Your Move, Darwin #11: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

(Spoilers. Always, spoilers.)

Cultural historians of the future will probably have no hesitation in recognising that cinema in the second decade of the 21st century was the high point of the Franchise Genre Blockbuster. A flood of Marvel and DC superhero movies; five new Star Wars movies; four Hunger Games movies; five Fast and Furious movies; a couple more Terminator movies; four more Transformers movies. And of course, there were more Bond movies (there have always been more Bond movies). Failed, super-expensive attempts to kick off franchises abounded, with Luc Besson’s good-hearted but chemistry-free attempt to bring French comicbook legends Valerian and Laureline to the screen flopping catastrophically, and ready-planned sure-thing multimillion-dollar franchises based around King Arthur and the Universal Monsters getting themselves cancelled on the spot thanks to movies that were frankly crappy enough that audiences noticed. Every studio was looking for a property to resurrect: indeed, the Rocky, Rambo, Alien(s), Mad Max, Predator and Jurassic Park series all came back, and the long-running Toho Kaiju series – home to Godzilla, Rodan and Kong – got a monster American relaunch. Why wouldn’t they have another pop at rebooting one of the most successful sci-fi movie franchises of the past? They did it with pretty much all the others.

I’m not the first to observe that the titles of the Planet of the Apes reboots are a bit wonky. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a film about the dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes had a war for the Planet of the Apes in it, explicitly flagged in dialogue. And it’s fair to say that War for the Planet of the Apes is really about the ultimate rise of the Planet of the Apes. Even the final film itself seems implicitly to admit this, explaining how each of the films supplies a Rise, a Dawn and a War in an opening crawl. I do not know if this is true, but I have this guess that they came up with the titles, pitched the movies and announced the return of the franchise before having a script. In the same way that Paul Dehn was long ago sent off to write another one with the terse words “apes exist” (and by the way knocked it out of the proverbial park), I would guess that the writers of these new movies got sent off to produce a bible and create scripts after the titles were settled. The initial thought behind these films was plainly “Hey, I guess we should make some more Planet of the Apes movies.”

Your Move, Darwin #10: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

(Before I start this one, I'd like to take a moment to dedicate this one to Planet of the Apes superfan Mark Talbot-Butler, who passed away recently. I did not know Mark well, but he was a hugely positive presence in the fan community, and was an invaluable help in the writing of several of the earlier posts in this series, which I'm only really returning to because Mark has passed, and I feel I owe it to the guy to finish the work I began. Mark is and will continue to be missed.)  

In any movie franchise, especially a genre franchise, you inevitably wind up doing a retread or two. You have to. You’ll always have to return to some ideas, because that's what makes it a sequel. In the era of the reboot, this is more acute still, as essentially you sometimes wind up making the same film, only with some parts updated, or even some messages flipped, so you get a Godzilla movie where they save the world with a nuclear bomb, or a Robocop movie where only some of the corporate executives are baddies, or a Superman movie where he's an objectivist who doesn't care about the consequences of collateral damage. Or a Spider-Man movie reboot where everything is pretty much exactly the same apart from Aunt May being sorta hot.

Room 207 Press Seminars #10: Your Move, Darwin – humanity, hope and meaning on the Planet of the Apes

Some science fiction franchises are more evolved than others. 

When Disney announced the acquisition of Fox, one of the big surprises was the announcement that plans were afoot to revive the Planet of the Apes franchise. First very loosely adapted from Philip “Bridge on the River Kwai” Boulle's novel La Planete des Singes, the story of an idealistic misanthrope stranded on a planet where evolution had taken a sideways lurch became notorious for having one of the greatest twist endings in history, a genre-defying mindbender that turns boilerplate space opera into something strange, disturbing and thought-provoking. A run of poetically scripted sequels and two TV series followed, both retreading the original tale, but more pertinently exploring how we get from a planet of humans to here. Revived by Tim Burton in 2001 and then with a run of three perverse, thrilling and hairy prequels from 2014 through 2017, the enduring low-key popularity of the series seems to defy all received wisdom: with a movie series that invites us to root for the end of human rule is anything but monkey see, monkey do. 

It seems bananas that Planet of the Apes might have endured for so long. What is it about these adventures that strikes such a chord with viewers? Why do these films tell us so much about ourselves? 

On Monday, I'l be asking just that in the next Room 207 Press Seminar. As ever, backers of my Patreon get a free ticket to this, and access to the videos of all previous seminars. 

