Planet of the Apes

Torpid action-adventure, toothless satire, generic science fiction, take your pick—Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes aspires to all manner of mediocrity. Never really a master of the lunk-headed blockbuster, Burton is far from his strengths here, resulting in one of the most flat and hackneyed films this eccentric stylist has yet produced. But it’s hard to imagine any director coming up with much better based on such a slapdash script. Narrative logic has never been the purview of this franchise, but even for a movie with talking apes and time travel this is pretty incoherent stuff. The best you can hope for is some trace of anarchic gusto (see: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), but all you get are the clichés and tepid ironies that killed this series in the first place (see: Battle for the Planet of the Apes). Charleton Heston even appears briefly as a dying ape patriarch, which only reminds viewers of how uninspiring this rehash is compared to the loopy original (and didn’t he blow up the Earth in the second Ape movie just so he could get out of making these things anyway? Damn you! Damn you all, etc.). At least the original films had the Cold War and impending nuclear death to give some shape to their satire; like most modern blockbusters, this film’s vision only comes into focus when its eyes are locked on your wallet.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

It’s the year 2670 AD, and we’re in some green corner of North America where brooks still babble on, even though everyone else has run out of things to say. But a voice still begins to speak, a voice of such sinister authority it could plausibly belong to either god or the devil—no one can tell the difference between such concepts anymore in 2670, they might as well be the same thing for all it matters. And what does this mighty voice say? What proclamations, what wisdom, does it impart?

Well, I’m embarrassed to report this voice is only here to recap the plot of Escape from the Planet of the Apes before we go another barmy expedition into the monkey house. Yes, the masterminds behind Battle for the Planet of the Apes have hired John Huston to do their plot summary. Tell me, who hires such an august presence just to stick him in a Halloween mask and make him recite the plot of a cheap movie as if it were the Book of Genesis? Is this a wise way to spend your casting budget?

But such is the bizarre logic of this film, which skimps on every detail—Claude Akins’ gorilla mask looks ready to fall off his face at any moment—yet throws such a strong presence into what otherwise could be (and should be) a completely anonymous role. We’re so deep in the realms of disappointment now that we can’t find our way back to the border anymore. Out here, there are only vultures circling this walking corpse of a movie, and any notions of kitschy fun were left behind in the dunes like an empty canteen.

Almost anything would be a comedown after the revolutionary zeal of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but Battle, the fifth and final installment in the Ape series, is a particularly listless conclusion to the story. How can one even feel comfortable with such a benign movie after sitting through its four barbed predecessors? If the rest of the series forms a nearly seven-hour nightmare, this film is the night-light. It’s cute, reassuring, and unnecessary.

None of this is to say Battle is a particularly cheerful film, even if it does ladle some goopy love-and-harmony syrup all over its conclusion (“Peace is boring,” one character sneers, and the film unwittingly proves this). John Huston, as the Lawgiver, hangs around in the year 2670 to frame the action, which actually takes place centuries earlier in the aftermath of the fourth film. We’re on the sticky side of an undefined nuclear cataclysm that has more or less annihilated human civilization, leaving apes the dominant species, ruling over the remaining people.

Roddy McDowall returns as Caesar, the ape revolutionary from the fourth film, and his performance is one of the few remotely enjoyable things to be found in this torpid little movie. Even the flashes of misanthropic humour that characterize the rest of the series only appear here in small doses of tart smugness. The series used to make misery so much fun—now it just feels like a chore.

For instance, the law that ape shall not kill ape is broken when Aldo, a gorilla general, kills Caesar’s son (I’ll spare you a detailed exegesis on the complexities of ape politics that led to this incident). This fall from grace prompts the remark that the apes have at last “joined the human race.” Because humans are murderous monsters, you see? This is the moral of every ape film, but this marks the first time the message has been delivered in such a dutiful, automatic way. While the climactic confrontation between Aldo and Caesar carries some of that old surreal excitement—the assembled crowd eerily chants “Ape has killed ape,” as if the force of this fact alone is enough to punish the guilty—most of the film feels drained of energy and purpose.

