A Series Review: Planet of the Apes – Part 5
Posted by jat59072Others: Reviews, Series
Read the Planet of the Apes Series Review Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.
Movie #5: Battle For the Planet of the Apes (1973)
What a sad, sad way for a pretty good franchise to end. There’s not much to say about Battle For the Planet of the Apes because not much happens here. After his rousing speech at the end of the previous installment, Caesar has created a village where humans and apes live together somewhat peacefully. However, tensions are beginning to rise as the gorilla’s leader, Aldo, is gathering support to overthrow Caesar, and the humans are getting sick of being “compassionately dominated”. All of this should’ve lead to some nice conclusions, seeing as the series has been leading towards seeing the moment the timeline meets up with the one we see at the beginning of the first Planet of the Apes. Unfortunately, any sense of closure or finality is compressed into a minute long summary of the last two movies that plays before the opening credits, and a minute long conclusion at the end, leaving the entire middle of Battle to consist of a recap of the series and a rock war.
As it has with most of the series, story and character continuity barely match up with the previous installments. Somehow, in the twelve years since the apes revolted in Conquest, every simian has learned to speak and walk like a human, civilization has been wiped out by a ten-megaton nuclear bomb, and society has reverted to grouping in small villages in the woods. Aside from this impossibly fast rise of the apes, the first half hour of the movie is dedicated to Caesar going into the ruins of the city to find the government archives so he can hear his parent’s retelling of the future. Not only is this trip slow and familiar, but also unnecessary, as Caesar was quoting these recordings in his dramatic speech at the end of Conquest! It seems like none of the writers in this series watch any of the movies that come before their installment. There’s no excuse to have a character be aware of and use direct quotes from his parent’s recordings, and then have him be completely unaware that there were ever recordings to begin with. It’s just plain lazy.
Looking past this infuriating lack of continuity, there’s really nothing here worth liking. The series would’ve been just as good if it had ended an installment earlier, with not one new or interesting addition included here. There is a callback to the mutated humans that live in the rubble of the old city from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, as we see their ancestors fight as a means to avenge their fallen species, but in the end, they’re right where we see them 1500 years in the future. Even the titular battle is nothing special, consisting only of a group of monkeys throwing rocks and grenades at the humans and their school busses for a few minutes.
It’s all very plainly presented and doesn’t take the series in any surprising directions, leaving everything exactly as it was when the movie started. Hell, even the makeup, which was one of the highlights of the first film, has been cut back so much throughout the series, here, the apes all appear to just be wearing masks with mouths that don’t move when they talk.
The only redeeming and somewhat concluding quality Battle serves the series lies in the human/ape relationship, which, here, is different than every version of it we’ve seen before. Having grown sick of the way they’re being treated, at the movies end the humans confront their captors and demand they all be treated as equals. As they stand on equal ground for the first time, we fade to a scene from the future where ape and human children are being educated about the turning point in their ancestor’s destinies. Seeing the interspecies mixing of these children in such a distant future could potentially give a fan of the series hope that in going back in time to warn the humans of their doom, Zira and Cornelius somehow stopped their future from coming true. It’s an interesting concept, and an unusually optimistic note for an Apes movie to end on, to show that it is possible to change the future, but it also opens up a variety of paradoxes and conflicts in the time travel use throughout the series, which pretty much negates any progress or message made here.
Every problem that has arisen throughout all four previous installments of the Planet of the Apes series comes together here: silly costumes and makeup, lack of franchise plot cohesion, repetition of past events, boring explanations of story and thematic points, etc. It’s like the producers went back to find all the things to avoid and to strive for from the previous movies, but then mixed the lists up when giving them to the writers, leaving us with all the wrong things. It’s a bad movie, a bad sequel, and a bad conclusion to a series that could’ve left a greater legacy, and definitely deserved better.
3 out of 10.
Related posts:
- A Series Review: Planet of the Apes – Part 4
- A Series Review: Planet of the Apes – Part 3
- A Series Review: Planet of the Apes – Part 2
- A Series Review: Planet of the Apes – Part 1
- A Series Review: Friday the 13th- Part 10
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