Though continuity problems are not near as bad in the Planet of the Apes films as they are in the Highlander film series, both contain similar issues regarding the justification of a sequel to a film that seems to have created a definitive end to the series. Thematically, the journey of Col. George Taylor was complete in Planet of the Apes. The verdict: human beings suck. And yet, because the film was so popular, a sequel happened.
I say “happened” because not much about Beneath the Planet of the Apes feels planned. Is this sequel a complete mess? Yes, but it’s the best kind of mess, because to simply call it bonkers doesn’t begin to describe it.
At first, Beneath the Planet of the Apes feels like it is literally going to be a movie about what Taylor and Nova are going to do with themselves now that they’ve escaped from the ape village and are hanging out on the beach in the Forbidden Zone where the half-buried of Statue of Liberty taunts them silently. The last few moments of the original are the first few moments of this film, just to let you know continuity matters. Pretty quickly however, things get crazy, and continuity doesn’t so much as go out the window as it leaves for an hour-long lunch break.
Suddenly Taylor decides he needs to go off and investigate something, and feels so strongly about this quest that he gives Nova his dog tags on the off chance that he suddenly vaporizes into thin air. Now, why Taylor knows he’s going to literally disappear into thin air, isn’t clear. Perhaps he’s read the script, because sure enough he soon vanishes into a rock face with some kind of cheesy science fiction special effect. Nova is horrified and immediately gets on her horse and rides back to the Ape village.
Meanwhile, a second spacecraft, identical to the ship from the first movie has crashed landed somewhere on the planet. (Everyone is incapable of safely landing spaceships in all the Apes movies.) Out of the wreckage comes a lone astronaut named John Brent (James Franciscus) who, physically speaking, is a poor man’s Heston. The beard, the blond hair, the blue eyes, everything. Other than maybe being a little shorter than Heston, if you’re drunk or squinting, you might actually think this guy is our Charlton Heston. So, what is this guy doing here anyway? We’re told he’s been sent on a mission from Earth to find Col. Taylor. Why the Earth actually expected a reply from this deep space mission is not clear and pretty much in direct contradiction to the first film. But whatever, Brent is here to find Taylor and sets out to do just that.
The search for Heston is an interesting metaphor for the craziness of Beneath the Planet of the Apes because ultimately the film is searching for its former star, and in many ways, its former soul. Oddly, the apes themselves don’t have near as large of a role in Beneath the Planet of the Apes as the humans. Poor Cornelius isn’t being played by Roddy McDowall, meaning not only do we have a faux Heston, but a faux McDowall too! Brent and Nova eventually find Zira (thankfully still Kim Hunter) and Cornelius to ask for help in the search for Taylor. Zira, just like the audience, initially mistakes Brent for Taylor for he too has “bright eyes.” Being the nice chimps that they are, Zira and Cornelius agree to help. But there’s trouble afoot! The gorillas are organizing into an army and preparing to invade the Forbidden Zone! Why would they do such a thing? Well, it turns out there’s a bunch of humans living there. Underground. And then things start to get batshit crazy.
Brent and Nova eventually find themselves underground in the Forbidden Zone, the same place where Taylor magically evaporated into at the start of the movie. And there are indeed humans living down there. And they’re not the naked savages we’re familiar with, but instead, creepy telepathic/telekinetic religious fanatics who worship a nuclear missile as a deity. Got all that? One more time: underneath the planet of the apes are a bunch of telepathic humans who think a bomb is God. Oh and they can peel off their faces too. When all of this stuff starts happening, you really start to feel like you’re watching a totally different movie that seemingly has nothing to do with the whole “apes ruling over humans” thing. Instead, you’re watching a movie about humans with powers similar to the Talosians from 60’s Star Trek trying to control the minds of Brent, Nova, and yes, Col. Taylor.
Suddenly Heston is back! The telepathic creepy humans have imprisoned him and soon they try to force him into a duel to the death with Brent. Using the power of their minds they make Brent and Taylor hit each other with big pieces of spiky fake concrete until eventually a commotion distracts them. The gorillas are invading the Forbidden Zone to wipe out all the humans once and for all. Something interesting about all of this is the fact that Dr. Zaius is present with the gorilla raiding party, but finds the whole situation to be pretty terrible. You know things are bad when Zaius is a moderate among militaristic apes.
