While we’re talking about stuff that doesn’t make sense, Chuck Heston mentions that the dead woman in their ship was supposed to be ‘Eve’ for a new planet.
You want to establish a colony on a new planet and you sent 3 men and 1 woman? Assume the ship can only hold 4 people, fine. Send 4 women and some frozen sperm.
That’s because the original screenplay was written by Rod Serling (as mentioned just above here), who wrote in that style — I don’t think it’s a defect, myself.
Even when I first saw it, I was annoyed at it as science fiction. Gorgeous costumes and sets, but it didn’t make a damned bit of sense. The talking English, as mentioned, is wrong on so many levels. The survival of the Statue of Liberty.
The very idea that the ship could end up on Earth at all defies belief – it’s as if you set out in a powered boat from, say, Manhattan with a working navigational system bound for Australia, and you get off the boat and find yourself in New York. Worse, actualy, since the odds of your coming to a star with habitable planets simply by chance in space is negligible. You can fanwank about “systems set to automatically return you home” all you want, but it’s all bull. You wouldn’t buy a blunder like this in, say, a World war II movie.
But even if we ignore that, the Ape Civilization makes not a lick of sense. Serling reportedly wanted to show something very much like the modern world, instead of the Organic Shapes in the Wilderness the movie had. (although I’ll grant that it had a wonderful sense of Weird to it). But a society of so few people, at such an industrial level (and stated several times to be on the edge of starvation because of the actions of the humans) just wouldn’t have the time or resources for Museums and Professional Scientists and Zoos – they’d be too damned busy trying to stay alive, and you’d expect them to be at a level like, say, Colonial America. Or maybe, for a cultural change, Japan under the Shoguns. I sure don’t expect dedicated Museums with glass-encased dioramas, and people who could afford to spend most of their time theorizing. If you’re starving, even the scientists end up working the plows.
I found the next movie embarassaing. If you think the original flick was too 60s-bound, watch the second one with its placard-carrying protestors facing off against the militaristic gorillas. And the series went downhill after that.
Pierre Boulle’s novel is worth the read. It’s very different, and Taylor and company aren’t on Earth through the bulk of the film (and Apes have space travel). It’s been argued that the title should be less pompously be translated as “Monkey Planet”, and it’s more obviously tongue-in-cheek. An interesting contrast is L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller’s Genus Homo, which features a bunch of 20th century folks dumped in a future Earth run by primates, who originally get stuck in the zoo because the apes don’t realize they’re intelligent. Just as in the movie (but NOT in Boulle’s book), the apes are segregated by variety into social classes, wiyth chimps as the brains and gorillas as the enforcers. I suspect that Serling o whoever is responsible for that feature of the movie developed it independently, though.
Yes, I wasn’t sure if the one ape village we saw was supposed to be their entire civilization, or just a part of it.
If it was the supposed to be the entire ape civilization then as you say it doesn’t seem plausible that the small number of individuals would be able to support a society with such specialization of occupations and apparent leisure time.
If the village we saw was just a part of their civilization then it would seem to be a very important part (because Zaius and others seemed to have pretty lofty titles). But it looked way too small to be, say, a capital city of a group of similar towns.
The real world answer of course is most likely they didn’t have the budget to create a more extensive ape civilization. These days it could be done with CGI but back then they would have had to build most of it.
I was just going to mention that most of these problems are dealt with easily in the book, but you covered most of that. One nitpick, though - in the original novel, the apes are described several times as being mostly separated into classes by type. I don’t have it on hand right here, but I recall the gorillas as being violent but mostly in charge (the aristocrats), orangutans are conservative book-learners who seem to control most of the society’s workings, and chimps are the quick-witted intellectuals but are sort of bottom of the social totem pole.
The presense of Ms. Liberty was one of Serling’s contributions, often attributed to him being inspired by an advertisement featuring a mostly buried Liberty with the caption “Until Liberty Falls” or something very similar.
I thought the point was that they were rapidly mutated after the nuclear war.
(A later film retconned it so they were genetically engineered)
And very typical of Serling’s writing. He absolutely loved “sting in the tail” endings, witness his numerous Twilight Zone episodes.
I was another that saw all five films in a single marathon session as a youngster and owned a Planet of the Apes treehouse ;). The first two films still work okay for me as a result of those rose-colored glasses. But yeah, they certainly don’t stand up to deep inspection. Or much at all.
Serling had done it already in the Twilight Zone episode “I Shot an Arrow in the Air”. There you have to accept that astronauts are utterly unsurprised to find an ‘asteroid’ with an atmosphere that was reachable in just a few minutes travel from Earth. But it’s probably my favorite episode.
It’s the strength of the ideas in the writing that makes the first one at least watchable. The lack of that in the later films is what makes them hard to bear.
