![]() ![]() Much of it plays out in contained spaces, in beautifully shaped scenes, like you'd see in superior stage production. Serling and Wilson's script, which adapted Pierre Bouelle's more literary/explanatory source novel, balances adventure, horror, parable and satire with a deftness rarely attempted by Hollywood blockbusters today.īy modern studio-film standards, "Apes" is a small movie. Schaffner (" Patton") from a screenplay credited to "The Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, "Apes" feels like a very long but superb "Zone" episode, so clever and well-crafted that even if you figure out the twist right away (and "The Simpsons" aside, why wouldn't you, as many times as that ending shot has been parodied?) you get pulled in by Taylor's predicament, and by the storytelling. "Get to the apes," some part of the brain might mumble.ĭirected by Franklin J. Taylor is insufferable from frame one, the kind of seen-it-all blowhard you'd hate to sit next to in a bar. ![]() As a species whose brains have evolved a fast-forward button, we no longer have patience for movies that take their time conveying the idea of a Long Journey, as "Apes" does during its opening twenty minutes, following three stranded American astronauts as they wander on foot through a wasteland while their captain, cynic supreme George Taylor (Heston), grandstands about the irrevocability of their situation. The mid-twentieth-century rhythm of the storytelling might take some getting used to for newcomers, especially those introduced to the franchise via the superb, CGI-saturated, ape-centric films, or the over-scaled, undercooked 2001 Tim Burton remake. I saw it for the first time on TV in the late '70s-I might have been ten or eleven-and found it unrelentingly intense, but today it looks like a model of stoic patience. This film is a classic, by which I mean, so fundamentally compelling that once you immerse yourself in it, you tend to accept its blatantly of-the-moment aspects-such as the once innovative but now obviously rubbery primate masks, Heston's toothy declaiming, and the hero's mute, gorgeous love interest (essentially a means of repopulating the species)-as aspects of its personality instead of deal-breakers. Almost fifty years after its release, the original "Planet of the Apes" still works because it, too, is a madhouse: up is down black is white ape on top, man in the dirt-or in jail. ![]() "It's a madhouse!" screams Charlton Heston's imprisoned astronaut in "Planet of the Apes," after suffering unending abuse at the hands of talking primates who treat him as a threat to their order. ![]()
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