“Man is evil, capable of nothing but destruction!” -Dr. Zaius
A funny thing happened on the way to making a sequel to 1968’s hit Planet of the Apes. Somehow, Charlton Heston’s hero character from the original, Taylor, became the ultimate villain – the Destroyer of Worlds, a la Oppenheimer, who in the final moments of the follow-up film unleashes an atomic bomb that consumes all of planet Earth.
Of course, Taylor isn’t portrayed as a bad guy in the sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and really Heston is barely even in the movie at all (the actor didn’t want to come back for the film and negotiated with the producers for what amounts to a glorified cameo). But still, in the sequel, our identifying hero figure from the OG Apes – the lost astronaut through which we experience the upside-down world of the Planet of the Apes – basically pulls the equivalent of flipping over a board game because he lost. Only, instead of a round of Monopoly, it’s the future of both man and ape alike that he throws a tantrum over.
But that’s the thing about Beneath the Planet of the Apes: It takes the misanthropy that was central to Taylor’s character in the first film and turns it into a brand of nihilism that leaves no character unscathed. While Taylor simply didn’t like people in the 1968 movie – which is in part why he agreed to lead what he knew was likely a one-way mission to space – the sequel makes it his defining flaw. In Beneath, the characters are so single-mindedly devoted to their almost universally misguided agendas that they would rather let everyone die than be proven wrong. Ironically, both things wind up happening, and in that order: They all die, and hence it’s confirmed that the self-destructive paths they’ve taken were wrong.
In essence, the Planet of the Apes here has become a highly polarized and politicized world where black is black, white is white, and there is hardly any gray area at all to meet in the middle and hash things out. If this means that things are getting worse, not better, for all involved, then so be it – as long as nobody has to admit that they’re wrong. And if that doesn’t sound familiar, wait until you get a load of one of the film’s main apes, General Ursus.
After some business involving Taylor conveniently disappearing (so that Heston could sit out most of the production), Beneath introduces us to James Franciscus’ Brent, who basically serves as a Taylor stand-in. But things really kick in when we meet the gorilla Ursus (James Gregory, who I first encountered as Inspector Luger on the late, great series Barney Miller, and only later realized was also in all of my favorite things: Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, and more!). Anyway, the Forbidden Zone from the previous film – which is basically where New York City used to be before the apes took over the world centuries earlier – has become a controversial hotspot, and Ursus is agitating for the military to invade the area in search of new food sources, not to mention as a campaign to wipe out as many humans as possible. The apes, you see, need breathing room.
So Ursus is a run-of-the-mill, would-be imperialist looking to expand ape dominion over the land, but his ability to rally the masses is what makes him dangerous. Early in the film, we see that even those apes who don’t necessarily agree with his views – the more intellectual chimpanzees – are compelled to stand in support of his military campaign, for fear of reprisals. And Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), who basically called the shots in the previous film, is also forced to acquiesce to Ursus’ unreasonable agenda here, even though he knows it could get them all killed. (Though even Zaius doesn’t understand how it could, and will, literally get them all killed.)
The result for the viewer is that Zaius, who was always a charismatic character, almost becomes likable in contrast to Ursus. He doesn’t seem so bad now, our Minister of Science who’s also somehow the Chief Defender of the Faith. Oh, if we could only get back to the good old days when Dr. Zaius didn’t have to bow down to the gorillas’ destructive impulses! Back when the government actually ran correctly! But no, Zaius has to play along in order to maintain his own relevance, however diminished that may be, and so the apes begin to barrel senselessly towards their own doom.
As the chimpanzee Zira (Kim Hunter) says, “To remain silent while this bully Ursus is committed to destroy everything in his path is no longer possible!” And yes, we see citizens protesting in the streets against the war, even as a militaristic police breaks up the protests through force. Such scenes of civil disobedience, and the sometimes extreme response to the same, was certainly nothing new to the viewers of Beneath in 1970, just as they remain salient today.
Zaius and Zira at one point wind up in a disagreement over the concept of innocence versus ignorance. Zaius, who is charged with protecting the secrets of Earth’s past from the ape population, sees his lies as maintaining an innocence for the people. But Zira reminds him that there is no excuse for being willfully ignorant and that the time for truth “is always now.”
That seems to be the message of the film: Maintain control at all costs, and blow it all up before you give in to anyone.
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And then you have the humans, who aren’t much better than Ursus or Zaius. Brent is a largely ineffectual figure, alternately focused on finding Taylor or getting off the planet – “I don’t know how or what with, but I’m not staying here,” he says after hearing Ursus promise that the only good human is a dead human. Who can blame him, right?
There’s also the mutants, who are sort of human, but not quite. Genetically altered from the radiation of the nuclear war that took place in the distant past, these monsters are as merciless as Ursus and his gorillas. When they encounter Brent, their response is to torture him for information. Surely they’ve known of the apes’ existence for generations, but not only have they never attempted to reach out to their neighbors or forge some kind of peace, their only response to the aggression of the apes seems to be suicide – launching the Alpha-Omega bomb that they all worship. (Yeah, man, this movie is weird. Did I mention that the mutants also peel off their faces when they go to church?) But that seems to be the message of the film: Maintain control at all costs, and blow it all up before you give in to anyone.
Which brings us back to Taylor, who finally shows up again for the last 16 minutes of Beneath. The thing about the Heston character in the original movie was that despite all his teeth-gritting, casual takedowns of the state of humanity back home, his experience on a literal Planet of the Apes finally got him to see that things could always be worse for ol’ mankind. Indeed, despite the dark ending of Planet of the Apes, where Taylor finally realizes, as he stumbles upon the destroyed Statue of Liberty, that he’s been on Earth all along, one could extrapolate that the character might have gone on to lead the mute remnants of humankind into a new and prosperous age beyond the domain of the apes.
But nope. Instead, we get what happens here, as Taylor basically loses it after his mate Nova (Linda Harrison) is shot dead. As all hell breaks loose in the remnants of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (!), the apes gun down Brent while Taylor takes a chest full of lead himself. And with his dying breath, he activates the Alpha-Omega bomb, destroying all life on the planet. My way or the highway is the rule of this land.
A melodramatic and probably unnecessary – but still chilling – voiceover ends the film, intoning that “a green and insignificant planet is now dead.” And so I’ll end this in the same way, reminding you, the reader, in melodramatic and unnecessary fashion that Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not just the weirdest, most face-peeling entry in the series, but also the one that remains most relevant, somehow, a half century after it was released.
Roll credits.
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
