Secure Immaturity

I really shouldn’t be surprised but then again, I always set myself up for these things. Halo: Contact Harvest is less a book but a series/video game bible/layout that, I imagine, was thrown aside when better ideas came along. I don’t want to say the book is written poorly because writer Joseph Staten is actually quite talented. His universe building skills, as shown in the second Halo game, for example, are excellent.

I really shouldn’t be surprised but then again, I always set myself up for these things. Halo: Contact Harvest is less a book but a series/video game bible/layout that, I imagine, was thrown aside when better ideas came along. I don’t want to say the book is written poorly because writer Joseph Staten is actually quite talented. His universe building skills, as shown in the second Halo game, for example, are excellent.

His problem: the universe he’s built is boring and as confusing as shit. I remember really liking Halo 2 at first. I felt the writers really expanded a universe that was mostly a rip off of Aliens in the first place. But then I started getting a bit confused and realized that SHOWING me a universe is one thing but hearing/reading about it is another. Halo 2, while an underrated game story-wise (the Covenant sections are interesting though not compelling), was definitely a mess. They lost track of their hero and focused on aspects that were made so utterly confusing and deep that, well, it wasn’t fun. And let’s not get started on Halo 3, in which they had to a)continue this craziness established in Halo 2 and b)erase all the terrible mistakes from Halo 2 in some exposition-heavy way to make Halo 3 a bit more accessible to newbies of the XBox 360 and to the now critically mixed franchise.

I always ignored the books because I always found myself more frustrated with Halo’s mythology as opposed to drawn to it. Also, I was shocked that despite the Halo franchise being one of my all-time favorites in the video game world, I was very unattached to it emotionally. I liked Master Chief but he is a very thin hero. . .not much depth there. He’s cool but is he lovable. There was Cortana. . .and who knows what the fuck happened to her at the end of Halo 2. I know Halo 3 told me but. . .I still don’t really know. And then there was the tricky Arbiter, who, himself, is a mythological symbol that makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. He was cool and I liked his missions in Halo 2 but. . .yeah. . .not much there either EXCEPT Keith David’s awesome voice.

The main three characters were really devoid of anything other then COOL moments. And the Halo games outside the Master Chief vein were pretty unbearable. A lot of people seemed to like ODST but, frankly, I had no interest in exploring the Halo world any further WITHOUT at least someone COOL since emotion was too hard to ask. I didn’t even finish Halo Wars and I will probably skip Halo: Reach since it is a prequel and prequels, especially loaded with anti-climaxes, dense mythologies, and, once again, none of the original characters, just sounds like crap on a stick.

So I think I just explained why I skipped the Halo books! I don’t want to read about this universe that is confusing and dense and has no emotion behind it. . .especially when I can’t fire weapons that blow shit up! But, somehow, I bought two Halo books. I bought one called The Ghost of Onyx, and this book, Contact Harvest. I initially bought Contact Harvest because it had Sgt. Avery Johnson on the cover. Now this was interesting to me for two reasons. One, I was GOING to name my first child Avery (and my last name is Johnson) so that would have been weird. . .and it had nothing to do with Halo. Second, Johnson seemed to be the only genuinely fun NPC in the whole Halo universe. You cared for him when he was there. . .which wasn’t enough, frankly. And, naturally, they fucking killed him at the end of Halo 3. Figures the first main character, of sorts, to die would be black!

But in the video game, Johnson was an Apone-rip-off who was kind of fun. But as I started to read his story in Contact Harvest, which is a prequel by the way, I instantly regretted it. Some people, who are rip-offs of other caricatures in the first place, can’t be made three dimensional. Johnson is a drill Sgt who says witty things and shoots stuff. . .yet in Contact Harvest he has a tragic past and a way with the laaaadies. It’s all kind of sad really. And now that I’ve read Johnson in all kinds of different situations outside of mindlessly shooting elites. . .I don’t like him anymore. Once again, the creators behind Halo have OVERDONE the mythology. Sgt. Johnson is no longer interesting to me now because he is OVER written now. Ugh.

The rest of the book doesn’t help much considering half of it is about Covenant politics. And the writer fails to let the story flow. . .he insists on writing a sentence and then writing eighteen paragraphs on Covenant society that led to that one sentence. It’s really distracting and annoying. It is not exaggeration when I say this book really could have been 100 pages shorter. But pesky Joseph Staten can’t let us turn the page without knowing how the Elites had a war once or how Sgt. Johnson masturbated once when he was 14!

Plus there is this inane subplot involving an Unggoy (the little creatures for the Covenant) and a flying creature called a Huragok and their friendship even though both, to facilitate the narrative of future games, must die. And then there are the AIs (like Cortana) that kind of Moonlighting/love-hate each other. Really bad. There is no one to root for in this book, nothing physical or emotional to grab on to, and the story, what little there is (something to do with Covenant/UNSC first contact out on the frontier of human space), is underwhelmed by the oppressive back story. I am seriously questioning reading the second Halo book I bought. . .I’d advise to ignore this one if possible.