Everything has a desultory feel, carelessly tossed off with disdain. Half of the time, we can’t even see what’s going on. The murky and poorly lit sequences that take place in the tunnels below some ruined city climax in a cloud of smoke, perhaps because director J. Lee Thompson was afraid we might actually see the movie and realize how bad it actually is.

Thompson, who also directed on the fourth film in the series, is clearly not engaging with the material this time around. Scenes begin the instant someone starts speaking and end almost before the last word has entered the air. Everything feels clipped and rushed; the filmmakers clearly can’t bear to waste one extra second of screen time on these characters. There are almost no transitions between scenes, no cushion as we jump from one flat moment to the next. The effect is such that you feel like you are being hurried through a museum moments before closing—speed walking past all the dead things.

But then again, what is there to see here? Even by the lax standards of Ape movies, the film is fairly incoherent. All of planetary life is apparently reduced to two colonies side-by-side yet completely oblivious to each other’s existence. Even more inexplicable is the fact that one of these colonies would choose to live in irradiated underground ruins, apparently preferring to starve in the dark rather than move into the lush forest right outside their cancerous hell. And somehow, in the span of a few years, apes have developed language and culture and politics. We even have hyper-intelligent orangutans discoursing learnedly on time and relativity, bizarrely, with the aid of highway metaphors. Because obviously a post-industrial society that uses horses for transport would use cars as their main point of reference, right?

Of course, I don’t go to these Ape movies looking for finely tuned narrative logic, but I feel like if I swallow one more ounce of this nonsense I’ll choke. As absurd as it is to rail against a cheap, cash-grab movie for not thinking through its plot, what I’m really bothered by is the lack of conviction and passion. I don’t ask that this movie make sense—I just want it to care.

Tragically, it all ends happily ever after. An assault on the ape-human colony ends with most of the irradiated tunnel dwellers being killed, while the few survivors form the beginnings of the bomb-worshipping cult we discovered in the second film. The militaristic Aldo dies in his final confrontation with Caesar and the humans and apes resolve to live together as equals. Then everyone hugs and some bunnies show up riding rainbows and pass the soma, it’s all good (details got a little hazy after that, but I think everyone broke into “Que Sera, Sera” at some point).

Is it wrong for me to want an unhappy ending? What I love about this dopey series is its unabashed fatalist streak. How many mainstream films can you think of from today or any other era that would dare embrace such darkness? Man is cruel, we’re all going to die—this is not the typical terrain of escapist entertainment. But there’s immense pleasure in this despair, a weirdly primal satisfaction akin to an old folk murder ballad, where all the worst impulses of humanity are dredged up like bones from the bottom of a lake and put on display. The Ape movies might as well be the cinematic equivalent of “Knoxville Girl” in the nuclear age. It’s a lament of self-defeat—an epic about how violence against others becomes violence against yourself.

Perhaps that is why this largely irrelevant coda feels so strained after listening to its four predecessors moan about death and destruction. Ignoring these demons is akin to giving in to them, making this one of the most joyless happy endings imaginable. The film succumbs to hope as if it were a fatal disease. In the final scene, the Lawgiver lectures ape and human alike about the uncertain future, but there is at least one certainty—there is no future for this series, and the movie bears that knowledge in every lifeless frame. Half-heartedly, the film preaches life and hope even as it gives up any will to carry on. A fitting conclusion to this most despairing series: this is what it looks like when a movie commits suicide.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes

The first time I watched Escape from the Planet of the Apes I expressed my disappointment with the movie to a couple of friends who had kindly sat through the whole thing with me.

Here we had the goofy spectacle of Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall, made up as apes, parading around dressed in the height of 1970s fashion and bantering as if they were actually the stars of an alternate-reality sequel to The Thin Man. How could that possibly go wrong? But when I lamented that I felt let down, my friends started laughing at me.