Pretty quickly a huge battle ensues as the gorillas raid the underground lair of the mutated humans just as these fanatics are about to set off this nuclear weapon. Taylor has determined this bomb is not only a nuclear one, but also a super-bomb capable of destroying the entire world. Chaos descends as gorillas advance on the humans and machine gun fire is everywhere. Are the apes going to set off the bomb out of ignorance? Will the mutant humans fulfill their deranged quest to destroy the world? Will Brent be the new hero and save the day? Well, the answer is none of the above because after Brent is shockingly gunned down by a gorilla, the bomb is set off by none other than Taylor himself. On purpose. Charlton Heston blows up the entire world.
At this point Orson Welles voice sounds over the events (no voiceovers have existed in the film prior) and tells us that the third planet in the solar system has gone silent forever. Roll credits. Every single character you got to know in this movie was totally irrelevant because as soon as control of the movie was given back to Taylor, he decided (still) that human beings just weren’t deserving of anything and finally, and decisively damns them all to hell. To be fair, the idea that this cynical character, after enduring so much emotional trauma would do something this drastic isn’t entirely crazy. In many ways, Taylor was always headed to this place from his very first speech in the first film. Maybe being the destroyer of the Earth was his destiny.
So now that the world has been blown up, who’s ready for a sequel? I mean, the Earth was destroyed by the beloved protagonist of the first film, so by all reasonable assumptions, the Ape series had committed suicide at this point. And yet, there are three more films! And the next film; Escape from The Planet of the Apes, is not only much better than Beneath, but actually rivals the first one as a great science fiction film! And what will shock you is that it doesn’t really contradict the continuity of this film at all.
Ryan Britt is a staff writer for Tor.com.
It is a terrible movie but it is a good encapsulation of the crazy. Looking forward to the next article.
“Is this sequel a complete mess? Yes, but it’s the best kind of mess, because to simply call it bonkers doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Well said. Worth watching just to see how weird it can get. The worship service alone is priceless.
From IMDB:
Charlton Heston was
reluctant to reprise the role of George Taylor for this movie. He
eventually agreed on condition that his scenes had to be shot within a
two week period. He also insisted that Taylor had to be killed. He
agreed to a compromise in which he’d disappear in the beginning of the
film and reappear to die at the end. Heston claims in the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes
that he personally suggested the ending, saying, “Why don’t I just set
off this bomb and destroy the world. That’s the end of the sequels.”
Yes, it was pretty weird, but it allowed Mystery Science Theater 3000 to do some great stuff spoofing it.
I guess I’m in a minority in that I just love this film. The bizarre underground world is perfectly in line with the insanity of the nuclear war and the rise of the apes, and their seemingly inevitable recapitulation of humanity’s follies.
And the ending is so wonderfully depressing and downbeat — I mean, everybody dies. It doesn’t get much better than that.
There are days — sadly, increasingly frequent — when I envy Taylor his last, vengeful act. Damn them all to hell.
@5 NomadUK
I love all of these movies! The sheer gall of this movie to end the way it does is awesome.
A movie without a happy ending is so unpredictable and that is one of the reason I love this series. The random telepathic creatures really were annoying though, and that’s why Beneath is my least favorite of the 5. I actually really like Brent, but found it strange they chose someone who looked exactly like Taylor. Poor Nova was probably so confused. The voice over at the end was laughable. Battle for the POTA helps this movie make more sense but that wasn’t until years later. Overall this movie seemed very forced. The ending is shocking but no more than the ending from the first film. It was creepy enough to find out there was a nuclear bomb that ended humanity as we knew it, it’s completely unnecessary to have another one go off days later. They could have went many other ways with this. Hopefully if they do a whole revamp of the series, the telepathic creatures will be left out. Talking apes is enough to make the series what it is, save the mutants for xmen.
@ChrisSoll : Thumbs up.