I want to start by saying that Good Omens is masterfully written: it’s attention to detail, its rich characterization, and it’s unique and never-fail humor is second to none (or, at least, very few). As a writer myself, I was constantly jealous of both Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s skills. DAMN YOU! But also THANK YOU!

That said, I feel that behind this brilliance is an acquired taste. . .and while I appreciate the skill, I’m just not a large fan of the style. Good Omens is a classic, for sure. All my geeky friends think it is a work of art and genius and that is fantastic. I’m glad I read it. . .but, at times, I wished it was a short story (which, I heard, it originally was. . .without an ending). Good Omens, to me, is a book of moderation. I would read 50 or so pages, laugh a lot, but when another free opportunity came up to read it. . .I waited until I was in the mood again. We’re not talking WEEKS or anything but I can’t deny that perhaps one single week would go by without picking this book up because. . .well. . .I’d tire of the style. To each his own. . .I can’t deny Good Omens brilliance. . .I just prefer it in small doses.

In the end, humor comes down to taste and Good Omens isn’t necessarily my type of humor. Granted, I did laugh hysterically often in this book and for that I am grateful. I can see some people reading this in one sitting and endlessly laughing but I felt that if I power-read this I’d end up hating it. . .so it took awhile but Good Omens, for me, in moderation, was worth the long haul.

Starting July 16th all the way through July 31st I will be doing a ‘week’ on my all-time favorite actor, Jack Lemmon. I’ll be reviewing fifteen classic Lemmon movies ranging from 1955 all the way to 1998 as well as contributing three essays on the man himself. I am really pumped for this whole thing to start so I have already begun preparing and watching so the reading experience will be enjoyable for all. I’m not going to release the ‘playlist’ , as it were, yet to keep some sort of surprise. Anyways, see you all July 16th for the opening statements on Lemmon ‘Week’.

Sometimes a film is popular for one thing. . .and even as generations pass, that one thing actually becomes more then the film itself. A Few Good Men is probably the most quoted film a lot of people HAVEN’T seen BUT people know exactly what you’re talking about when you ‘hear’ about it. In this case, the now infamous line ‘you can’t handle the truth’ is ubiquitous with A Few Good Men. Do people know what the line means or why it’s iconic? I’m willing to bet that even people who have seen the film, which is now approaching its 20th birthday, don’t even remember what ‘you can’t handle the truth’ is all about. I certainly didn’t and I had never watched the film. . .yet I knew the set ups of the camera, the delivery of the line, and the action going on around the scene. For a moment in a film’s 2 hour plus running time, without seeing it, I knew what was happening, physically, with crystal clear clarity. . .and this was off of pop culture popularity alone.

So I decided to finally watch the film and see what this truth was that I couldn’t handle. And 1992’s A Few Good Men certainly isn’t a bad movie but it isn’t exactly the cultural tour de force that has, for near 20 years, been current and present in the cultural zeitgeist. If you (dare to) say ‘you can’t handle the truth’ people KNOW you are talking about this film. . .how did this happen???? Who knows. . .but A Few Good Men is a standard court procedural involving the military. There is only one gun fired and the majority of the action takes place in a court room. Court room movies, for the most part, are greatest hits albums of really boring proceedings: we get all the good parts. But you’re still just sitting in a room watching other people sitting in a room watching really overly-intelligent smarmy lawyers talk to people who are also sitting down. It’s a tricky thing to make a court movie. . .so how do you do it?

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This was one of those rare opportunities when I got to see a movie AFTER I’ve read a book. . .I just wish the book was better then mediocre and the movie followed suit. Oh well. . .you can’t win at everything. And neither can the characters in the book or the movie since The Road exists as a book/film in which to break the human spirit.

My thoughts on the book are documented here but, in short, I felt the book would have had a lot of power if it was a short story and was, perhaps, written better. The ideas of an apocalypse are one thing, as are the staples of bad guys who eat people and the will to survive, but to make those ideas refreshing, you actually have to expand on them. Cormac McCarthy, the author of the book, just described grey stuff. . .and the book, while an interesting read for it’s atmosphere, was kind of boring.

And the film decides to stick more to the book then to the director’s take on the whole thing. The Road is in dire need of a little plot rejuvenation or a little injection of purpose. But, alas, I feel like I read and watched something that was largely a waste of time.

Call me old fashioned, but I love people who wear feathered football pads and have Mohawks, fight in big domes of thunder, and drive cars with big metal spikes on them when it comes to the Apocalypse. It’s one category I am happy to be relatively shallow in. But The Road, both on page and screen, is The Thinking Man’s Apocalypse. There is nothing really wrong with that is there is a wide range of issues to actually think about. The only thing The Road educated me about was that, well, if the Apocalypse comes then I am fucked. I am so unprepared to live in post-apocalyptic forests (or modern day Oregon) that I’m pretty much a goner right away.

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One of the greatest, most outlandish lines in cinema history WAS in Planet of the Apes (2001), but appears to be cut. I wanted to see Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes back in 2001 for many, many reasons (and it WASN’T Tim Burton. . .who I loathe) but one of the main reasons was because Tim Roth, as the villain, General Thade, says, in the trailer, ‘GET ME THE SPACE MAN!’ That is so ridiculously stupid that. . .I HAD to see it. Just had to.

