes unearth.
Near the end of the film, Cornelius, at the behest of Dr. Zaius, reads from The Sacred Scrolls:
"Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair for he is the harbinger of death."
Whereupon Charlton promptly goes out and discovers his destiny, and the truth: he was home all along. Man is indeed the harbinger of death, and by the megaton.
Taylor is an arrogant, smug narcissist. A self-made God. As Grouchy Marx might say, he is someone who 'would never belong to any club that would have him.'
And humanity, ages ago, delivered on Taylor's low expectations.
He ends the film pounding his fist helplessly into the surf, bowed before the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty.
It's an image laden with symbolism, and the scene is a slap in the face, a visual scream, a wake-up call, demanding us to do better, to not let the writers, and ourselves, down. To prove we're better than what Taylor believes us to be.
That's one heck of a political statement for a mainstream film.
The only film with a bleaker ending is the sequel.
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