I tend to agree with “NomakUK” above. I also liked this film in spite of its being a mess in many ways. I found the underground society of telepathic worshippers of an atomic bomb fascinating. The scene with them singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful” must be one of the strangest scences from any film.
Mad magazine had an amusing parody of the whole Apes series (“The Milking of the Planet That Went Ape”). At one point, the telepathic mutants were explaining to Brent that they worshipped an atomic bomb as their god. His response was, “Boy….I sure hope I’m not here for your HIGH HOLY DAYS services!”
As I recall, 20th Century Fox still had the elaborate New York sets from “Hello Dolly!” in place, so they simply set about messing them up to look like a fallout zone for this movie, which, along with re-using the still standing “Ape City” from the first movie, managed to keep production costs down . I also remember reading that the budget for each of the sequels was basically half of that for the previous movie – which was very little by the time they got to “Battle…”
Good article; I enjoyed reading it. However, I disagree on the question of continuity. With a little imagination, the continuity errors can be explained. You wonder how Taylor got an inkling that he was going to “vanish into thin air” in the flashback scene near the start of the film. Well, a sudden earthquake, lightning, and the appearance of a rock face that “wasn’t there before” (in his own words), surely threw him and made him realise something very strange was going on. So no wonder he knew he might be in danger and may leave Nova on her own if he went off to explore.
Secondly, you mention that Brent’s ship was on a rescue mission, but wonder how could that be so since Taylor’s ship was heading off into deep space? True, the authorities on Earth were not expecting Taylor and his crew to ever return. But again, although this is not mentioned in the film, one can imagine why a rescue mission was launched. Assume Earth was tracking Taylor’s ship, until it finally went out of range. Well, we know that Taylor’s ship went into a time warp at some point in its journey out of the solar system towards the stars. So imagine that his ship at this point suddenly inexplicably disappears from the Earth’s tracking scanners – assuming of course this happened before they expected the ship to disappear through simply being too far away for them to detect anymore. At this point, they may have sent a ship to follow Taylor’s trajectory and investigate. hence Brent’s mission.
Finally, James Franciscus was a good actor and does a good job in this film. He even got involved with director Ted Post in revising the script. I think it’s unfair to view him in this film as a substitute for the estimable Heston. Not so, if you watch the film and listen to Brent’s dialogue (and consider his actions), he is a different character to Taylor. They do share a similar physical appearance, true, but I think it is an injustice to write off Franciscus’ contribution in this way and also disrespectful to a fine actor who cared about making this film as good as possible. After all, it was not his or Ted Post’s fault that the studio made the movie on a much tighter budget than the original.
I liked this film a lot more than I thought I would. Hahaha
Crazy as it is – it’s my favourite if the franchise. Great ending and a nonsensical plot!
I have always wondered what did the mutant humans do for food?
@14 Lets say Mushrooms. I think we all know what they did for food, and it was answered on a recent XKCD “What If” page, but mushrooms sounds like something that would help us all sleep at night.
So Heston falls in with a crowd that worships a suspiciously bullet-shaped bomb (seriously, that pic up there looks like someone glued wings to a rifle bullet for their prop) and then goes crazy and blows everything up. This movie is a metaphor for Heston’s relationship with the NRA, isn’t it?
The voice over at the end of BTPOTA was by PAUL FREES not Orson Welles. Also Taylor didn’t know he was going to vanish on Nova,he just said that if anything should happen to him to find Zira. The dog tags were supposed to help with ID since all humans look alike to most apes.
How dare you make mistakes when discussing my beloved incredible,ridiculous,bat shit movie?
This article was great. I’m 36 and had never actually sat down and watched any of these movies from start to finish. Over the years I’d seen bits and pieces of all of them, but that’s it. Of course it was usually the same bits and pieces as I would stop on them once in a while channel surfing. Tonight, I finally sat through the first one. Then low and behold, Beneath was on immediately after. Bat shit crazy definitely describes number 2. I was wondering where Taylor went and if we saw him again, so as I was watching I googled it and found this article. The best part about reading it was that as I was reading “Oh and they can peel off their faces too”, I looked up at my TV to see the mutant leader peel his face off. Haha! This is definitely bad movie gold.
