The double feature does not represent a long night at the home video screen but rather last week’s and this week’s Sunday Night Movie feature combined into a single essay.
After watching 1968’s Planet of The Apes the idea struck me that I should watch all five of the original Ape movies in order. A coupe of years ago I scored a blu-ray box set that had all the films and tons of bonus feature, so logistically I saw no issues. That said I knew that meant I would be watching the crap with the imaginative. Oh well, I decided to do it.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the hastily consider sequel to 1968’s smash box-office success Planet of the Apes. However due to financial troubles at 20th Century Fox and boardroom infighting the film suffered from a trouble production from the get-go. Heston, the star of the first film hated the very idea of any sequel and only reluctantly agreed to participate as a favor to Daryl Zanuck, but even this came at the price with Heston insisting that his character of Taylor — spoiler alert stop reading if you care, serious stop reading — be killed off in the story.
The plot of Beneath is one that makes little to no sense. Another crew has been dispatched following Taylor’s into space. Now Taylor’s team knew that they were on a one-way trip into the future, proving Dr. Hasslien’s theories. In this film Brent (James Franciscus) and his crew have been dispatched to find Taylor. (Apparently Landon, Dodge, and Stewart were utter berks and no one wants them back,) Brent crashes, and has a much abbreviated repeat adventure of Taylor’s first encounter with ape society. Escaping the apes, he and the mute animal/human Nova go into the forbidden zone searching for Taylor. They find mutant humans with psychic powers who are at war with the Apes. (First appearance of the Producer’s wife as the mutant Albina.) Taylor and Brent find each other, have a manly fight (thanks, mutants!) and then are caught there when the Ape army arrives. Everyone panics, there’s lot of gunfire, and a nuclear device that is over 2000 years proves that there is no beating American manufacturing when it goes off and destroys the world.
This film was a hit. It practically relaunched the idea of major studio, major money sequel. Except for the Universal horror franchises, series films before Beneath were usually constructed like episodes, each film could be watched on its own and did not effect the continuity of other films. After the major success of Beneath, film sequels were seen not as episodes but a continuation of the same story. Quite a change.
I can clearly remember seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes at the Sunrise Theater in Fort Pierce Florida. That was 1971 so I would have been 10 years old, and I remember laughing a full belly laugh as the ‘unmasking’ scene at the film’s open. Escape faced the challenge of crafting a continuation of the story when in the pervious film not only did your principle characters get killed, but the entire freakin’ world was turned to ash as a gravely toned narrator informed the audience that the world was now dead.
Hollywood turned to the now familiar trope, time travel. Thee apes, apes that in the first film believed flight to be a physical impossibility, have figured out the operation of an advanced spacecraft repaired it, launched it, and through a freak incident are thrown back in time to 1973. So instead of a story about men on a planet of apes, it is a story of apes stranded on a world of fearful humans. While there are a number of comical bits, this film does plumb interesting depths. What actions are morally justified to prevent a terrible future from coming into reality? What is the place of the outsider?
Something I only noticed on this viewing is the continuity of a secondary character. In Planet of the Apes the flight is done in part to prove Dr Hasslein’s theories, but not much more than that is mentioned of the good doctor. (Clearly a script stand-in for relativity and Einstein.) Beneath mentioned the good doctor not at all, but in Escape he is a principle character. (Played wonderfully by Eric Braeden, who also star in another 70’s SF film in my library, Colossus: The Forbin Project.)
The ape time-travelers quickly transit from curiosities, to celebrities, and into hunted fugitives. Though they find allies, second appearance of the producer’s while as a kind and sympathetic vet, in the end there are more enemies than friends. Like so often in film of the 1970’s it ends darkly, but the producers this time left themselves a thread for another film and this upcoming Sunday I’ll watch Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
Guardians of the Galaxy (GotG) must count among the strangest concepts ever used to launch a major franchise. GotG concerns a collection of criminals and riff-raff that are thrown together with conflicting motives with the fate of the galaxy resting on their actions.
Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant and baffling masterpiece, 2001 is truly not only one of the most influential SF films of the 1960s, it is one of the most influential films of any genre of all time. It is groundbreaking in its style, scope, depth of concepts, technical mastery, and sheer artistry. Coming at the end of the decade, this movie raised the bar on what could be expected of a science-fiction film. Where Forbidden Planet brought in literature, 2001 demonstrated that SF, the genre of ideas in print fore decades and decades, could also be the genre of ideas on the silvered screen. Eschewing a traditional plot driven narrative, this film took us from the dawn of humanity through its eventual evolution beyond the cradle of Earth. It did this will a level of technical competence that forever changed what would be expected of a major SF film and set the stage for the dazzling spectacle in the next decade of Star Wars.
film! Yes it is both of those things, a horror film, just as Frankenstein was a horror film, and it is not just a zombie movie it is the progenitor of all modern zombie movies. It is also, quite clearly, a science-fiction film. First off, co-writer and Direct George A. Romero has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for this film was Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend, a story about a world overrun by scientifically explained vampires. In the film Night of the Living Dead, quite unlike Romero’s other zombie films, there is a clear explanation given for the rise of the dead and their transformation into murderous cannibals – radiation from the Venus probe. This radiation is what ‘activates’ the ghouls’ brains (the term zombie is never used in the movie and was grafted onto these revenants later) and it is what destroyed the brain destroys the ghouls. The cause and explanation is grounded in a scientific reason, though it is terrible science. So, like Dr. No, this is a movie that one rarely thinks of as SF, but clearly falls within those borders.
Released in 1968 Planet of the Apes would certainly be on the short list for best SF movies of that or any decade, but I can tell you that it is not one of the two films I selected as most influential from the 1960s.
Those who know me might suspect I selected this film because of the close association with one of my favorite SF authors, Robert A. Heinlien, but they would be wrong. This film, as a movie, is in my opinion flawed, but I am not selecting for best SF movies in each decade but most influential and on that count there can be no arguing with Destination Moon. This film, released in 1950, was a box office hit, both domestically and over-seas. It launched George Pal into his love affair with SF film, and for that alone it is an important film but it also launched the SF film crazed of the 1950’s. Without this film we do not have the rich fertile treasury of SF films from this decade and without those movies we do not have modern SF cinema. Destination Moon, while dry and flawed, is one of the most important SF films of any decade.
This selection should be less surprising. It is a well know movie, beloved and rescreened often. I had the good fortune to catch it in a theater and the special effect and images still hold up quite nicely. The characters are quite a bit dated, very much the writing is a product of the repressed 50’s, with the Production Code still in full effect, but this is still a movie well worth watching. It is influential because until Forbidden Planet science-fiction films were not literature. Most SF films were heavily plot based, being either adventure stories, such as Destination Moon’s exploration of the adventure inherent in a trip to the moon, allegorical story, or arguments for a particular worldview, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still. Forbidden Planet, an SF adaptation of The Tempest took the SF movie, with credible science, beyond the solar system and into the soul of humanity. It asked, with typical MGM glitz, deep questions about revenge and power and to price might they extract. In addition to opening up SF film to deeply internal stories, though they might be about aliens and robots on the surface, Forbidden Planet also inspired Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. The production design of the movie strongly influenced the look of the television series, and the very concept of a paramilitary exploration of new worlds and new life-forms start here. There is no doubt that you can draw a line from Forbidden Planet, through Star Trek, to many shows and films today.
an American military PR Officer who has never seen a day of combat, now suddenly thrust into the largest invasion in human history. Untested, untrained, and unworthy this is not the sort of assignment Cage wants to participate in.