“What’s so funny?” I asked. “I’m just disappointed in the movie, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” said one of my associates (who, due to a back problem, walked in an awkward, shuffling gait, much like a slower version of McDowall’s monkey walk), “but just listen to yourself. You’re disappointed in THE THIRD PLANET OF THE APES MOVIE.”

Okay, so she had a point, even if she did walk a bit like a monkey. It’s probably unwise to invest too much hope in dubious cinematic properties such as Planet of the Apes sequels, but after the lunatic gusto of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, I had expected further heights of tasteless, demented apocalyptic fantasy.

I suppose you can only blow up the Earth so many times. Naturally, that’s a hard act to follow, and this movie can’t help but appear modest and slight next to the messy, overreaching zeal of its predecessor. Gone are the weeping monkey messiahs and mind-reading cultists; now we have cutesy fish-out-of-water antics and boringly sinister bureaucrats. Transporting Cornelius and Zira, two human-loving ape scientists, back into the present day was perhaps the most sensible way to continue the series, but after watching the entire Earth explode, there’s an inevitable sense of let-down at seeing the planet back in business as usual. Oh yes, this place. Again. Yawn. I only care when it is in flames.

But in retrospect, all we’ve really done is trade a big apocalypse for a little one, and it’s hard to say which is more painful. At the end of the second film, we see all life extinguished. At the end of the third, we see only a handful of deaths, each depicted with singular brutality. A newborn ape swaddled in a blanket is shot, repeatedly, on the deck of an abandoned oil tanker. Cornelius and Zira fare no better, each murdered in turn. When Cornelius is shot, he stares into the camera and emits a hideous blood-bubble wheeze as damning as a dying curse. And then plummets from a great height, his body crushing against the deck of the tanker, which emits a hollow thud.

Director Don Taylor films the whole sequence as a series of sharp angles flying from different directions, giving the impression of being caught in crossfire. It’s a well-wrought scene—one of the few examples of sure direction in the series since the first film, in fact. But what really gives the scene its punch is the sheer shock value of moving so rapidly from light comedy to grisly tragedy. We were having fun just a few minutes ago, weren’t we? Now every major character in the series is lying in a bloody heap. You might as well blow up the planet now, for all I care anymore.

One of the distinguishing features of the first two Ape movies was their willingness to employ completely unlikable protagonists. Sure, you felt a bit sorry for Heston’s Taylor, stuck in that zoo so far from home, but his volatile misanthropy hardly made him endearing. By contrast, Cornelius and Zira are pure charm. Their borscht belt marriage routine—“Does he talk?” one person asks of Cornelius, who replies, nodding towards his wife, “Only when she lets me”—is like something your grandparents would say at their 50th wedding anniversary, which helps explains the appeal of Cornelius and Zira. They’re corny, but sweet.

So obviously, they must die. Because this film, like its predecessors, is about the death of everything decent and kind and beautiful and innocent.

Some might argue that the film’s final scene—which reveals that Cornelius and Zira’s baby did not die with his parents, but rather was switched with another chimp in a traveling circus—contains a glimmer of hope. This being an Ape film, I’m not inclined to credit it with any hope for the future. This series paints with purest, blackest fatalism, envisioning history as a series of mass graves, each layered on top of each other like geographical strata. There is no hope for the future because there is no future.

The one promise the film makes to the future is that more suffering awaits. The last thing we see in the film is Cornelius and Zira's son in a cage at the circus, crying out “Mama” over and over while the image repeats on a loop. As the screen turns black, all we hear is that mewling sound, like a toothpick jabbed into your eardrum. The image is far too upsetting, too creepy, to really work as a bright spot in all of this gloom. Besides, this little guy could be the catalyst for the end of human civilization. Try not to get too attached to him.

