Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) - film review

Two astronauts crash-land on a seemingly deserted planet.  They are Brent and Maddox, on a rescue mission to discover what happened to the crew of another spaceship led by a man named Taylor.  When Maddox dies from his injuries, Brent sets off to explore and meets up with a young woman on a horse.  She is dressed in animal skins and cannot speak, but around her neck she wears Taylor’s identification tag.  Brent does not know it but this woman, Nova, was a close friend of Taylor, before he mysteriously disappeared whilst traversing an area known as the Forbidden Zone.  Nova takes Brent to a city which, to the astronaut’s amazement, is inhabited by talking apes.  General Ursus, the leader of the gorilla army, is exhorting the assembled mass of apes to completely eradicate all of the humans, starting with a purge of the Forbidden Zone.   Dr Zaius, the orang-utan political and religious leader, urges caution, reminding his fellow apes that no one knows what dangers lie in the Forbidden Zone.  Wounded by a gorilla soldier, Brent is saved by Cornelius and Zira, the two chimpanzee scientists who had previously helped the astronaut Taylor.  With Zira’s help, Brent and Nova manage to escape from Ape City and begin to explore the Forbidden Zone.  They find an underground cave which Brent soon recognizes as part of the New York subway on his own world.  Following a strange humming sound, they arrive at a cathedral which contains the last thing Brent expected to see: a primed nuclear missile.  The astronaut then realises that this underground mausoleum is far from deserted.   It is home to a group of mutant humans who worship the bomb and are quite prepared to use it if they need to.  Meanwhile, the ape army has reached the Forbidden Zone, intent on destruction...

If ever there was a film that deserved a sequel that film would have to be Planet of  the Apes (1968).  Ending on what is probably the most famous cliff-hanger in movie history, the first Apes films left audiences baffled and anxious to know more.  Two years later, the eagerly awaited sequel came along, but instead of continuing the narrative and giving a nice tidy resolution, it merely replayed what we had seen in the first film and tagged on an a daft doomsday scenario ending which made it clear that there wouldn’t be any more sequels.  What were they thinking?  Fortunately, this was not the end of the story and this somewhat missed opportunity was more than made up for by the three sequels that followed.

So just what went wrong?  In a word: Charleton Heston.  The actor had no enthusiasm for a return match and made it clear that he would only make a brief cameo appearance at the start of the film, where his character would be killed off.  The problem that this presented the screenwriters is that Heston’s character was central to the original Apes film and so if he were to be despatched as the actor wanted, much of the sequel would be taken up with recycling much of the exposition of the first.  And this is more or less what happened, even though Heston was persuaded to appear in more scenes that he had wished.

The first two-thirds of Beneath the Planet of the Apes is little more than a cut down version of the first film.   Once Taylor’s replacement, Brent (played by James Franciscus, a poor substitute for Heston), is finally up to speed, the plot is finally able to progress.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t progress very far and ends up as a rather strained anti-war satire.   It didn’t help that Roddy McDowall (who played the sympathetic chimp scientist Cornelius) was unavailable – he was away directing a film entitled Tam Lin – so his part would have to taken by another actor (David Watson).  

The plot notwithstanding, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is an adequate sequel (certainly by today’s standards) and is not a bad adventure sci-fi film in its own right.  The action sequences are well choreographed and, as in the first film, the make-up and special effects are in a league of their own.  The imaginative camerawork and score are particularly effective at sustaining a doom-laden mood, the tension gradually building towards a truly horrific climax.

It is a shame that the underlying racial and political subtext of the original film is handled less subtly here. Indeed, the film ends up looking like a hippy rant against the Vietnam War and the policy of mutually assured destruction.  Still, the spectacle of a group of smug, self-righteous fanatics worshipping an atom bomb in a Christian temple has an amusing irony that will not be lost on anyone watching the film today.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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