It runs twice, as usual, at 8pm BST and then at 8pm Eastern Daylight Time (US/Canada). The ticket gets you into either or both sessions.

Your Move, Darwin #9: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

In a sense, I can't help thinking, how did this even happen? I mean, I know how it happened technically, factually: someone said, let's revive the Planet of the Apes, and the right combination of executives, creative talent and money providers happened to be in the right place at the right time and they made another (Noun) (Preposition) the Planet of the Apes. But that's not really what I meant there. What I mean is that I can't help but marvel at the simple fact that anyone might think that making what amounts to a prequel series to a screen sci fi franchise that had at this stage been dead in the water for about 35 years – and yes, that includes the Tim Burton attempt a decade before, which if anything just provided a practical demonstration, a reinforcement that the franchise was over – was a good idea. OK, we're doing Planet of the Apes again. Which version, though?

Hollywood generally, if given the choice between the safe and predictable course and, you know, the interesting one, will take the former every time So you would naturally assume that if someone wanted to defibrillate the Planet of the Apes franchise, they’d do what they did with the last three goes, that is, go with the Space Gulliver option, where someone heroic lands on an actual Planet of the Apes. Full of apes. Where the apes got smart and took over.

But they didn't. 

Artsploitation! Richard Blackburn on Vampires and Apes

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, which is honestly one of the most downright fun films I've found since starting my project, was directed by Richard (Dick) Blackburn, and I had the immense privilege to talk with Dick over the phone a couple of times over the last week, and to ask him about Lemora, and also, more briefly, about his voice work on Return to the Planet of the Apes, which makes Dick the nexus of an unlikely crossover of my interests.

Your Move, Darwin #8: That Tim Burton Movie (2001)

I don't even know where to start with this. So, I'll just say it. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes reboot has the reputation of being a bad movie. It's considered to be a terrible movie, in fact. It's the one undeniable Bridge of Crapness I have to cross with this project, the thing I've been dreading.

I'd never seen it before. Now, over and over, my expectations have been confounded. Things I've not expected to be good have turned out to be at least fun.The epic Planet of the Apes watch has been, generally, a delight.

Well, that streak is comprehensively broken. Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes reboot is worse than I could have imagined. It's a bad remake, a bad sequel, and a bad movie on its own terms.

Look. I don't have any patience with the idea that the original movie is some sacrosanct artefact to be respected and put in a glass case. Remake movies if you want, reboot them, tear it all up. Occasionally remakes and reboots are even worth your while, as we shall see. But not this time. Not this time.

God help me, to write this, I watched it twice. Don't pity me. This is my own stupid fault.

But you'd better read this.

I did this for you, you ungrateful bastards.

Your Move, Darwin #7: Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975)

I suppose that having given Planet of the Apes a relationship with Scooby-Doo already, it only perhaps followed that the final go at bringing the Planet of the Apes to the screen, at least for its original run, might be the full cheap'n'cheerful Saturday morning cartoon treatment. Ruby and Spears had their go with the TV series, but if they were the kings of Saturday morning cartoons, surely the crown princes were Isadore “Friz” Freleng and David H Depatie. While Ruby and Spears had got their start on Tom and Jerry, Freleng was one of the main people behind characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam (who apparently was based on Freleng himself). Warners shut down their cartoon division in the 60s and Freleng set up with producer DePatie, to set up DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, and they're best known now for producing the Pink Panther cartoons, originally a spin-off from the animated title sequences of the Peter Sellers-starring movies of the same name, which I remember from my childhood clearly, and which looking back is probably one of the weirdest concepts for a popular kids’ cartoon series – or a movie spin-off – ever made. And so, in 1975, Fox TV, fresh from the cancellation of the TV show, hired Depatie-Freleng Enterprises to create Return to the Planet of the Apes.

Your Move, Darwin #6: Planet of the Apes: the TV Series (1974)

It's been a while since I've returned to the Planet of the Apes, but then in order to do this justice, I really had to do a rewatch of ten and a half hours of TV, and that's more than the five movies put together. Here we are, though, the ruin of the Statue of Liberty behind us, and new media ahead.

Thanks again to the assistance of Mark Talbot-Butler, who supplied the stills for this post.

Your Move, Darwin #5: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

(Before I start, once more I owe a vote of thanks to Mark Talbot-Butler, who as before very generously furnished me with a copy of the extended version of today's film. It's much appreciated.)

