Childhood Memories Smashed

Or How Rewatching Beneath the Planet of the Apes Ruined My Night

I just began to rewatch all the Planet of the Apes movies, excluding the terrible 2001 remake. Other than the classic original I haven’t seen these since I was a young lad when they were shown on the Channel 7 4:30 Movie. (Planet of the Apes Week and Godzilla Week were my favorite weeks.) To start, I watched Planet and Beneath the Planet of the Apes back-to-back. Planet is still great. One of my all-time favorites movies. It sets up a great world and ends with a fantastic payoff.

I finished watching Planet of the Apes, thought of retiring for the night, but excitement took hold of my faculties and I popped in Beneath. If asked which of the Apes movies was my favorite I would have answered Beneath. In fact, I did answer Beneath to that very same question just the other day, which was one of the things that whetted my appetite to watch all these again. This favoritism was based upon my childhood memories. I remember a Taylor look-alike who I thought was cool while fighting apes. He gets shot in the arm and doesn’t make a sound while hiding behind a scrub brush, and then in the finale he ends up getting stood up to a wall in a rain of ape gunfire just before the ape world is destroyed. What a way to go! Until I rewatched this movie I would have placed dying in a hail of ape gunfire while the world blew up to be in my top 3 ways of passing on.

Other than the shooting scene behind the bush nothing about Beneath was as I remembered. In fact, I am saddened to say, the movie really isn’t any good. How can something I imagined for around thirty years to be great become so disappointing? I knew something was wrong when I didn’t se Roddy McDowell’s name in the credits. What is going on here? (I have since read up on wikipedia that Roddy was busy directing another film during Beneath’s making and therefore could not be in it.)

The main problem may be that I watched this and the original together. On rewatching the original I found more subtely added and the ape world more complex. . In a short span the movie sets up the different ape groups: orangutans are smart leaders, gorillas are the police force, brutish and powerful, and chimpanzees the diligent workers. It shows how that world works. We see museums, markets, courts of law, churches, research facilities. The orangutans know about the past human history. This is alluded to in one of the first conversations between Zira and Cornelius as they talk about how chimpanzees have been given new rights but that they both realize they can never really know all that the orangutans do and will never sit on the council. The council ruled by the orangutans want control. Even though they claim their civilization is thousands of years old we wonder why they haven’t advanced as much they probably should have. From some tidbits coming out of the mouth of Dr. Zaius we realize that the orangutans have been purposefully holding back the apes from advancing too soon too fast based upon the folly of humans who had done their best to destroy the world. In themselves they see the capacity for destructive war that humans have mastered and they are trying to prevent that. (The subsequent movies play on other human follies that lead to the ape world. Or at least I think it does, I haven’t gotten around to rewatching them yet.)

What was greatly disappointing about Beneath was that it doesn’t really add further insight into this world. They do add a gorilla army, that is belligerent and bellicose, rather than just a police or hunting force. There is one scene where chimpanzees are at a peace protest against the gorillas but this is never explored further. Dr. Zauis sort of goes with General Ursis and his army but he is really the only orangutan around and in the first one he wasn’t even the most important orangutan. (Dr. Zaius is the Minister of Science and the Leader of the Faith.) It seems that orangutans have given control away to a populist militaristic gorilla movement. It can also be seen in any scene involving more than three apes that they really cheaped out on the production design. In group shots I really do think they juts put some gorilla masks on extras and told them to jump up and down.

Other than these ape insights, Beneath focuses way too much on the humans. Especially the stupid telepathic underground mutants. I understand that circa 1969 telepaths and nuclear war destruction were common SF and fantasy tropes but c’mon! You have a great concept in a world ruled by apes. Why add mutant telepaths who worship a nuclear bomb? Not only were the mutants terrible but, worse, they were unnecessary.

I do understand why Brent, the new astronaut, was included. (Because a recalcitrant Charlton Heston did not want much to do with a sequel.) The guy who played Brent was fine if not a bit too much of a “serious” actor. During the scenes when he was attempting to ward off the mutants brain control and refrain from choking Nova I was like “Lighten up man, you’re in an Apes movie.” Intentionally or not, the film does fulfill the promise of modern man as world destroyers as Taylor, the misplaced human, is the one to detonate the “Doomsday bomb” which while small as far as bombs go, apparently packs a humungous punch and was stored in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

The first film packs a wallop at the end with Taylor finding a dilapidated Statue of Liberty. Beneath now imagines an entire ruined NYC that seems misplaced. It does away with time and distance when dealing with the Forbidden Zone. Every cave became an entrance to New York City. And New York after a nuclear war is amazingly easy to get around. Brent went from Queenboro Plaza to the New York Public Library to Grand central Station to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in no time at all.

The movie also starts off with a scene involving Taylor giving Nova his dogtags. Dogtags were never in the first movie. But here is Taylor digging it out of his loincloth and handing over to Nova. How ridiculous. Didn’t anyone watch the first movie? Taylor is completely naked like three times and his only possession is his dirty stinking loin cloth summarily torn off after offending an orangutan’s delicate olfactory senses. It’s not even the broken continuity that bothers me. It’s the sheer laziness. There are a million other ways and reasons for Nova to have Taylor’s name written down somewhere on her person. And dogtags was the best they could come up with. And for more nitpicking, Cornelius and Zira who at the end of Planet were being held in arrest for heresy by Dr. Zaius now appear to be his confidante and living in married bliss. More laziness from the filmmakers.

In addition to the above quibbles I think I was either disappointed in myself or I just found myself questioning the younger me. Did I ever think those mutants were cool or added to the story in any meaningful way? The mutant telepaths were quite lame. I was deflated when I found out that the gorilla General was named Ursis and not Urko. Apparently, Urko was not introduced until the TV series. They were the same rocking helmet, though. The biggest disappointment was the death of Brent which for some reason lasts a lot longer in my memory. I recall a man dying as a hero while being stuffed full of burning lead. The death is quick and untidy and not at all like the image that I have been holding in my mind. Then the voice-over ending concerning a “dead planet” was cheesy and not ominous. And you would think that they would end the series with a destroyed world.

But there is Escape from the Planet of the Apes. The next DVD to be popped in a watched. I remember liking this one quite a bit also. I’m just not going to think about how Cornelius and Zira could have commandeered a spaceship and gotten it off the planet and into a time vortex. It’s not gonna bother me at all.