Oh and I saw it all right. . .and out of some kind of odd loyalty, I’ve watched Planet of the Apes numerous times even though the logical portions of my brain tell me to run away as fast as possible. IT’S A MAN HOSE! A MAAAAAAAAAN HOSE!!!!!!! Sorry. . .anyways. . .

I saw Planet of the Apes twice in the theater. I saw it opening night with a then-girlfriend who I had inflicted much pain on by watching all five of the previous films before hand. The full house rightfully found the movie dumb. . .but I had blind faith that my beloved Planet of the Apes was not, indeed, raped but in tact. . .somewhere. So I saw it again. . .and I bought it on DVD. . .and I still own it. . .but why?! I’M A MANIAC! DAMN ME TO HELL!

I’m an old school guy so I like the old Planet of the Apes films (as this week has shown) so I at least expected Planet of the Apes (2001) to look similar to Planet of the Apes (1968). I have no problem with people making their own interpretations of things (example: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings is similar but different to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) but if Burton wanted to make something completely foreign to the original then he shouldn’t have taken the POTA brand and made it a Tim Burton film with cameos from Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison.

But there is something to say about maximum effort being applied to maximum stupidity. But we’ll get to that in a second. What’s THIS Planet of the Apes about: glad you asked because, well, I guess I have to tell you (and keep in mind, I didn’t write the movie so don’t blame me if it doesn’t make sense). Mark Wahlberg plays. . .um. . .Mark Wahlberg who is an Air Force pilot on a starbase near Venus or something. He trains monkeys to fly little pods around space to investigate storms. Naturally, they send a monkey into this storm and it disappears. The general in charge of this Air Force/Space Force station-monkey-zoo thing is a smart guy. He decides ‘I don’t want to waste another pod’ and wisely goes away from the storm.

However, Wahlberg wants to pilot things in space so he steals a pod and stupidly goes into the storm that clearly took his monkey friend’s pod away into seeming nothingness. But he’s Mark Wahlberg and he does whatever he wants (let me do a little aside here: humans are VERY stupid in this movie. Okay. . .moving on). Anyways, he gets sucked into a storm, somehow goes into the future, and winds up crashing on a completely different planet (not Earth) which happens to have oxygen, talking humans, and talking apes. As you guessed it, humans are slaves and apes are all super-powered militant mongrels who believe in a little monkey god named Saimos and are on the brink of martial law thanks to the maniacal General Thade (Tim Roth) and his very large aide, Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan).

There is, of course, a few good apes. One of them is Ari, not the Entourage guy, played by Helena Bonham Carter. She’s an animal rights activist! Her fellow protector is a disgraced general named Krull, not the movie, played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (for the uninitiated, he’s the guy from Mortal Kombat that goes YOU ARE MINE while literally making his lips go across the back of his head) who happens to be the arch-nemesis and former master of Attar. Anyways, Ari kind of has a thing for Wahlberg and she buys him and this one annoying female named. . .cleavage-human. . .and takes them home where her father, a senator (David Warner) has dinner guests and they hate humans and stuff. Thade has a thing for Ari while Cleavage-Human has a thing for Wahlberg and an ape-trader named Paul Giamatti has a thing for little ape girls. It’s weird.

Anyways, Wahlberg escapes and finds a beacon from his space station and he and a large group of completely pointless humans (and a few apes) travel to the beacon while trying to escape Thade and his random tirades which involve cutting down ceiling lights and going into weird convulsions. Phew. That was just the first 30 minutes! And that’s the most coherent part of the story. . .see, later all these human tribes want to follow Wahlberg even though Wahlberg wants nothing more then to get off the planet and leave everyone to die. He’s also immensely stupid and can’t do anything right (except swim). These humans still insist on following his every word and they look at him meaningfully. Completely outclassed, Wahlberg mostly leads them to their deaths until fate intervenes (I won’t spoil it. . .seriously, you need to see it for yourself to believe this shit).

I think it’s odd that this one particular movie makes the whole planet of apes thing seem so unbelievable when state of the art technology is in play. The proceedings are just so stupid that. . .you just can’t take most of it seriously. The original films, with low budgets and, in some cases, outdated makeup, were immensely believable. Even the one with the veiny forehead people. This Planet of the Apes is an absolute freak show that is more Tim Burton then any kind of story.

But within this large pile of shit is a few diamonds that sparkle with amazing brightness. To start, many of the actors cast as apes are simply spellbinding. If the Academy Awards thought outside the box a little, and I am being totally serious here, Tim Roth’s exhilarating performance as Thade would have got a nomination. Roth is simply chewing the scenery to the point of over consumption and it is a joy to watch. He has to be one of my all-time favorite villains. He loads the proceedings with these amazing little character tics and beats that make Thade seem real and completely crazy. I would be frightened of this guy if I saw him. One of my favorite moments is when, in the final battle, he takes off this silly pointy hat he’s got on and starts beating humans to death with it. And then to add insult to injury, he impales another human with it. Genius. Also in that scene, a human gets a lucky shot on him and he simply stares at the hapless human with that look of ‘fuck no you didn’t!’ He, alone, could carry this picture.