After seeing this movie on the OTA channel ‘MOVIES’, “re-watching” it, as is touted in the by-line for this blog, was perfect timing for me. I remembered those wondrous days of late puberty/early teen-hood (1970, I actually had to look it up to recall the exact year) coming back as fresh as ever. Memories of seeing the TV ads for it back then, and finally going to the movies to see it, (I believe with my WELL, WELL read best friend and Sci-Fi/ Mensa genius friend Kingsley) in 1970 or ’71; the first year of junior high school, and a goodbye to childhood. New experiences abounded and I suppose the weather, temperature, barometric pressure, smells, etc., or some other mystical combination of triggers resurrected the whole heady, gaseous affair all over again. Another WOW moment, among those rarities of sentimentality, and exhilaration that occur now and then; youth again! With music, my chosen, obsessive avocation, this is more frequent. That was foremost in why I chose to remark upon this movie event for me anyway. I was about o burst at the seams, wanting to call my old buddy up, or anyone, just to re-share the moment. Somewhat sadly, I had to go it alone. I remember more sci-fi stuff from the era too, and the spacious, and spacey weekends of rendezvous to the movies; rarely to be out of sight or sound of home and parents. As in the Cannonball Adderley sense, ‘Fun’! Recently I was jack rabbiting around on the net and ran into another avocation of mine, architecture, and subsequently, finding out the difference between the Church of Scientology, and the Church of Christ Scientist. Now how that connected up was that the Brutalist movement in art, and its influence in architecture was hitting me pretty hard for a binge a few weeks ago. The Third Church of Christ Scientist here in DC where I live had met a tragic demise by razing in just the last few years. But, the whole feeling of this chapter of the ‘Apes’ movie series was special at that moment. When I tuned in the familiar, even homespun memories of the cast, [the] character actors in particular, made for quite a biochemical recipe trip. a bit after I tuned in, the Church rites scene did the trick for me. The dramatis-personae (musical; effects) were SUPERB, and were refreshing, 47 years later. And so, It also was imputed in my mind about how the poignant fate of the Third Church of Christ Scientist was thrown into BOLD, if even EMBOSSED mental relief. The FUTURISTIC plot with the tonal, slightly JAZZED music (what with world conditions being what they are today) was of such relevance that it was eerily spot-on, and on-point.Then the somewhat similar Roman Catholic, Episcopal. Scientology et al, choral unison was like hearing Andrew Hill’s Blue Note Records avant garde masterpiece ‘Lift Every Voice’ personified, Dans un filme, in its own time era. VERY well done. Now, when coupled with the costumes, and props, and the PROFOUND message about the BOMB, it was truly the or Da’ BOMB in the contemporaneous, colloquial, idiomatic expression sense too! Shall we say this particular installment of the ‘Apes’ series was the best one? Artistically, I would give it a perfect ’10’ vote. Sentimentally, it was the “most-est” for me personally, as I submit and maintain. “If they asked me, I could write a book” as the first few lyrics/lines of the JAZZ STANDARD proclaim.
Although the Talosian comment is on-the-mark, I think Beneath isn’t nearly as bad as critics tend to make it out to be. It propels the story forward mostly logically, develops the role of the gorillas (although in a one-note fashion), and Taylor’s reversion to cynicism (and embracing of despair) is understandable given what his character has undergone. The comments about Franciscus looking too much like Heston are common, but no one would be making the comparison if Burt Reynolds (who was offered the part before Franciscus) had accepted the role.
On the other hand, the biggest continuity gaffe wasn’t mentioned here: for Nova to have survived in the Forbidden Zone, it can’t have been more than a few days since Taylor left the apes, but Zira tells Brent that she and Cornelius “loved” Taylor, their unmentioned heresy trial is almost certainly past (given their cordial relations with Zaius), and both the threat of famine and a militaristic gorilla movement have suddenly arisen. At the very least, it seems that months have passed since Taylor was in Ape City, but that’s impossible. Maybe Dehn was more clever than we thought and is indicating by the 3955 date that the timeline has been changed? No, I didn’t think so either.