Similarly, the deaths of Cornelius and Zira are not as easy to read as you first think. The man responsible for the deaths is Dr. Otto Hasslein, a man described—rather vaguely—as the president’s science advisor. At first, he seems an easy choice for our villain, a stern, angular man who is far too calmly zealous to be trustworthy. He even carries a secret recording device in his cigarette case (just another day in Nixon’s America!). Anyone who hides recording devices in everyday objects is clearly a bad person.

Yet Hasslein nonetheless cares deeply about saving the human race—an odd trait for any movie villain, I would think. He even gives an impassioned speech about the dangers of delaying action in the face of worldwide catastrophes ranging from pollution to overpopulation to time-traveling apes. “How much time has the world got?” he rages. “Somebody has to care!” What sort of movie puts its moral in the mouth of its chief villain? Dammit, this is supposed to be a stupid movie. We’re not supposed to be getting this kind of ambiguity in a silly Planet of the Apes sequel with Ricardo fucking Montalban in it.

As vicious as the death sequence may be, the film does leave open the provocative possibility that it was necessary. The survival of Cornelius and Zira could accelerate the demise of humanity, just as the existence of their offspring might well damn us all. I realize this series takes a dim view of the human race, but once you accept that we should survive as a species, you have to consider the possibility that these charming chimps and their baby must die. Not only do we have to contend with all that ugliness, we have to consider the chance that it was necessary for our collective survival.

Which brings us back to the troubling question that has plagued me while watching these movies: is their message simply that the human race cannot survive? Or rather that it should not? Misanthropy is too gentle a word for what this film feels about humanity. And hey, why not go for a bit of despair once in a while? Frankly, when you consider the myriad ways our species has flirted with death, who wouldn’t want to unleash an uncompromising tirade against our endless capacity for murderous folly? And while I don’t want to celebrate pessimism for its own sake (which can be just as mindless as optimism), a hopeful ending to this mess would be an insult. No one goes looking for a good slap in the face, but sometimes that's the best we deserve.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

1. You know how live albums are sometimes described as a band’s greatest hits played faster and louder? This sequel to Planet of the Apes feels likes the original movie’s greatest hits played slower and quieter. With a new astronaut landing on the planet, Beneath the Planet of the Apes goes through many of the same revelatory moments—the initial exploration of the desert, the discovery of the ape city, and so on—while making each retread a lesser version of the original. One need only compare the early scenes in the Forbidden Zone to see the difference. Original director Franklin J. Schaffner was almost too stylish at times, but his crane-drunk, angle-sniffing camerawork in the desert at least resulted in some evocatively lonely imagery. By comparison, sequel director Ted Post brings the brusque literalism of a television director to his desert sequences. The camera simply pans over a flat plain with a mountain in the distance. Yup, that’s a desert alright.

Our hero, Lean Beef McStudly (James Franciscus), continues this trend towards diminishing returns by giving us a watered down version of Charlton Heston’s brittle astronaut from the first film (luckily, Heston shows up at the end of the sequel to lend a touch of movie-star grandeur to the otherwise debased proceedings). Worst of all, the all-important they-blew-it-up revelation is a mere whisper next to the original’s melodramatic roar. Whereas Heston realized he was on Earth when he discovered the Statue of Liberty, Franciscus has to come to terms with the annihilation of 20th century civilization when he stumbles across Queensboro Plaza. The setting trades the iconic for the mundane, and the performance is similarly diminished. You’ll find more dramatically persuasive emotional breakdowns on the subway every single day at rush hour.

2. Let’s talk about film editing for a moment. Film editing is a fine and difficult alchemy, with results that are not always expected or desired. When you put together 1 and 2, you don’t always get 3—sometimes, you get 12. I’ll put this into context using an example from Beneath the Planet of the Apes: cutting from a deathly wounded man to a scene where someone is patting down dirt on a freshly dug grave does not necessarily imply that the man died in his sleep while angels whispered sweet lullabies in his ears and god tickled his toes. No, it suggests he was buried alive.