Michael Clarke Duncan and Helena Bonham Carter are almost as good and look like they are having the time of their life filming this. That kind of attitude can be felt by the audience. Duncan just loves throwing people around and screaming and it’s fun while Carter adds all this sexual stuff to the character that is both compelling and disturbing. Without these three actors, plus MAYBE the comic relief of Paul Giamatti, this film would be a complete and total loss.

This brings us to the humans. Oh my. . .the humans. I can’t think of another film that had a bigger collection of uselessness then Planet of the Apes. Here is our lineup, for those keeping score: Wahlberg, established as the headstrong, dumb hero. We have Cleavage-Woman who is like having one of those shrewish needy girlfriends but on screen instead of at home. She’s always staring at Wahlberg and looking REALLY INTENTLY at everything. She follows Wahlberg around like a dog and gets jealous a lot. It’s REALLY annoying. We’ve also got Random Black Human, who naturally gets killed first. We’ve got Bald Human who does nothing but walk around, literally. He dies. . .with a Mannheim Scream. There is the truly deadly addition of a human 10 year old who only exists to fuck everything up and pout. Thta’s it. . .those are our heroes. Add to that the reaaaaallllly dumb human tribes that deserve to be slaves and. . .yeah. . .not much to get behind here.

Wahlberg is a fair actor. He’s never really been great in anything and I am always hard pressed to say he’s an Oscar nominee and while his character lacks any charisma or intelligence in this movie, he does have the physical hero moments: jumping through fire, running away from lots of apes, and things like that. And his physicality is nice. He gets beat up a lot which is fine. He takes a good beating and he is one of the few actors who can pull off getting thrown around and getting the tar kicked out of him and still look tough. The apes, for whatever reason, are all like superman in this movie and thankfully Wahlberg isn’t the ubermensch who can fight them all off despite his limited strength. Regardless, he does have a high ape body count by film’s end.

The technical aspects of this film are of such high quality that they to can make the picture watchable. The make-up is some of the best in film history, no doubt, and the visual effects have aged well. The set design is both Tim Burtony AND Ape-like. . .he didn’t overindulge himself too much there and I appreciated that. . .and the music is some of Danny Elfman’s best. It’s just the law of averages that brings this film down. There are some quality performances mixed with some really bad ones. There are some amazing technical feats brought down by an inane story.

And worst of all, Planet of the Apes has absolutely nothing to say. Wahlberg mentions something or other about humans willing to destroy themselves but even if you caught it, you realize Wahlberg is the ultimate example of a dumb, destructive human since he decides to put his crew in jeopardy to go find a missing monkey! All five of the original Planet of the Apes films, for better or worse, had something to say. . .this Planet of the Apes is empty of an ideology and that, I’m afraid, is the worst thing you can do to a beloved franchise known for it’s presentation of science-fiction ideas.

Planet of the Apes is an anomaly. Ironically, it’s ending is the most faithful thing to the book though the ending in the book and most certainly in this movie make no sense whatsoever. It made an assload of money both in box office and rentals/purchases but a sequel never came. This I can chalk up to the audiences reaction on that fateful opening night when my movie watching innocence was lost: the crowd LAUGHED at how dumb the movie was. And it is indeed dumb. Oh, very dumb. I wish it didn’t exist at all, despite Thade, but most people have forgotten about it anyways so maybe we can all pretend, those of us that remember, that it never happened.

I would like to say, before we get into this thing, that Battle for the Planet of the Apes is NOT, I repeat NOT, a bad movie. But it isn’t very good either. It kind of exists in that nether region where your kind of enjoying yourself AND pulling your hair out at the same time. But, and we can thank God or the Lawgiver for this, it is better then Beneath the Planet of the Apes. In fact, anything is. But Battle is okay. . .and feel confident in saying that.

When I was a young lad, Battle was probably my favorite of the then five films. It had lots of stuff exploding and people shooting large weapons. When you are a kid, that’s the shit you enjoy. As I got older, and presumably wiser, I realized that Battle is kind of crappy and now that I am even older and even wiser (I hope), I realized it lies in that middle ground I mentioned above.

The things to praise the movie for are its fluid attention to continuity and by creating a few moments that make the movie memorable. What I mean by that is that Battle is famous for the now pop-culture famous line: ‘Ape Shall Not Kill Ape’ and thanks to the frequent reference to that line, the movie builds some tension in certain areas and that is refreshing since, when it comes down to it, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is really an action film padded with a bit of dialogue.

