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markk's review
informative
medium-paced
4.25
In today’s world of big-budget space opera and comic book movie franchises, it can be difficult to recall just how huge the original Planet of the Apes series was at its peak. Between the heyday of the original Star Trek series and the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, five movies, two television shows, and host of comic book series and merchandising were produced about a dystopian future in which apes has supplanted humans as the rulers of the world. Its impact is reflected today in the success since 2011 of a rebooted approach – the second since the original series’ end – the four movies (to date) of which have earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.
While the durability of the original Apes series can be traced to several factors, perhaps the most consistent of these was the allegorical portrayal it offered of contemporary America. At a time when Americans were dealing with conflict at home and abroad, the stories told in its movies and television shows offered a pointed commentary about the problems facing the nation, and what the choices it faced might mean for its future. Eric Greene’s book offers an analysis of this examination, one that charts how the discourses in the films paralleled the political debates of the time, particularly those concerning race and the ongoing American involvement in the Vietnam War. While acknowledging that some of this was unintentional, he details how such commentary became more overt and specific as the series continued, turning into a pointed critique of the intersection between race and power in postwar America.
To a degree, the social commentary was wired into the series’ DNA. As Greene notes, the original source material, Pierre Boulle’s 1962 novel La Planète des Singes, was itself a satire that addressed the relationship of man with nature. This element of the story was embraced and refined by the original film’s scriptwriters, Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, who introduced the theme of nuclear destruction and played up the juxtapositions between ape and human society. The casting of Charlton Heston as astronaut George Taylor further helped to convey these themes, as his well-developed film persona of a white male hero in racialized struggles against non-white hordes made his presence in the film an effective means of underscoring many of themes the filmmakers developed. Yet the decision to make these political themes secondary to the entertainment value of the movie ensured that they remained subtle enough not to dominate the story.
Intended as a stand-alone film, the unexpected success of the original movie nevertheless quickly spawned a sequel. Though a variety of ideas were proposed for what became known as Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the producers ultimately went with a treatment drafted by Paul Dehn, who went on to become the main writer of the subsequent films. With the Vietnam War at its peak, an antiwar theme emerged as the militaristic gorillas and conservative orangutans overrule the objections of the pacifistic chimpanzees and undertake the conquest of the “Forbidden Zone” containing the mutated descendants of humans. While the planet’s destruction in a racial apocalypse at the end of the movie seemingly precluded further sequels, the success of the second film ensured the continuation of the series for an additional three movies. Here the decision to shift the setting to the near-present brought the political elements to the forefront, as modern-day humanity now faced head-on a forecast of their domination by apes. These allowed the filmmakers to consider (in Escape from the Planet of the Apes) the fate of strangers in a racially foreign land, the prospect (in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) of race revolution in urban America, and the fears of whites (in Battle for the Planet of the Apes) of Black Power and reverse racism.
Despite the negative critical reviews and the relatively low gross of the final film, the overall popularity of the franchise led CBS to commission a television series that premiered the following year. Greene summarizes how the show continued the tradition of using the premise as a vehicle for commenting on American society. And while it and a subsequent animated series were canceled after the production of only a handful of episodes, the use of the concept as a metaphor was well entrenched in American culture. The emergence of the franchise as a cultural trope – for better and for worse – is among the best evidence of the value of Greene’s examination of the commentary it offers on contemporary America. Though his text is somewhat repetitive in places, it nevertheless is a valuable study of an iconic cinematic franchise that both fans of the series and students of the era more generally should read for the insights it offers on its subject.
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