3. When Franciscus is locked up in the slave cart, Zira—the friendly ape scientist from the first film, if you’re keeping track of these things—grabs the key and unlocks the cage for the man to escape. You would think someone would ask why she was opening the cage when they just closed it, but she justifies her actions by saying, “I’ll just double lock it.”

Really? Is that a thing now? If I was a guard and someone said they were going to double lock the cage, I would say, hey, whoa, hold it a minute now, don’t go sticking that key back in there. That lock ain’t getting any more locked than it already is. What, do you think you can make it extra locked? Twice locked? Is there some special, secret level of locking things that I’ve never been told about? Let me tell you something, most locks tend to have just two settings: locked and unlocked. So just leave that cage double unlocked (you know, locked), if you would be so kind.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I would care about if I were a talking gorilla in the year 3955.

4. Due to the whole double-locking fiasco, we are gifted with a fight scene on a fast-moving slave cart. Unfortunately, the movie awkwardly (and obviously) cuts between Franciscus in a studio in front of a rear projection screen and a stunt double on an actual moving cart outside. I suppose the star did not want to risk his life doing stunt work, and can you blame him? Who would dare risk the shame? “He died for his art” is a particularly stupid statement in almost any context, but none more so than a sequel to Planet of the Apes.

That said, I find this to be a helpful rule of thumb: if your star isn’t willing to die for your movie, then you either need to find a new star or a new movie.

5. For all the inherent goofiness of having people walk around in monkey masks debating science and religion, the Ape movies have always had a dark edge to their satire, and this one is no different. This incarnation of the series introduces the gorilla class of ape society, a warmongering lot who are thumping their chests (quite literally) and agitating for invading the Forbidden Zone.

The scenes of the army running preparation drills possess the innate comedy of people doing very serious things while wearing very stupid outfits, but that’s about all you can say for this whole ill-conceived invasion subplot. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that this would make a nice bit of social commentary. I suppose it might have if it had actually made any sense.

Here’s the thing about wars: you need an enemy. There are a lot of forms this enemy can take. You can have a traditional war and meet your enemy on contested ground and battle for position. You can have a cold war and never directly engage your enemy in armed conflict. You can have a war on terror and fight a network of shadow-enemies across many territories. But you’ll notice that most wars have some sort of opposing force, which makes the fighting that much more photogenic and helps disperse the burden of organizing things and split costs on costume rental fees.

In this movie, there is no enemy. As the army marches off into the Forbidden Zone, protestors block the way while waving signs that say, “Wage Peace Not War.” It’s a lovely sentiment, and completely nonsensical in this context. The army certainly isn’t waging peace, but they can’t really wage war either, seeing as how they’re heading into uninhabited territory with no knowledge that any enemy force even exists. In essence, they are invading a desert. One would think this is a brilliantly undefeatable military strategy, except that they still somehow fuck it up and die anyway.

Moral: always have an enemy when waging a war. It’s much more difficult to win, but much less embarrassing when you lose.

6. Giant stone monkey Jesus weeping tears of blood!

I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy. Avert your eyes.

7. The “beneath” part in the title of this movie comes from the cultish society of telepathic mutants living below the ruins of New York City projecting trippy hallucinations to fuck with the apes and astronauts. As you can imagine, they are a dour, smug, and uniformly loathsome bunch, spending all their time worshipping an active nuclear bomb while singing bizarre hymns about how the weapon will kill the devils and make angels of everyone. All of which begs the question of how a nuclear weapon got to be stored in the New York subway system in the first place—or should we just take this as more proof of the stupid recklessness that damned humanity in the first place?