The plot of this flick is pretty simplistic: Caesar’s rebellion at the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes has led to 12 years of all out war and the nuclear destruction Taylor saw at the end of the original film. Now, Caesar and a colony mixed with apes and humans lives primitively (it looks exactly like the original film now) while a group of mutant humans (like the ones in Beneath) still live in the destroyed city and are mutated. When Caesar joins MacDonald (not the guy from Conquest, but his brother. . .a gimmick I personally hate) and Professor Virgil (Paul Williams) on a personal journey to the destroyed city to find old recordings of his parents, the mutated humans make their presence known and their insatiable need for violence. Meanwhile, as both sides prepare for war, a cocky gorilla named General Aldo (Claude Akins) wants to declare martial law and make the Apes a dominant species (or rather, the ONLY species) on the planet which naturally means getting rid of the human population of the colony.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t so simplistic. That took a long ass time to write. Anyways, I liked the attention to detail director J. Lee Thompson and the screenwriters gave to the characters. For one, Caesar (Roddy McDowall) has really developed. At then end of Conquest, you saw a reluctant leader back off of his anger thanks to MacDonald’s words, but he still looked a little crazy. In this film he is more like his father: peaceful, intelligent, but willing to lay a smack down if he needs to (of course, not by killing. . .APE DOESN’T KILL APE DAMN IT!). He also has become a father, his young one named Cornelius, from his wife Lisa (Natalie Trundy) who was basically the ape version of Nova in the first film and magically learned to talk in the last 12 years or so.

I think the dude who plays MacDonald’s brother, MacDonald (not confusing), is pretty cool and once again the conscious of the picture (those damn MacDonalds!) and Paul Williams is a great foil for the straight man that is Caesar. And while generally on the topic of Caesar’s child. . .this is yet ANOTHER Planet of the Apes movie with a child being murdered. Jesus. . .did the writers have a rough childhood or something. Can any of these Apes flicks just be happy for a change!!!!!! Child death count: 2.

But actually, the film does end on a positive note (that’s a first) and I think that’s mainly because this film was touted as (and has so far lived up to being) the final chapter. Every single films ends with something terrible happening, be it the death of the earth or the slavery of man or the death of babies or something equally horrific. But the ending actually fits what started in Escape from the Planet of the Apes when more then one character referenced that we can change our history by ‘changing lanes’ or what not. It appears that in the first four films and most of the fifth, the lanes were going to stay the same and man would meet the fate it met at the end of Beneath.

But at the end of Battle, it appears, thanks to MacDonald’s calming conscious and Caesar’s ever evolving attitude (get it, humans and apes working together), man and ape go on to live in peace and harmony. It’s actually kind of a cute and satisfying ending for a five movie series considering all the death, mayhem, tension, and pain that exists in the first four films. I do have to say that while Battle is kind of mediocre and Beneath is terrible, the five films, on the whole, are very consistent and, at the very least, contain excellent acting performances.

Yet ANOTHER word of caution for the parents out there. Battle for the Planet of the Apes is very violent. Though not quite as violent as Conquest, Battle has a few sequences that tests its pre-PG-13 PG rating. One sequence, in particular, involves Aldo and his gorilla mates trapping a bunch of humans in a bus and slaughtering them. Not pleasant. I don’t know why I’ve become so squeamish with these films but they certainly defied the censors of the times and I don’t want little kiddies, like my now 14 month old, to get nightmares from ape-human massacres.

I’d say Battle is ranked 4th in the hierarchy of five Apes films and deservedly so. It has it’s moments and it ends the series in an adequate and upbeat way. . .but it doesn’t necessarily go out with a bang and that is a shame for such a brilliantly crafted and generally consistent film collection.

SCREW HUMANS! YEAH! Wow. . .I just got done watching Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and I feel ashamed of myself. But for all you apes out there. . .you shouldn’t feel much better. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a great film, no doubt, but it kind of exists without a clear winner. Though we sympathize with apes for most of the picture, their ethics are a bit suspect by film’s end while humans, save the really cool MacDonald, are never shown as anything but brutes.

Such is the result of a film that has managed to carry the depressing torch that all three of the previous films carried with aggressive ruthlessness! And while Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the most depressing film, perhaps, of all time, Conquest if pretty damn close. There is not a trace of humor and a lot of the running time consists of massive amounts of violence and almost every single character worth living dies or loses a piece of themselves. And we call this entertainment!?

Of course! Conquest is a marvelous film solely for the purpose of social commentary. Though not quite as subtle as the original film or Escape, Conquest manages to display equal quantities of irony and tension which result in the viewer taking a moral viewpoint and a side. And, like mentioned above, the film then makes you question that side by having an ambiguous ending.

The plot takes place about 20 years after Escape. Milo, now named Caesar (Roddy McDowell) to protect his identity (we last saw him as a young baby), is taken to the Ape City Center (I don’t know what it’s really called so all the Apes nerds out there leave me alone) by his ward, Armando (Ricardo Montalban, returning from Escape) to promote both his dying circus act and to show Caesar what Armando is protecting him from. In this case, a city in which humans are teaching apes, through oppressive mind control or violence, how to do menial jobs for humans (mop floors, light cigarettes, cook food, shine shoes) so they can eventually be auctioned off into human being’s homes outside the complex. When Caesar sees a young chimpanzee beaten by a number of humans, he shouts out ‘Bastards!’. Armando tries to cover for Caesar but the doubt is now in the human’s minds that perhaps the talking offspring of Cornelius and Zira is not dead after all. Armando manages to hide Caesar within the general population of apes and, through a sequence of events, Caesar begins to teach his fellow apes to rebel against the human forces who violently tell them ‘NO’!