Serling frequentl had such unbelievable aspects in The Twilight Zone – asteroids with earth-like gravity and atmospheres, unknown planets a mere hop, skip, and jump from Earth, English-speaking alien civilizations, and so on. I was usually willing to give him a pass because the story was inyteresting, they were doing pretty decent SF otherwise, and he didn’t pile on too many improbabilities. But in The Planet of the Apes they just keep on throwing on improbability upon impossibility. To be fair, they didn’t simply shoot Serling’s script – it went through many hands after his, and they added other concepts. As I noted, the idea of that awfully small, odd and primitive civilization wasn’t his.
The end result was something you could only excuse by saying – well, it’s just Science Fiction. You have to allow for it. Except, of course, that i’m emphatically NOT one of the people who says that, and it annoys me no end.
Yeah, but they might have ended up on Planet of the Spiders (or Pickle Jars).
Pretty forward thinking I’d say.
Maybe he’d seen Star Trek and accepted that English is the dominant tongue of all the universe?
Charleston?
As noted, there are any number of reasons the movie makes absolutely no logical sense. It’s a fairy tale.
I could see this as analogous to the Indian Caste system, with the gorillas as Kshatriya (soldiers), but the Brahmin caste includes both roles of priest (orangutans) and scholar (chimpanzee) and the film doesn’t address the labor caste (Shudra), so you don’t get a 1:1 correspondence.
I identified the themes of racism, civil rights, religion vs. science and environmental conservation the first time I saw it all the way through, at about age eight.
I loved this movie when I was a kid. Linda Harrison (Nova) was my first actress crush. I always wondered why the humans in the film were mute and stupid compared to the Apes. Was this addressed in any of the sequels?
I didn’t realize they retconned the genetic engineering angle. It always bugged me that a single intelligent chimp would have anything to do with gorillas and orangutans becoming intelligent, essentially in one generation.
I still get confused about the overall timeline. I’ll have to watch all the movies again someday.
I seem to recall that one of the reasons the astronauts didn’t recognize the night sky as Earth’s was because of cloud coverage at night–they couldn’t see the night sky, or they would have instantly recognized the patterns of the constellations as what you would see from Earth.
On the other hand, the daytime skies were not as overcast–they could see the sun, and debated about which star it was. Was the moon visible in any of the daytime scenes? If so, that should have been a major clue that they were back on Earth. However, without a view of the moon or the constellations, it’s reasonable that the astronauts wouldn’t have realized they were on Earth.
I’ll have to go back and watch it again!
I own a copy of Serling’s December 1964 Second Draft of the script. Except for the basic plotline, very little of his dialogue made it to the final film. Like Boulle, he posits a technological Ape race (they round up the humans in jeeps and with helicopters, etc.). His script is very dialogue-heavy (“wordy” as mentioned before) and ponderous. He does have the astronauts speculating (and dimissing, iirc – my stuff is packed away in moving boxes at the moment) that they may be on Earth due to the similar star patterns, the moon, etc.
His version of Taylor’s (I think the character had a different name in his script, but forget what it was) first words after being shot in the neck are amazing flat. We all remember Michael Wilson’s rewritten version (“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”). Serling’s went something like: “Let me go! Don’t touch me, I say!”
Sir Rhosis
Would the constellations change much in 2000 years?
I think it would be more like 20,000 years before they change significantly. Even then, you’d recognize them. It would be many thousands of years before they weren’t recognizable.
Our current zodiacs were identified by ancients thousands of years BC. You can see some movement if you carefully compare old maps with new, but it’s not great.
Speaking only with regard to the first film and disregarding the subsequent sequels, I always assumed that the same forces of radiation-induced genetic mutation that caused the apes to rapidly ascend the evolutionary scale resulted in a developmental decline in humans so that their descendants were considerably less intelligent and mute.
In any case, I think the POTA series after the first film (both the sequels and 2001 remake) is an interesting concept that was never creatively capitalized upon due to budgetary constraints, executive meddling, and simple lack of imagination. There were a lot of directions and a lot of areas the later movies could’ve explored but, unfortunately, never did.
On a related note, is anybody familiar with Bernard Malamud’s "God’s Grace’? Although it’s coincidental, the premise of the book is almost like a prequel for POTA. It’s about a survivor of a thermonuclear war–a scientist–who’s left on an island with a small colony of primates, one of whom is a chimp who–due to genetic modification–develops the ability to speak. I’ve only read the first chapter of the book (it was published in “Esquire”) but not the rest of it. My understanding is that it’s not really considered among Malamud’s better works.
I first saw it at about the same age but I guess I wasn’t used to picking out themes in films. I think I probably only recognized the environmental theme at the time. I certainly knew squat about the civil rights struggle then, and was only dimly aware of racism. The religion vs. science would have gone over my head too.
I forgot to mention the racism theme in the OP but that was obviously another area explored in the script. Many of the arguments the apes used whether or not Taylor was a person have no doubt been used about other races.