It is genuinely difficult now to watch Planet of the Apes the way audiences watched it in 1968, because the film has been absorbed into the culture so completely that its central situation and its final image have both become common property. Almost everyone knows the shape of it before they sit down. That makes the film an unusually good test case for a question critics avoid: how much of a movie’s power is surprise, and how much survives when surprise is gone?
The answer here is that a surprising amount survives, though not all of it, and the parts that survive are not always the parts the film’s reputation rests on.
A Premise Played Absolutely Straight
Franklin J. Schaffner directs from a script by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, adapting Pierre Boulle’s novel, and the first thing to say is that the film has no sense of humor about itself whatsoever. This is its greatest strength. The premise is inherently absurd. A crew of astronauts on a long-duration flight crash on an unknown world and find it ruled by talking apes who keep humans as mute livestock. Handled with a wink, this is camp. Handled with the total gravity Schaffner brings to it, it becomes something closer to a fable, and fables only work if the teller believes them.
Schaffner’s most consequential decision is the opening stretch. He takes his time. Before we see a single ape we get a long, near-wordless passage of the astronauts crossing a punishing desert landscape, terrain so bleached and geometric that it stops reading as Earth. Leon Shamroy shoots it in wide, unhurried compositions with the figures reduced to specks. Jerry Goldsmith’s score, one of the most radical ever written for a mainstream American film, does the rest: percussion, unpitched scraping, brass that snarls rather than sings, a soundscape with almost no melodic comfort in it. By the time the plot arrives, the film has established that we are somewhere genuinely wrong, and the apes land on ground carefully prepared.
The Makeup, and Why It Still Works
John Chambers’ ape makeup is the film’s most famous technical achievement and it has aged far better than it has any right to. The reason is a design principle later productions frequently forgot: the appliances are built to let the actors act. The mouths articulate, the brows move, and the eyes are entirely unobstructed. Roddy McDowall’s Cornelius and Kim Hunter’s Zira are not people in masks but performances that read clearly through prosthetics, and Hunter in particular does an enormous amount with small shifts of expression.
Maurice Evans as Dr. Zaius is the other essential piece. Zaius could easily have been a stock authoritarian, and the film’s most sophisticated move is to make him neither stupid nor simply villainous. He is a man defending a position he has excellent reasons to defend, and the film gives him the intellectual honesty to state those reasons. Evans plays him with a weary gravity that makes the character’s obstruction feel like a burden rather than a pleasure.
Then there is Charlton Heston. His Taylor is a misanthrope before the crash, a man who left Earth partly because he had concluded humanity was not worth staying for, and the film needs that setup badly. Heston’s performance is enormous, declamatory, occasionally close to ridiculous, and it is nonetheless the right register for the material. He is playing a man who is the last representative of his species in a courtroom, and the size of the playing matches the size of the situation. His famous line on regaining speech is delivered as a roar, and the film would be weaker if it were delivered any other way.
What the Film Is Arguing
Serling’s fingerprints are all over the thematic architecture, and the film is doing at least three things at once.
- It is a satire of institutional authority, with the ape tribunal as an explicit send-up of resistance to inconvenient evidence. The film’s treatment of the ape scientific establishment is pointed and, in places, very funny in a dry way.
- It is a story about the fragility of the assumption that we are the ones doing the classifying. Taylor spends the film demanding to be recognized as a person by a system with no category for him, and the film is unsparing about how quickly the demand becomes undignified.
- It is a Cold War document. The anxiety underneath the whole picture is nuclear, and it is present from the first scene, long before anything makes it explicit.
The inversion of human and ape positions is usually described as the central idea, but it is really a delivery mechanism. What the movie is after is the observation that a civilization’s account of itself is constructed and defended, and that the defense is always most vigorous against the evidence that threatens it most directly. Zaius is not lying to protect his power. He is lying to protect everyone from something he believes they cannot survive knowing. That is a more interesting position than the film needed to give him.
The Ending, Without Describing It
The final sequence is one of the most famous in American cinema and I will say nothing about its content. What is worth examining is why it works structurally, because it is a textbook case of a twist that is not a cheat.
The ending is not a piece of withheld information dropped in at the last minute to invalidate what came before. It is the logical terminus of everything the film has already told you. The bleached geography, the score’s refusal of consonance, Taylor’s opening contempt for his own species, Zaius’s evasions, the ape culture’s specific taboos: every one of these is load-bearing, and every one of them points the same direction. Watch it a second time and the film is practically shouting. That is the mark of a good reveal as opposed to a good gimmick. It reorganizes the preceding two hours rather than contradicting them.
And this is why the film survives the loss of surprise. Knowing where it lands changes the experience from shock to dread, and dread is arguably the better fit for the material. The last shot’s power comes less from its information than from its composition and its silence, and neither of those is spoiled by advance knowledge.
The Problems
Now the objections, and there are two serious ones.
The first is the film’s treatment of its human characters other than Taylor. Nova, played by Linda Harrison, is written as a mute, uncomprehending presence whose entire function is to be looked at and looked after, and the film’s interest in her is uncomfortably close to purely decorative. This is not merely a period failing to be excused; it is a structural weakness, because the film’s argument depends on humans being worth the recognition Taylor demands, and it never gives us a single mute human with enough interiority to make that case. We are asked to take the value of the species on Taylor’s word, and Taylor spent the opening reel telling us he did not believe it either.
The second is pacing in the middle act. Once the tribunal material has been established, the film circles. There are repeated scenes in which Taylor asserts his intelligence, the ape establishment refuses to accept it, and the position resets, and while the repetition is thematically defensible as an illustration of institutional deadlock, it is dramatically inert. A good fifteen minutes could go without losing an idea. Schaffner’s patience, so effective in the desert opening, becomes slack once the plot has to be advanced by argument rather than image.
The Verdict
Reputation is deserved, though not entirely for the reasons usually cited. Planet of the Apes is not remembered because of its twist. It is remembered because it took a premise that should have been unplayable and gave it a straight face, a serious score, a real visual idea, and a villain with a coherent philosophy. It is science fiction that is actually about something, made at a moment when American studio science fiction rarely was.
It is also a film with a hole where half its cast should be and a saggy second act. Both things are true. Watch it anyway, and watch the desert opening with the sound up.