The first credit has to go to Roddy McDowall. Though Caesar looks identical to his father, Cornelius (who Roddy McDowall also played), you really believe he is an entirely different character. McDowall is, at first, just as innocent as Cornelius was but Caesar, exposed to such hatred and slavery, ends up going in an opposite direction. Containing his father’s intelligence but his mother’s instincts to rebel, Cesar ends up becoming the leader of the Apes and slowly and intelligently leads them to rebellion. Also unlike Cornelius, Caesar lays the beat down on some fools.

I also have to give props to Ricardo Montalban for his extremely sympathetic and sad performance as Armando. A lovable man in Escape, Armando is a tortured soul in Conquest, who seems to have lost his old passion of the circus and is facing the loss of his surrogate ’son’. And, naturally, he gets murdered (which leads Caesar to pursue his revolt). I also loved Hari Rhodes as MacDonald, the conscious of the picture. He serves as assistant to the villainous Breck, the governor of the Ape complex (played by Oscar nominee Don Murray) and he is unafraid to not only voice his opinions on Breck’s inhumane treatment of apes but to help the apes whenever he can, going so far as to basically aid Ceasar in escaping to join his comrades and begin the rebellion. It is no coincidence that MacDonald is black and often references he’s a descendant from a family of slaves. His graceful performance lends credibility to a movie about apes fighting for freedom.

Despite my immense respect for the picture, I do have a few complaints. For one, the direction is terrible. Director J. Lee Thompson (Oscar nominated director of The Guns of Navarone) utilizes a lot of hand held camera moves which, I suppose, is supposed to make some of the action claustrophobic. In reality, it just makes the viewer dizzy. Add some very odd shot selections, one involving Armando and Caesar talking to each other while out of focus and off center comes to mind, and you get a film that just doesn’t look that great.

Plus I have to caution viewers with small children about watching this film. I understand there was an R-rated or unrated cut at one point (or it’s on DVD now, I dunno. . .I’m watching all these from my old VHS box set collection, believe it or not) but this PG rated cut is hardly better. Much like the ‘brutal’ G rating of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest is an epically violent film. I don’t necessarily mind violence but there are portions of this film that is literally non-stop slaughter, most of it being apes killing humans with point blank gun shots to the head, slicing them up with machetes and cutlery, or beating them to death with the butts of guns. This is not a COMFORTABLE picture and family viewers should beware. Because of the excessive violence, the film often loses it’s point. . .some of the revolt goes on for far too long. That said, the visceral nature of the uprising can, in many cases, aid the film in being effective but all it needed was a little moderation.

Writer Paul Dehn, a two time Oscar nominee and one time winner, makes up for that horrible Beneath the Planet of the Apes, by crafting a decent picture here (as he did in Escape). The pacing is good and the development of Caesar is exceptional. Also, his attention to continuity details is impressive. Without missing a beat, Dehn manages to tie in the previous films without overloading the film with unnecessary exposition. The film flows amazingly well from one film to the next. . .and Conquest has the brilliance to basically end one form of the saga and also start it all over again (Cesar saying that the Planet of the Apes has just begun brings the series almost full circle).

Plus, the moral ambiguity makes this film more then just a show-and-tell of human flaws. I, of course, was rooting for the apes in the beginning because the humans were treating the Apes like crap. But as the film ends and the humans are getting beaten and killed and Caesar begins a rant much like a power-obsessed dictator, the ‘good’ human MacDonald lectures Caesar on the dangers of violence and oppression. And while Caesar somewhat retracts his ‘now the humans are the slaves’ rhetoric, you can’t help but feel like no one is really right here. Now humans are under the Apes thumb and the roles are reversed. That’s great for the bastards that treated the apes like crap in the FACILITY but what about all the innocents. We end up leaving the film wondering if any of the humans or any of the apes are really worth saving.

I haven’t watched Battle for the Planet of the Apes since I was a kid so I’m wondering if it will hold up and if addresses the issues I brought up above. Escape and Conquest have defied my expectations. . .and while I think Escape from the Planet of the Apes is a much better film then Conquest, Conquest still manages to move the heart and soul and shock you a bit. If you are questioning re watching these Apes films, and Conquest in particular, don’t: they stand the test of time.

I’d like to begin by saying that Escape from the Planet of the Apes is one of the most surprising films in movie history mainly because it had everything going against it. 1)It was a second sequel to a film classic, 2)it was the sequel following what is probably one of the worst films of all time, 3)it shifted it’s thesis to focus on apes as opposed to humans, and 4)it positioned itself during a fragile time in the American psyche. And while the film will undoubtedly be dated (the ‘present’ is 1973), the movie is incredibly powerful and is ALMOST as good as the original that spawned it.