In one of the movie’s more inexplicable reveals, the telepaths peel off their faces, exposing their hideously veiny, pink-grey heads. Now, if I could, I would like to seriously consider the tomato head mutants for a moment. Why would a civilization in which everyone is equally disfigured need to wear latex masks? Are their rotten tomato heads simply too sensitive to be exposed to the air, or are they just that vain? I incline to the latter explanation, as it fits with the movie’s bleak opinion of humanity. Even in an apocalyptic wasteland where everyone is similarly scarred, even when you can read everyone else’s thoughts and always know for certain if they are thinking about how fat your ass looks in your robe, even despite all of that—people will still feel insecure. We’re just that shallow and stupid, apparently. Maybe we did deserve to be nuked after all. Tomato head mutants, you’ve convinced me.

8. If you have to talk out loud when communicating with a telepath, maybe you should think before you speak.

9. The first time I saw Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it left me positively giddy (yes, that’s right, I’ve watched this movie more than once). No, it’s not a good movie by any objective measure. But it does have one thing going for it: the death of all life. The movie ends with Charlton Heston, oozing red paint, gasping a dying curse (“You bloody bastard!”), then falling on the trigger for a nuclear weapon that destroys the entire Earth. And then there are three sequels! You can understand my excitement.

The glory of this nutty shit-bar of a movie—and it is glorious, for all of its innumerable flaws—lies in its sheer bleakness. If the first movie were a person, it would be a crazy derelict carrying a sign that reads, “The End is Nigh, Repent.” If this sequel were a person, it would be a crazy derelict carrying a sign that reads, “The End is Nigh, We’re Fucked.”

In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, there’s no redemption, no false hope or appeals to virtue. The original Ape movie suggested primitivism might be the only way to avert nuclear disaster, but even that escape route is closed to us now. The anti-science apes are just as likely to trigger the bomb as the all-powerful mutants. Both knowledge and ignorance lead us into the same smoldering pile of ash. Strap yourself to this movie and it will rocket you straight into the blackest void, with you laughing all the way. You remember in Dr. Strangelove the cowboy bombardier riding his nuke, yee-hawing on his way to the grave? Imagine that scene without a trace of irony and you will understand the sick appeal of this movie.

After all, this is a movie where the hero happens to be the destroyer of all life on Earth, a movie either too clumsy or too deranged to staunch the horror that seeps through the cracks in its story. You would think that all of this cold-war nuclear anxiety would have lost its sting over time, but that isn't the case here. Something about this vision of inevitable nuclear annihilation feels stranded from its time, a marooned howl, like a message in a bottle washed up a beach. You would think the contents of the bottle couldn’t be relevant anymore, but when you open it up, the only message you find is, “You’re going to die.” And in that hesitant pause between laughter and scream, this movie lives its life.

Planet of the Apes

My earliest memory of Planet of the Apes comes from when I was no more than nine or ten years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, and my father had been watching the movie on TBS. I didn’t actually watch it—probably I was in my room reading comic books—but I recall standing on the stairway and watching the final scene through the banisters as if I were sneaking a peak of something sordid and secret. It disturbed me enough that I wouldn’t come back to it for fifteen years.

After the movie was over, I stepped out of the house and into the farmyard, feeling this queasy churning in my guts. The sky was like a giant pit I might fall into; I didn’t trust the ground. But it wasn’t the apocalyptic implications of Charlton Heston on the beach, howling into the surf as he pounds the sand, which frightened me. It was the depthless loneliness that he surely must have experienced at that moment. (Returning to the movie, I was surprised to realize there was a woman with him in that scene, although this mute, uncomprehending primitive can only offer limited solace.)

When I think back to me alone in the yard, I have trouble locating my parents anywhere, even though they were certainly there somewhere. The television glows in an empty room, even though I know my father must have been watching. Everyone has been evacuated from this one memory in my mind, leaving me to wander all on my lonesome after the end of the world.

