I liked the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes in a very basic, superficial way. I’m either quite partial to or quite forgiving of the brainless summer blockbusters. The drive-in movie theater in Riverdale, Utah is only open in the spring and summer, and it’s not unthinkable for us to try and go every week to catch a double feature. It costs six dollars a ticket for a double feature, and usually the blockbusters are worth seeing on the big screen and are mediocre enough that while one is pretty unsatisfying, two makes a pretty good night out at the movies. The Planet of the Apes remake falls into that category. There was a handful of really good stuff in it, namely the montage of the apes in their evening routine, which was bizarre and utterly delightful. Tim Roth’s performance as the villain was absolutely brilliant too, reminding of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and Billy Bob Thornton in One False Move. He was the kind of bad guy that you’re afraid to get close to.

Pauline Kael writes of the original film, “This is a slick commercial picture, with its elements carefully engineered – pretty girl (who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have had acting training), comic relief, thrills, chases – but when expensive Hollywood engineering works, the results can be impressive.” The remake is probably sloppier, but is admirable in the way that you admire a slick commercial picture. To paraphrase another critic, on a different film of similar virtue, it was little more than a geek show, designed to win a weekend or two. On those modest terms it wasn’t that bad. While I’m not completely in opposition to Kael’s assessment of the original being simply a well-oiled machine, lacking of hard artistic merit, watching it I’m reminded anew of how enormously superior the picture is to the remake or the other summer blockbusters of recent years.

The film is ironically a great time capsule. It has dated like fine wine. The philosophy and the morality in the film takes target towards easy targets like fascism and war, but it’s sort of stunning to see a film that contains much of a shred of philosophy or morality. These days, people are actually getting sold on the murky hypocrisy of films like The Matrix Reloaded. People actually talk in this movie. Actually talk! Charlton Heston calls the orangutan theologian and scientist Dr. Zaius by his name. Same with the chimps, Cornelius and Dr. Zira. In the remake, Wahlberg treated them like monkeys: never on his level. I’m reminded of Bill Maher’s observation that, for terrorists, our founding fathers had particularly good manners. They even wrote a “Declaration of Independence.” Like our founding fathers, Heston is fighting on behalf of ideology and principle, probably more than anything else. Wahlberg could really care less what happened to the Planet of the Apes.

One of the most bothersome aspects of The Matrix Reloaded was that it was so damn hip. It was all sunglasses, leather jackets and computer hacking. The philosophy, which was pro-humanity, then didn’t make any sense as the heroes were positioned on the level of stoic hypermasculine machines beyond human emotion. They hadn’t any of the weaknesses of human beings. The great thing about Planet of the Apes is that it ain’t hip. Heston’s Taylor is a REAL ubermensch as opposed to those posers in The Matrix. Strong, intelligent and angry; he’s hyper-masculine in a pro-human way -- well, HEIGHTENED human, maybe even IDEALIZED human, and isn’t protected through disaffection. The absolute worst thing in the Planet of the Apes remake is the fact that Wahlberg is one of those stoic hypermasculine types. He floats through the thing, kicks some padded baboon ass, and never even raises his voice. Heston puts a uniquely electric charge through Planet of the Apes, and the film is conducive to it.

Kael calls the film “expensive,” but she is of course thinking in pre-Star Wars terms. The sets aren’t overly elaborate, and seem even rather limited. The filmmakers shot on location in the desert. This is good though! As with George Romero’s REAL low-budget horror picture Night of the Living Dead (also released in 1968), the director Franklin J. Schaffner doesn’t have a lot of budget for special effects or sets and is forced to get us high on pure cinema. This is the first time in a while when I’ve seen a zoom lens fully exploited in a movie. I love the zoom lens when it’s done well. I love the movieness of it, the voltage it adds to the scene. Eyes Wide Shut and The Royal Tenenbaums are terrific films and I love them dearly, but you’re forced to reflect that in the former it felt almost archaic, and in the latter it felt almost self-conscious. In Planet of the Apes, there’s something that feels pure and untouched about it. Early in the film we see Taylor’s ship crash into the “Planet of the Apes.” The scene is made up of several point-of-view shots from the ship as it spirals out of control. I found myself enormously impressed by this sequence. There is an order to the chaos; there is a reason that one shot spins one way and the other spins the other way. I remember trying to shoot and edit a similar kind of sequence in a video project for one of my classes, and it sure as hell didn’t come out anything like this. I admire the AESTHETICS of Planet of the Apes. It’s as well-made a film as anything by Scorsese, Kubrick or Spielberg. You get high just on looking at the filmmaking. This is a movie for movie lovers.