The craziest thing about Escape is that it does almost the same things Beneath the Planet of the Apes did but actually succeeds at them. For example, Escape decides to focus on the mythology established in the last movie and expand on it. When Beneath did that it failed miserably by ruining the classic ending of the first film (see my review here for more). In Escape, the action is written so well that the inane ending of Beneath becomes immensely important to the plot of this film and others to come. So out of the madness came some sort of logic and we have Escape to thank.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes, unlike some of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, actually looks immensely ridiculous on paper (whereas some of Beneath’s ideas were sound but executed poorly). But somehow Escape’s plot is not only is believable but incredibly moving and powerful. In this Ape adventure, Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter), Dr. Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), and Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo, in his last role) manage to escape the Earth’s destruction from the end of Beneath and, through some sort of time distortion, get sent back to Earth’s past in Taylor’s shuttle. They then become a media sensation and loved around the country. . .but one particularly intelligent man fears the ape uprising will occur sooner then later and he wants to eliminate the two apes (Dr. Milo dies early on for unrelated purposes) and the baby ape Dr. Zira carries in her womb.

And that’s where I recommend extreme caution to viewers of this film who think an old 70s movie that is rated G is a family film. I made a lot of points that the original Planet of the Apes was perhaps the most depressing film ever made once viewed with older and wiser eyes but I am going to now reverse that decision and give Escape from the Planet of the Apes that honor. The tricky thing about Escape is that it lures you into feeling good about things. For the first time in the series you kind of have a light feel for the proceedings: Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius are cracking jokes and the military seems kind of goofy. Then something tragic will happen (Dr. Milo’s death for example) to shake you. . .which you’ll quickly forget about once Zira and Cornelius try on 70s suits and dresses and become spokespeople for all kinds of support groups, hardy har har! Everything is a laugh and the groovy 70s score (by the late, great Jerry Goldsmith) makes you feel sooooo comfortable.

And then out of nowhere, the stakes are raised, people are killed, and our lovable heroes are chased and SPOILERS eventually murdered. Keeping in the tradition of the two earlier films, the movie ends on a fade to black in which something terrible has happened. In the original film, Taylor learns of man’s destruction. In Beneath, Taylor blows the shit out of everything. In this one, Zira and Cornelius are gunned down and so, seemingly, is their baby! A FUCKING BABY GETS SHOT EIGHT TIMES IN THIS G RATED MOVIE! And then the movie basically ends. . .

But the fade to black isn’t once our seemingly innocent, fun loving bunch is killed. No. We discover that Zira switched her baby, named Milo, with a real gorilla’s baby at a circus run by Khan Noonien Singh. After we see the parents and the baby chimp murdered brutally, we cut to the circus and Milo simply shouts ‘mama, mama, MAMA, MAMAAAAA’ as it fades to black. What should be a beacon of hope is really the most depressingly sad thing I’ve ever seen. . .period. And, like I said before, it is 30 times more depressing then the original Planet of the Apes because for 75% of the running time, Escape is a fucking comedy! A laugh fest! A god damn family film! Man, what a bummer.

When you put the Planet of the Apes films together, you always leave the original film out of the rankings because it is a classic and nothing in the series could beat it. . .but Escape comes pretty damn close (though Conquest, which I haven’t watched in years, seems to be very strong if memory serves). Escape isn’t quite as redudant and preachy as Beneath is. The one major flaw in this film though is following the apes. Planet of the Apes was so powerful because humans, though hardly present, kind of became the absent enemy. Here, a lot of humans are just dicks because their paranoid and we can’t relate so much to the apes when it comes to the human social commentary.

But that is really hardly a criticism. . .Escape from the Planet of the Apes is masterfully made with incredible acting and a pace and tone that will knock your socks off. Even after seeing this movie and knowing the ending, I was still floored by the painful conclusion; it certainly hasn’t lost any of it’s potency. So while I was immensely disappointed with how poorly Beneath the Planet of the Apes has aged, Escape from the Planet of the Apes has only gotten better over time.

I was recently trying to think of what film saga has the ultimate fall from grace when one of the films in it’s franchise is considered a classic. At first I thought maybe Return of the Jedi and then The Phantom Menace but I have soft spots for both those films even though they are, indeed, awful. I also thought of those Matrix films but The Matrix Reloaded is salvageable. I then thought of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade followed by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but while IJKOCS is indeed a horrible piece of trash on celluloid, The Last Crusade is pretty good and also not generally considered a ‘classic’. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier isn’t a complete waste of time though in comparison to The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country it is pretty horrible. So, one has to assume, the biggest jump from quality to shit-in-a-box belongs to the opening salvo of apedom that is Planet of the Apes, in 1968, a frickin’ classic, and it’s direct sequel, 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which could possibly be one of the worst films known to man or ape.

Seriously, I wanted to come up with something witty to describe how awful Beneath is but. . .all I can say is that it really, really, really, really, REALLY, really, reeeeeeeeeally, really, really, really, sucks. Hard. I am almost hard pressed to put it as the WORST film I have ever seen. It really defies explanation and it exists to destroy whatever thoughts I have on the matter. But I will attempt to pick out of this steaming pile of gorilla dung something worth noting.

