Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

I am going back and revisiting the Apes films from the original series. I had only seen the first three before and so this is the first time I am seeing it and WOW. 'Conquest' is a violent shift in tone. The 'Apes' films were always sort of political but this one is on a whole other level. The story finds Caesar, son of Zira and Cornellius, grown to manhood in a dystopian future where apes are used as slaves. Over the course of the film he is constantly abused and goes mad and leads an ape revolution. This is a dark and angry film and it's hard to believe Fox didn't get scared and cut the thing even more so than it is (the ending is butchered in the editing room). Its hard not to infer Marxist metaphor in the story of Caesar's revolution and his hatred of slavery. Does it work? Yes and no. Roddy McDowell gets a far more juicier role to the play. He's great. The movie isn't fun though. There's no sense of humor or camp value to anything. It just gets kind of depressing seeing men in ape costumes endure abuse. I suppose it achieves everything it sets out to do but camp fun and self aware humor is what made this series. The original is a very funny and biting satire despite it's political undertones. This one is 100% earnest.

It's 20 years after the apes from the future landed. Apes are now trained to do all the menial jobs. Every cat and dog died 8 years ago in 1983. The world is a semi-fascist state where apes are no more than slaves. Senor Armando (Ricardo Montalban) is hiding the fact that Caesar (Roddy McDowall) is the intelligent offspring of Cornelius and Zira. An unguarded outburst leaves Caesar hiding among the regular ape population while Armando is interrogated by the authorities. MacDonald is Governor Breck's assistant and they buy Caesar only to discover his intelligence later on.The setup is pretty stupid. It's too much to turn on the ape revolution so quickly. The whole thing is rather silly and lacks any believable whatsoever. I do have sympathy for the difficulties of closing out this circular story loop. Honestly, some of the apes seem highly inefficient and some of their work seem comical. The use of slavery images is good but the apes should do tougher jobs like mining. The battle for the city is pretty silly where guns are always overwhelmed and the guards never look behind them. The governor's speech is nonsense. Much of this movie is nonsense too.

When I saw this for the first time in the 1980's I was really excited by the style of the film. The art direction gave a really good feel for a totalitarian regime in the future and it had a very clinically sterile look about it which emphasizes the authoritarian '1984' environment the film attempts to depict.The storyline is simple enough. The apes are being used as slaves in a fascist culture which is allegory for Orwell's warning in the novel 1984, also a film. The ape central to the story is educated and can speak. He emerges as the great hope for his species to emerge from slavery. Revolution ensues as the slaves attempt to overthrow their masters.There's nothing complicated about this movie and was the second best of the five films with the original starring Charlton Heston obviously the best.

The fourth Planet of the Apes movie takes place many years after the events of Escape. Apes are now the enslaved pets of man. Caesar (Roddy McDowall), the son of Cornelius and Zira, is an intelligent ape who can speak. He's been raised by circus owner Armando (Ricardo Montalban). The government has never given up the search for the child of the future apes so Caesar must keep his intelligence a secret. This becomes increasingly difficult for him when Armando takes him to the city, where he witnesses human cruelty to apes firsthand.The series takes a slight step down with this entry but it's still a smart, thought-provoking film. The humor is scaled back and the social commentary magnified. Roddy McDowall, playing the son of his previous character, does an amazing job. It's a good movie, despite some plot hiccups. The ending was notoriously altered after test audiences reacted poorly to the original darker end.