“In the beginning,” the end begins. A voice echoes over a rocky creek, reverberating as if spoken through the cannon barrel of history. It sounds like God because it sounds like John Huston. In Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the legendary director plays a legendary orangutan. While clips roll from the last couple movies, the Lawgiver narrates Gospel-ish blather about how Caesar (Roddy McDowall) became a “savior” integrating humans with apes “according to divine will.”
In this saga, religion was previously only laughable: a corrupt Defender of the Faith, those nutjobs worshipping the Bomb Almighty, that Nativity massacre. Battle strives for piety. It was unloved and underfunded. Key Conquest stars didn’t return. Mainstay screenwriter Paul Dehn lessened his contribution. Producer Arthur P. Jacobs planned to offload his Apes rights to Fox and focus on new projects (like a big-budget Dune). His death two weeks after Battle’s release punctuated the series’ own decline.
This miniscule production attempts maximal scope. Some years after civilization nukes itself, Caesar commands a treehouse village where various species live in fractious harmony. Grown gorillas sit in English class with chimp teens like Caesar’s son (Bobby Porter). Homo sapiens are second-class citizens, with no seat on the governing council. Caesar maintains order inside the settlement and protects it from the old world’s armed survivors.
He finds footage of his parents from Escape, and learns the precise date of Beneath’s global collapse. The ravaged tunnel-dwellers in a nearby bomb-blasted city are ancestors of the atomic mutants. The apes already wear feudal-disco outfits from the original film’s 40th century. We’re in Terminator Salvation territory, a dot-connecting late sequel full of characters trapped in a prequel. Excess future history juggles into a way-to-big ensemble. Natalie Trundy returns as Caesar’s wife Lisa, whose stay-at-home fretting feels a tad conservative when you recall Caesar’s explorer-intellectual mom. With Hari Rhodes gone, Austin Stoker plays MacDonald’s brother. General Aldo (Claude Akins) wants all humans dead.
Akins had been the brimstone preacher condemning the study of evolution in 1960’s Inherit the Wind. The man just had a voice for inter-species rants, I guess. Aldo is Caesar’s dumb foil, but the gorilla’s bluster is endearing. He lashes out at a teacher when the man tells him “No,” bringing up memories of enslavement. Imagine this line spoken by Ryan Gosling’s Ken: “The class is ended! The schoolroom is closed! Now we go back to riding horses!”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Draftland Scene to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.