Perhaps the destruction of all human life was a little too abstract a concept for my young mind. Besides, what does nuclear war mean to a kid at the end of the Cold War who wouldn't have been able to tell Gorbachev from Grimace? (Now that I'm all grown up, I know the answer: Grimace smiles more.) Looking back at the movie, its vision of nuclear annihilation is really only good for providing that iconic final image of the mangled Statue of Liberty on a lifeless beach. Beyond that, there isn't much bite to it. The idea that scientific progress might destroy us all is hardly new, and the movie mostly just trades on that well-established anxiety while engaging in easy ironies punctuated with a few snappy chases and assorted histrionics. Anti-scientific sentiment was hardly a fresh—or even particularly useful—addition to the nuclear debate, even in 1968.

But the movie still resonates, due largely to Heston’s performance as George Taylor, all-American hero and smug prick. This is a man who so loathes both the warmongers and peaceniks of his era that he volunteers to pass centuries at light speed while waiting for all the jerks on Earth to die. Why even bother coming back if that’s how you feel, George? (Early foreboding scenes where he insists there must be a species better than man somewhere out there can barely contain their anticipation of his ironic comeuppance. Turns out your primate forebears are better than man, jerkwad! Oh, and ha-ha, everyone you love is dead.)

This is by no means one of the most subtly modulated performances of Heston’s career—in fact, it’s overwrought ham of the first order. Heston pounds the dirt, curses the sky, and gnashes his teeth. His dialogue is alternately delivered in a hiss or a bellow, save for a blissful interlude where he cannot speak (thus dropping the volume of his emoting to a muffled roar). The horrible rictus he bears throughout the film never lets us forget that we are watching an intense actor acting intensely.

And yet this might be the best role of his career. With his towering frame and stentorian voice, Heston was a natural fit for righteous authority figures, so rigid and upright that one could only assume Moses’ staff was firmly lodged up his ass. Taylor’s condescension and contempt are merely the darker side of this familiar type that Heston made a career out of playing. The film lets his usual high-minded air turn abrasive (or more deliberately abrasive than usual, I should say). The sense of superiority behind his strident morality easily turns to loathing for the rest of humanity.

Taylor remains an unrepentant prick right up to the very end. Even when two sympathetic ape scientists help free him before he can be lobotomized (and gelded!), he can’t help but be a bit of an asshole towards them. He complains about the stench of the rags he is asked to wear while sneaking away and pointedly reminds his saviours, “You’re not in charge of me.” Even though Taylor makes it sound like he simply could no longer live with the rest of humanity, it’s quite clear that the rest of humanity likely could no longer live with him either.

So forget about the end of the world for once. We all know we’re riding this spinning blue top right into oblivion, so there’s no need for another toothless sermon about our warlike nature (especially when you can peg most contemporary apocalypses on the excessive consumption of peacetime—how’s that for bitter irony, and oh yes, ha-ha, everyone you love is dead). Planet of the Apes is about more than the folly of science and nasty nuclear death. It’s about the impossibility of living with other people, and the horrible need for them all the same. It’s about a thought so scary that it rattled my young self and made the whole world for a moment seem like an extension of that desolate beach. It’s about that simple phrase Heston utters as he stares into the void, obliterated by its vastness: “I feel lonely.”

Oh, poor baby, you might say, why not try being less of a jerk and then see how lonely you feel? But the poor bastard can’t help it, he really can’t. He yearns for kinship but sees it nowhere, pushing against the folly of the human race, ignorant of the fact that he is no better. When he sneers that back on Earth there was lovemaking but no love, the words don’t sound like those of a wounded romantic—this is the cold, hard speech of a man who has used others and taken refuge in their weaknesses rather than face his own. He disdains the warlike nature of the civilization he so readily left behind, but he is a more capable fighter and killer than anyone else in the movie. His misanthropy lacks only the glimmer of self-awareness necessary to turn inwards and finally rip him in two. Goddamn you all to hell? No such luck, George—hell is other people, and you’ll yet learn to beg for it.