I understand that a substantial amount of money was spent on the famous ape makeup. When I first saw it, some seven or eight years ago, I fell into an intense laughing fit. They don’t really look like monkeys. The apes in the remake looked like monkeys. These guys look like something in the “other” category. Because the Planet of the Apes look is standardized however, because it’s unique to the Planet of the Apes universe, it has a strong internal logic to it and it works. The Planet of the Apes look is patented; when you see it, you know that you are in the Planet of the Apes universe. It’s good that it doesn’t look like real monkeys. It shows us that we aren’t in the real world, we’re in a movie. One of the things that I love the most about the make-up is the acting that has to be done under it to sell the character. It doesn’t move much, and so the actors act with their eyes, opening them wide in surprise like when Zira discovers that Taylor can write, or squinting them in disgust like when Taylor can’t explain to the prosecuting attorney why men don’t have souls. And if you have never seen Planet of the Apes apes kiss, then you really need to grant yourself this small but intensely satisfying pleasure and rent the movie right now. It’s absolutely hilarious.

The whole movie is intentionally, deliciously campy. You see it especially in the dialogue with lines like “What were you expecting? An ape’s new suit?” or “He always said, ‘I’ve never met an ape that I didn’t like.’” My favorite gag in Planet of the Apes has to be when Taylor tells Zira’s rebellious nephew “Don’t trust anybody over thirty!” Heston’s hilarious “damn dirty ape” line has grown famous, in no small part because Heston sells the goofy line with fiery conviction. It seems that we see most of the special effects in the beginning of the film, where Taylor talks into a tape recorder about his experiences on Earth and how he hopes that our future will be an improvement on our present. There is a pop gorgeousness to the way that the lights of passing star systems passes across his ship.

Not all the pleasures of Planet of the Apes are simple. The campy dialogue, makeup and performances moderate, but do not fully disguise the fact that this is very dark material. The more successful remake of the picture that I have in my imagination would maintain the evocative nighttimes and swamps of the Burton film, but would also greatly resemble a cross between The Trial and maybe Midnight Express. The horror in the picture comes from the hero fighting against a totalitarian system that uses an impenetrable logic to oppress its inhabitants. The idea that there is logic to the system gives them the illusion of freedom, and THAT is the real thorn in their paw. (In the most literal sense, naming The Trial “The Trial” is sort of contemptuously ironic. A trial would imply that Josef K. may be innocent.) Taylor is the only talking human on the Planet of the Apes, and thus there is a feeling that he is in an isolated cocoon, screaming and begging to be recognized. Typically, his throat is either scarred or there is a gorilla with a firehose telling him to shut up.

You can tell from watching the film that it’s a mainstream movie that has had a bit of counterculture hippy-ism soaked into its skin. It’s the tie-dye T-shirt that you can buy in the department store. It seems that you would have to be a very dedicated leftist to really oppose the picture as being a corporate perversion of hippie values, though. As I have said, it picks pretty easy targets; we’re all against nuclear war and fascist orangutans, aren’t we? The passage of time, especially, makes it sort of admirable. Heston makes the surprisingly insightful observation that on Earth, when he left, there was lots of lovemaking but no love, shortly predating the death of hippy socialism and free love and the birth of self-interest and self-gratification illustrated in Easy Rider and Fellini Satyricon. Free love wasn’t describing how it flowed anymore, but how much it was worth. Until the admittedly cuetsie-pie horror show ending, Taylor seems to have come to the conclusion that humanity, for all its foibles, is still superior to the monkey culture. He gives this speech upon finding the remains of a human:

I don't say he was a man like an Earthman, but I'd call him a close relative, for he was plagued by most of man's ills. Yet, fragile as he was, he came before you and was superior to you.