But first, let’s look at the plot. At the end of Planet of the Apes, Taylor (Charlton Heston)discovers that he really isn’t on a planet full of apes very far away. He is, actually, on Earth, way in the future, and humans had obliterated themselves. We were left to assume that Taylor and Nova (Linda Harrison) just went off into the oblivion of The Forbidden Zone to live negatively ever after. At the opening of Beneath, we find a new astronaut, named Brent (James Franciscus), crashed landed on future-Earth but, of course, he doesn’t know this. He spots Nova riding alone on a horse and asks her about Taylor (Nova has Taylor’s dog tags on her neck). She then has a flashback to Taylor and Nova learning English in the middle of nowhere. Then, of course, Taylor falls down a hole (or something) and she rides off oblivious to her surroundings because she is a mute retard.

What happens next is mostly 45 straight minutes of Brent and Nova getting on and off horses and a sexy scene of a gorilla general named Ursus (James Gregory) and the beloved Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) taking steam baths naked. We also catch up with Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) and her husband Cornelius (not Roddy McDowall). They’re chimpanzees and they are Vietnam hippies fighting for man’s rights and are getting in trouble for it. Brent meets up with them and they get on horses and it all leads to an abandoned subway tunnel from old New York City where there is a cult of telepathic yahoos, one of which is called ‘Negro’ (wish I was joking), who worship a giant A-Bomb named Alpha-Omega. Oh and Taylor shows up and everyone dies but only after a psychic induced human on human gladiatorial fight and Taylor blows up the world. YES! I love this positive movie making!

It’s really sad because on paper. . .this sounds like a good idea. Okay, maybe not but still. . .a sequel to a classic couldn’t have been a complete disaster, yet it is. It is unthinkable how badly director Ted Post and the filmmaker’s failed on this flick. To start, their is the redundancy of the heroes journey. James Franciscus is fine, I guess, but he spends half the movie trying to figure out where he is. The problem: we did this in the first movie already and we know everything he doesn’t. . .so it’s boring. To be impressively redundant, Brent goes so far as saying, upon finding the abandoned New York tunnel, a variation of YOU MANIACS! YOU FINALLY DID IT! but instead he whispers it. And just when you THINK Brent is getting likable. . .he goes out like a bitch, shot in the head and chest. That was pointless.

Add to this the actual story-arc of Nova (who had none in the first film) perhaps learning to become a human of old and then. . .you guessed it. . .shot by a meaningless character for no reason whatsoever. And let’s not talk about the raping of the character that is Taylor. In the first film he was disenchanted with humanity and was still shocked, despite his knowing the nature of humans, that humanity would blow the shit out of itself. But by the end of Beneath, he is so mad about pasty faced humans worshipping a bomb and at monkeys not liking him that he. . .sets off the bomb?????? Taylor, the man who abhors man’s behavior. . .blows up. . .the world? What the crap?

And last time I checked their is the word Apes in the title but I believe a few apes make cameos. This film mostly revolves around these crazy humans who wear human face masks and are really veiny and gross. They also preach a lot about peace but then make Brent try to kill Nova 88 times. THIS MOVIE IS STUPID! ARGH! Sorry. . .but anyways. I think the biggest fault of the film is taking what was a successful gimmick of the first film (the Statue of Liberty destroyed thus explaining Earth’s nature for destruction) and taking it waaaaay too literally. Planet of the Apes should have ended where it was. . .but the writers of Beneath felt like ‘well, if the Statue of Liberty is there, then the Forbidden Zone is New York City!’ and decided to make this piece of garbage take place in New York City, all bombed out of course.

So the impact of the Statue of Liberty in the first film, which needed no explanation. . .they could have made something up about a landmark moving or something after the Apocalypse. . .ends up losing it’s effect because now we’ve got the bombed out Stock Exchange, the bombed out Radio City Music Hall, the bombed out subway system, and the bomb out church of missile-worshippers. If you add the non-existent mythos of ape society to this raping of the classic ending to the first film, you get a Planet of the Apes movie completely alien to the franchise it is being a sequel to.

But let’s focus on the positive. For one, the dude who plays General Ursus is brilliant. Through his crappy make-up, he manages to make a very unique character. He reminded me a lot of Yul Brenner in The Ten Commandments: subtle and going against type. Ursus could of been the Patton-general type and one dimensionally evil but in his limited screen time manages to make his presence felt. Ursus is a truly unique being in a Ape world full of automatons. I also want to thank Linda Harrison for being hot. God damn is she hot in this movie.

And some of the set pieces are nice to look at. The set design for the New York tunnel system is pretty neat (though looking nice and being completely stupid are two different things) and there is a pretty intense fight scene between Taylor and Brent that I was really into. There was all these walls of spikes and a spike-bat and. . .yeah. . .it really didn’t belong in an Apes movie but it was exciting if you pretended it was a short film about gladiators or something. That’s it folks. . .that’s al I can muster with positivity.

When I started this whole Planet of the Apes week I have to say the film I was most excited about re watching was Beneath the Planet of the Apes because I had only seen it twice over a period of 20 years or so, whereas man of the other films are regular staples of my viewing life in on TV or I’m just in the mood to watch something cool. Wow, was I disappointed. I shouldn’t even say disappointed, I should just say flabbergasted that a movie was made with such incompetence. My memories of the third film, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, is strong so hopefully that will be maintained. . .