Let's not pretend that people had stopped caring about the Planet of the Apes by this point. The toys were still being made, the comic books were selling just fine (and displaying a level of crazed invention all of their own, from the little I've seen) and people liked these films. They wanted more. We'd have a TV show, two in fact. But Hollywood worked differently back then: the idea that you might make a sequel bigger and more expensive, or commit to making about fifty-eleven superhero films in the sure knowledge that they're all going to be colossal critic-proof international hits, with a massive crossover at the head of it that isn't even the end of the line, no one in the industry forty-five years ago would have taken that seriously.

They stopped making Planet of the Apes films, as much as anything, because it was time to stop making them. It didn't set the box office on fire, but it wasn't a bomb. Sure, there were other reasons, of course there were, but there was the sense that as far as cinema was concerned, this was the end of the road.

And clearly every intention that informs Battle for the Planet of the Apes is for it to be a graceful finish, that you can look back and feel that the circle has been closed and the narrative is for all intents and purposes complete. It aims for a dramatically satisfying ending.

Does it supply a dramatically satisfying ending?

Your Move, Darwin #4: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

It’s really nice to know that people read and appreciate your writing. So, for example, Mark Talbot-Butler, who is admin at The Official Planet of the Apes Universe group on Facebook, very kindly sent me the Director’s Cut of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes this week, on the grounds that if I was going to write about this particular Planet of the Apes movie, I needed to see the Director’s Cut, and while I’ll go into why later on, the takeaway is that Mark was absolutely right, and his generosity has made this is a better essay, and the film has risen in my estimation.

So. Thanks, Mark.

We’re now moving into the Planet of the Apes films that I have only seen as an adult, and apart from a brief, partial return to my childhood with the TV series, this will be the way of things now, the examination of things that do not for me have that blur of nostalgia around them that those first three movies have. And the first time I saw Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, in about 2010, I wasn’t very impressed. And I think my main issue was the ending; it didn’t ring true. Anyway, I was wrong. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is is an excellent film. It is entirely as exciting and disturbing and bonkers as any of the three previous films, and perhaps this time also a bit problematic.

Your Move, Darwin #3: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

It isn't, of course, it can't be. In no way does anyone in this film escape from the Planet of the Apes. Let's get that settled right from the beginning. For one, where would they go?

The only possible answer is of course this: back to the beginning. Before the beginning, even.

We are on Earth. And it's 1971 or possibly a few years ahead of that. One of the capsules from the first two films has landed on a California beach. The military are there to greet them. Three astronauts climb out. And they remove their helmets. And to the astonishment of the assembled troops, they're chimps.

Roll credits.

Your Move, Darwin #2: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

(Wondering where Your Move, Darwin #1 went? It's here.)

It is with the second film that a movie franchise really begins. It's with the second film that someone has thought, this is a hit, and we should make another one, and has asked how the property be stretched to get it to produce a sustainable profit. And let's not kid ourselves, this is the main reason sequels exist – to get the most money out of an idea you can. So the people working on an idea continue to be in paying work.

There is no moral issue here. Nothing is wrong with making money from entertainment.

Of course, there's still a profound problem with the way that a capitalist system treats art, and the mass-production of art is one of those things, especially when that art is basically, you know, a commercial product.

Nonetheless, cultural products like this are still products of our culture, and they have something to tell us.

Your Move, Darwin #0: The Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes, 1963)

So. Welcome to Your Move, Darwin.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, a survey of the Planet of the Apes series, ever since I wrote about the first one and realised just how much I love all of the Planet of the Apes films. And it's kind of a departure for me because it's not open ended, it's nine films and a TV series with only a handful of episodes (and maybe the Saturday morning cartoon, although I might skip that, except, who am I kidding, of course I'm not going to skip it, because it's genuinely interesting) and then I'm done. And it's all the one franchise, the one unfolded text.

I Blame Society #5: Planet of the Apes (1968)

(This post is also Your Move, Darwin #1)

One of the absolute top experiences of this Summer has been sitting down with the Golden-Haired Youth (at the time of writing, eight years old) and showing him, at his insistence, Planet of the Apes. It is a film I've adored since I was maybe 11, one I never get tired of. Anyway, about twenty minutes in, my son turned and said to me, "This is a really good film." I'd somehow miraculously managed to keep him unspoiled, and so when That Big Reveal happens at the end, his eyes almost popped out of his head and his mouth fell open.

It was glorious.