The idea of making the humans in the movies into mutes and unintelligent animals actually has a primal unprententious sexiness to it. For one, two thousand years of cryogenic sleep has given Taylor and the rest of his crew thick beards. Heston in a beard: manliness hightened almost to the point of self-parody. It’s earthy, however, the “let it all hang out” attitude manifested in the most direct and obvious terms. There’s not really any excuse for the moment when Zira puts the gorgeous Nova into Taylor’s cell, describing her as a “present” and mentioning that she hopes they’ll mate. Nor should there be any excuse. The human sexuality is, intentionally or not, given a sort of purity and weight, whereas the ape sexuality is, thankfully, more pedestrian and dull. We’re undeniably more interested in the romance between Taylor and Nova than Cornelius and Zira’s engagement. Cornelius and Zira share one chaste monkey kiss, while Taylor and Nova sleep in the same haystack. Compare this film to the bizarre remake, where the apes were given various sexual hangups and the hero seemed to prefer the simian Helena Bonham Carter to the human Estella Warren.

The sexuality of Planet of the Apes is of course reflective of its politics. We learn later in the film that secularized man has destroyed the planet through nuclear war and the ape civilization has sought to bring back order through their religion that suppresses and inhibits scientific development. At the end of the film, Dr. Zaius quotes scripture about how Man has created a desert of his own home and will create one out of yours:

Beware the beast man, for he is the devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust or greed. Yes, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair: For he is the harbinger of death.

Dr. Zaius is aware that man once ruled the planet and was overcome by apes, but once Zira and Cornelius discover evidence of this, he has it covered up. The ape civilization is so primitive they think that flight is a scientific impossibility. One of the more shocking scenes in the film comes when Cornelius shows Taylor a map of his world. It’s just a square of canvas! The last shot of the film has a genuine jolt to it, but it’s grossly unsatisfying and the film feels ultimately morally ambiguous. We begin to recognize the pro-human feeling as simply being anti-ape more than being where the heart of the picture lies. As with L.Q. Jones’ brilliant post-apocalyptic sci-fi comedy A Boy and His Dog, Planet of the Apes is about the preference of anarchy to a totalitarian state.

A Boy and His Dog, often criticized for being sloppy filmmaking, remains the superior film because it stays with this idea that anarchy is better, and thus has a defined moral center. The hero of A Boy and His Dog is a killer and a rapist, but so is the fascist society that he is seduced into. He’s just a redneck with a shotgun, but that’s better than the controlled robot soldiers of the fascist society because he is at least free to act, and the people that he rapes and kills at least have a fighting chance. Jones isn’t beyond seeing this conclusion as ironic or nihilistic, and there are certainly parts of A Boy and His Dog that remind especially of Slim Pickens riding the missile to nuclear orgasm at the end of Dr. Strangelove. But the point is that he’s able to take a position. The problem with Planet of the Apes is that it hates the humans for being destructive and it hates the apes for being oppressive. Taylor is unable to take sides; he can’t show a preference towards the peaceful slavery of the ape society or the rudderless nihilism of the humans.

Planet of the Apes has the form of a message movie, but it’s too cynical to in effect say anything. However, perhaps this ambiguity is a byproduct of the fact that Taylor is, again, the only one of his kind to exist on the Planet of the Apes. A talking human. The success of both the ape society and the human asociety depends greatly on their lack of consciousness of their situation. They are living in a state of gleeful ignorance. The apes may never evolve beyond apes; they’re never going to overcome their rigid caste system (where the orangutans are the ruling class, and the gorillas are the warriors). And flight may very well remain a scientific impossibility, evolution theory a simian heresy. At least as long as apes like Dr. Zaius are running the show. And from the looks of it, it appears that mankind never took a good look around as it rode that atomic bomb down to earth screaming in orgasmic glee all the way. Taylor exists as the only conscious being on the planet, and it drives him insane. He sees clearly where humanity is going and where it went, and he knows that while it’s not the best or even a particularly good solution, the apes have a solution all the same: keep the man animal on a tight leash and don’t let the monkeys get any funny ideas either.