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Planet Of The Apes Special Edition
01/06/2005 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
DVD. 20th Century Fox F1-0CB 22371DVD. Price: £45.00 (UK) although prices vary so look around for the best deal, I got mine for less than half price in Smiths). Stars: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, James Franciscus, Maurice Evans and Natalie Trundie. Buy Planet Of The Apes Special Edition in the USA - or Buy Planet Of The Apes Special Edition in the UK  This boxset contains the five Planet Of The Apes films plus a sixth DVD containing a two-and-a-half hour Making Of documentary, all the more astounding considering such things weren't thought of at the time. Whatever, the people who compiled the DVD must have deemed this a labour of love with early footage ranging from Edward G. Robinson being made up as an orang utan to identifying pictures showing the actors behind the make-up as well as it being put on nicely narrated by its key star, Roddy McDowall.
Do I really need to tell you people who are old enough what this series is about? Well, briefly, although there was a stronger impression from this repeat viewing this time that wasn't dependent on advert breaks on TV viewing.
In many respects, the Ape films have and are described as allegories to various aspects of the human condition, be it racial tension to the suppression of scientific knowledge.
The first film, aptly called 'Planet Of The Apes', follows Taylor (actor Heston) and his band of astronaut explorers on a time distortion flight in hibernation who crash-land on a planet where the apes are in ascendance and humans as savages. Captured, Taylor has problems convincing the apes of his own origin and later that humans were once intelligent on this planet. Only at the end does Taylor discover he was on a future Earth. Modern day sensibilities would probably have had him questioning why the apes could speak colloquial English but we'll let that pass.
'Beneath The Planet Of The Apes' follows the crash-landing of a second rescue mission to discover the fate of Taylor and the others. The surviving member of this two man team, Brent (actor Francisus), likewise discovers that apes can talk but also bumps into Nova, the savage girl Taylor befriended and goes off in pursuit. Beneath a ruined city are a small number of mutated humans with telepathic, illusion-casting and telekinetic abilities who imprison Brent with Taylor. In the meantime, a gorilla army are out to invade the Forbidden Land and oust the mutated humans. In the end, it all ends in disaster when a doomsday bomb goes off destroying the Earth.
Roll on the third film, 'Escape From The Planet Of The Apes' where three chimpanzee scientists, two of who - Cornelius and Zira (actors McDowall and Hunter) - were in the earlier films, arrive on Earth. The third member of their team, Milo, succeeded in getting Taylor's spaceship to fly again and get them into space just prior to the Earth exploding. On Earth, they have the reverse problem Taylor had cos apes were the primitives. Through a series of circumstances after Milo's unfortunate death, Cornelius and a pregnant Zira are forced to flee or risk castration by humans fearing the rise of the apes on Earth. The baby ape survives in a circus. What struck me about this film is the events that archaeologist Cornelius describes of the future doesn't quite gel with that in the earlier films, especially as information of their origins was forbidden knowledge. Likewise, Zira acting as an animal psychologist would hardly have made her an expert in dissection in the future we saw neither. With so much talk about alternative futures, I came away thinking this time that any knowledge discrepancy doesn't necessarily lie at scriptwriter Paul Dini's hands but the probable futures. Even so, it still makes you wonder where the propulsion systems were on Taylor or Brent's spaceships not to mention why send a rescue mission after a faster-than-light starship. As with many things from this time period, I guess you're not supposed to scrutinise too closely which neatly brings us to...
'Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes' where a now adult Milo re-named Caesar (again actor McDowall) with the circus owner visit the city for a circus promotion to see apes being subjugated to be more like slaves than pets to replace the cats and dogs that died from a plague brought back from space. Caesar organises a rebellion and takes over the city. However, in this reality it isn't, as his father said that happened much later that a chimpanzee called 'Aldo' would be the first to speak, but a female chimp Lisa who would become his wife declaring that important word, 'No!' Again, this film got me thinking again. Considering the past space flights never came back, one has to wonder what other space missions were going on let alone bring back an infection that only affected canines and felines then it dawned on me: that was their assumption. Where was the one place that this infection had already taken place and the returning astronauts might have carried the dormant plague. Exactly. Our apes from the future and bearing in mind the scientist Milo would have had his autopsy at the zoo, would have made a convenient passage into the outside world before flaring up. With everything starting up so much earlier, together with the rapid conditioning of the apes, also leads me to speculate that the virus might have killed the dogs and cats but at the same time might have made it easier for apes to evolve faster as well. After all, in the far future, this plague would have been mutated to its finest form or enhanced by the nuclear war that led to...
'Battle For The Planet Of The Apes'. Twenty years down the line, Caesar is now running a community of talking chimps, orangs, gorillas and humans after a nuclear war which is inferred that the Russians started when the apes rose in dominance. Pursuing knowledge about his parents from the old nuked city, Caesar, Virgil the orang and MacDonald the human, visit and realise the surviving humans there are dangerous and are preparing to attack them. It isn't helped back in the ape village that the gorilla leader, Aldo...excuse me...General Aldo, must get it right, is planning his own coup even if it meant killing Caesar's young son to stop him snitching on him. Then again, this also breaks the creed of 'Ape shall never kill ape.'
With so much changed from the events that Taylor and Brent encountered in the future, it can hardly be a surprise that a more stable ape/human society develops even if the indications from the final film don't really show just how advanced they might have become over several centuries.
Anyway, as you can no doubt see from the length of this review, watching these films again gave me a lot of food for thought. Some aspects of technology might be found hackneyed and almost Buck Rogers in some areas but can probably be considered secondary to the play with alternative Earths and time travel. Maybe not quite an article here but definitely a good excuse for you to go out and get this boxset for yourselves.
GF Willmetts
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