Beneath the Planet of the Apes: He blew it up!
How the gonzo sequel to a beloved classic explains the Republican presidential race.
I’m reaching for some low-hanging fruit this week. After spending more than a week in Iowa following presidential candidates around for my day job, I don’t have much left in the way of headspace. Also, that Oppenheimer piece last week took a lot of out of me. I still don’t feel like I got that quite right.
If you haven’t been following – and really, who can blame you – the Republican primary has come down to Donald Trump and couple of candidates chasing his fumes, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Just about everyone else has taken their ball and gone home. On Monday, Iowa voters will caucus as Iowa voters do and choose a candidate, which is expected to be Trump, perhaps by a wide margin.
I have spent much of the last year paying attention to DeSantis, who was once heralded as the next big thing in Republican presidential circles but has not, to this moment, enjoyed a moment or a boomlet or a spike or a surge or anything that suggests momentum. Maybe that changes on Monday, but there isn’t much sign of it.
This brings us, naturally, to Planet of the Apes.
If you are of a certain age, this is a movie that was a basic part of childhood, woven in there somewhere between “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, Stretch Armstrong commercials, and Saturday morning cartoons. It left an indelible impression. As a kid, I was knocked out by it. Ape City! Charlton Heston running around like a madman! The Statue of Liberty! No, I didn’t comprehend the civil-rights allegory. It was just cool. Even Pauline Kael liked it.
More fundamentally, like all classics, it just works. It’s thrilling, it’s interesting, it has a sense of humor, it transports the viewer to a previously unseen world, and the ape characters are three-dimensional and believable, particularly the scientists Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) and Zira (Kim Hunter). It’s well directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, boasts a tremendous production design and features a terrific, percussive score by the legendary Jerry Goldsmith. The script was written in part by Rod Serling, a master of suspense. It was a studio film in the best way, running on all cylinders.
And then of course, there’s the iconic unforgettable ending, arguably the best ever for a post-apocalyptic film. (“You blew it up. Damn YOU. Damn you ALL TO HELL!”[Pounds sand])1
The film was a hit, making almost seven times its budget at the box-office. So, of course, the studio, 20th Century Fox, demanded a sequel.
Instantly, there was trouble. Heston didn’t want to come back. Schaffner couldn’t. (He was making Patton.) Serling and Goldsmith weren’t retained either. They couldn’t even get friggin’ Roddy McDowell to return. To make matters worse, the studio slashed the budget from the first film in half – and on screen, it really shows.
Beyond those obstacles, the challenge lay in making the second film seem fresh without the shock value of discovering an ape-driven society. The solution was to introduce an entirely new set of antagonists, telepathic mutants living underground, which ends up making the apes peripheral to their own franchise.
Did I lose you at “telepathic mutants living underground?” No? Good. Because this movie is, as Kael might say, bonkers. And really, that’s the only thing that makes it watchable. The mutants worship a nuclear bomb (“the doomsday bomb”) and during rituals, peel off their human-looking masks to reveal grotesque faces scarred by radiation. Why the mutants even bother to wear human-looking masks when there are no normal humans around and everyone looks like they do is never explained.2
In fact, the movie tells us it’s the year 3955, two millennia after mankind supposedly blew itself up with atomic weapons, so how have any of these mutants ever seen what a human looks like?
It’s better to not ask any questions. Eyes forward.
The apes, led by crusty James Gregory playing a gorilla general, have decided to invade the barren so-called Forbidden Zone for some reason even though the zone is entirely lifeless and has no value. But the film wanted to say something about Vietnam, I guess. The apes come across the mutant stronghold and conflict ensues.
The good news is that Heston did ultimately agree to return – but only in a supporting role. So just a few minutes into the picture, his character, astronaut Taylor, literally disappears. He falls into some kind of a crevice. But that’s okay, because nearby, another astronaut, Brent, played by James Franciscus, suddenly shows up, having crashed in his spaceship in a similar manner to Heston in the first film.
Franciscus was largely a TV actor and not a household name like Heston, but he, like Heston, was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and looked enough like Heston that even some of the ape characters (and maybe some viewers) were confused. But Franciscus lacked the broad-shouldered physique of Heston, who could really wear the hell out of a loincloth.
Most important, Franciscus couldn’t go big like Heston. Few actors in Hollywood could. He was not subtle. There was a reason he made biblical epics. That was his mileau. He may have been on a screen, but he played to the back row of the theater. Heston later turned into a bit of a caricature of himself when he became the president of the NRA in the 1980s but alas.
You know where I’m going with this.
Donald Trump is the Charlton Heston of Republican politics. Every word, every movement is big and broad, exaggerated, puffed-up. I saw him in the small town of Clinton, Iowa last week and true to form, he filled the high-school gymnasium with super-sized strokes of bluster and bravado.
If Trump had played Moses in The Ten Commandments, not only would Trump have led the Hebrews across the Red Sea, he would have built a casino on the mountain next to the tablets. (“Pharoah, he begged me to stay, ok?”)
Throughout the campaign, Ron DeSantis has courted Trump voters by suggesting Trump isn’t, well, Trumpy enough. And that hasn’t gotten him anywhere. But by his nature, DeSantis is smaller, more compact, more restrained. He’s not a yeller. He doesn’t emote. He does bullet points. He’s a checklist guy. He’s not Charlton Heston. He’s James Franciscus. Republicans, right now at least, seem to want a Heston.
Heston, by the way, shows up again at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He and fellow astronaut Franciscus battle it out with the gorillas amidst the ruins of mutant town. Heston is gunned down, but before he dies, he crawls to the control panel for the bomb, setting it off and destroying all life on Earth.
Cue narrator:
In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.
You can draw your own allegory there.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Beneath the Planet of the Apes is rentable on most platforms. I watched it on Amazon Prime.
HEY ISN’T THAT: You can hear James Gregory’s familiar gruff voice under the gorilla mask. A veteran character actor, he might be best known for playing Inspector Luger on the sitcom “Barney Miller.” Coincidentally, Gregory Sierra, who plays one of the mutants, was also briefly on “Barney Miller.”
DUST CLOUDS: Heston had in his studio contract that he be killed at the end of the movie. (He takes the world with him. Talk about ego!) In fact, given that the planet of the apes is destroyed, one would think that wouldn’t leave much room for another sequel. But three more Apes movies were made in the 1970s, each with a cheaper budget than the one before it and none of them very much good. The franchise has since been rebooted twice. There was also a Saturday morning cartoon in which the Apes solved crimes and chased ghosts.3
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 10/10 They blew it up. Damn them. Damn them all to hell.
WHAT ELSE I HAVE BEEN WATCHING: “Fargo” (S5); “For All Mankind” (S4); “Reacher” (S2); “The Sopranos” (S4); The Holdovers (****, dir. Alexander Payne)
SUGGESTIONS: E-mail: nucleartheater@gmail.com
LAST ENTRY: Oppenheimer (2023)
NEXT ENTRY: I go to New Hampshire, and Clint Eastwood steals a top-secret Soviet jet in Firefox (1982). Somehow these two things will be connected.
Almost as iconic as Planet of the Apes is the Simpsons episode that features a musical version of the movie. (“I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Zee.”)
I’m not a moviegoer who needs everything explained to me. I don’t mind mystery. But where did the mutants get the latex for the masks? Or the glue? It’s maddening.
I might have that wrong.