I guess my essay series on influential SF films has –eh hm – influenced my selection for this week’s Sunday night Movie.
Released in 1968 Planet of the Apes would certainly be on the short list for best SF movies of that or any decade, but I can tell you that it is not one of the two films I selected as most influential from the 1960s.
While Planet of the Apes spawned 4 direct sequels, two television series’, 1 re-make and 2 sequels to the remakes, I would say that it’s impact beyond the franchise is limited primary to its advancement of special effect make-up.
The said it is a marvelous piece of political parable, taking the explosive issues of race relations and dealing with it under disguise of SF adventure.
The film concerns a crew of astronauts launched from Earth in the early 1970’s, ah the halcyon optimistic days when we simply assumed that our trajectory in space exploration would bend upward as sharply as a Saturn V thrusting for the moon, that through traveling at near the speed of light and by the use of cold-sleep, find themselves thousands of years in the future, crashed on a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion.
The surviving crew is made up of a scientific idealist who would ‘walk naked into a volcano’ if it meant he learned something no one else every knew, a egotist for whom glory has driven him to this one-way mission, and a misanthropist for whom mankind is something to be despised and dreams of finding something better than humanity amongst the stars.
Aside from a crashed ship, limited supplies, and inter-personal conflict, the mission is threatened when the crew discovers that this planet has humans, but one that have never progressed beyond mute animals, and that the dominate life are apes.
Captured and experimented upon, it reduces down to one survivor who eventually unlocks the puzzle of the planet, and despairs as the answer.
Truly a classic film, this one is well worth the viewing, and I am quite happy to have it on blu-ray. (As part of a boxed set containing all five of the original films.) If you have never seen it, crawl out from under that rock you hide under and do see it at once.