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A contemporary of 2001: A Space Odyssey that's a ripping reversal, from up among the stars humankind comes crashing down into a new Stone Age. The space cruiser marooned on a strange planet is a solitary metallic spec on a primeval world, leading the exploration is the nihilistic seeker (Charlton Heston), "somewhere in the universe there's got to be something better than man." (Cosmic jokes are not lost on him, his cackle at the tiny American flag planted in the crumby expanses echoes for miles.) What he finds is a topsy-turvy civilization "a rung or two down the old evolutionary ladder," with people dumb as oxen under the rule of a simian order. Reactionary orangutans protect ancient laws while militaristic gorillas hold mass hunts, inquisitive chimpanzees embody the sotto voce of science in a paranoid theocracy. Nothing less than a threat to ape culture's foundations, the perplexed visitor is stripped, caged, whipped, hosed, leashed and damn near clipped. He finally regains his homo sapiens belligerence astride a horse with rifle and cigar, a journey a couple of millenniums in the making. "You can't trust the older generation!" Nightmarish regression is the nucleus of the piquant allegory, the alien mirror held up to 1968's upheavals to reflect a divided society's road to ruin. Franklin J. Schaffner embraces hallucinatory disorientation: Sturdy Panavision compositions unbalanced by rising and plunging cranes, Rod Serling sermons jangled by Jerry Goldsmith's atonal score. The pantomime of Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans lends a beguiling twitch to the primate prosthetics, and there's Heston's splendidly wounded hubris in the era of mutations—the last twentieth-century man in burlap rags yet still raging at the new organ grinders. The famous punchline is a Rauschenberg effect recalled by Gibson's Apocalypto. Cinematography by Leon Shamroy. With James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison.
--- Fernando F. Croce |