It's also in the thick layer of social commentary, and the specific choice of themes that the film elects to pursue.
#Charlton heston planet of the apes full movie series
Though the Serling fingerprints are the most obvious, and not just because of the whammy of a twist ending, a Serling speciality for all five years of his groundbreaking television series The Twilight Zone. The film began life in the form of a satiric novel by French author Pierre Boulle, and turned into a rather different satire by Rod Serling, whose ambitious first draft was revised considerably by Michael Wilson (who had earlier won an Oscar - whilst on the blacklist - for adapting Boulle's The Bridge on the River Kwai). But it's early in the review for me to already have my hackles raised. And yes, the ape makeup looks hokey after nearly half a century, but Jesus Christ, half a century is a long time, and with even a modicum of willingness to meet the film halfway, that makeup is pretty goddamn impressive, allowing a spectacular range of facial expressions and genuinely subtle grace notes of acting. One does not entirely avoid camp in any film starring Charlton Heston, his run of '60s & '70s sci-fi films doubly so (though this is actually one of my favorites among Heston's performances: there's a raw, fatigued quality to it that I love). That being said, I concede that Planet of the Apes has a reputation for being a camp classic, as much as or more than being a classic-classic, and not without reason. And while my heart will always belong with the second pair of movies, the former pair are masterpieces by any plausible reckoning I could imagine. The films have somewhat of the same relationship as the same year's pair of epochal horror movies: Planet of the Apes, like Rosemary's Baby, is an extraordinary modernisation of something that had already been done, but never with such seriousness and aesthetic richness 2001, like Night of the Living Dead, just blows everything right the fuck up to start from scratch.
It premiered mere weeks in advance of 2001: A Space Odyssey, compared with which virtually everything ever made would look a bit old-hat, but that's the only context in which I could imagine calling it a disappointment. That's 1968 for you, one of the only years in the history of sci-fi cinema when Planet of the Apes could qualify as "the normal one". What a hell of a thing to be a completely transformative exemplar of everything that a genre can achieve, and still be only the second-best genre film within a given year. Widespread Spoiler Warning: I'm going to assume you know how this one ends, because at this point, how couldn't you?
What better cue to spend a whole week revisiting that franchise's original incarnation? This week: War for the Planet of the Apes is likely to be the last film in that franchise for a good long while, sad to say. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.
0 kommentar(er)
