Ewoks are cute rubbish, but still rubbish

D'aw, a space puppy equivalent!

Ewoks are fuzzy little divisive furballs. The entire Star Wars fandom is basically split into two camps: those who hate them, and those who LUUUV the cute lil' bipedal Tribbles. One side will never convince the other. 

It is a state of Civil War. And sometimes not so civil.

When anyone says the ewoks defeating the Empire is implausible, the standard response now seems to be: ever heard of Vietnam?

Yes, 100%, George Lucas was consciously drawing inspiration from the conflict in Vietnam when he created Star Wars: he saw the Evil Empire as the US of A and Richard Nixon as The Emperor. Originally, he intended the wookies to be in the ewok insurgency role, but since he didn't think he'd get to film the entire story, he threw Chewbacca into the first film, and for Return of the Jedi, cut the wookies in half and made them ewoks (roughly half the letters, too. Cute).

This, however, is irrelevant: as presented in the film, it still isn't plausible, and the Vietnam comparison is only valid on the most abstract level.

First, the ewoks are stone age hunter gatherers (and cannibals, willing to eat any humanoids they capture for extra calories, which suggests they don't have the best diet) who live in small villages. Cannibalism is usually only done when alternative food sources are scarce. 

They aren't nomadic, as their village is large and built off the ground, presumably to avoid predators, which suggests they are not at the apex of the food chain (or they war with nearby ewok tribes, in which case they are fractured). 

Vietnam left the stone age thousands of years ago. It was a nation aspiring to be a state, with a vibrant and flourishing civilization, occupied by France (and Japan) when the liberation war started. It was agrarian, with a population of roughly 60 million (in the 1960s), with large cities and developed infrastructure. While the Viet Cong may have been willing to fight with bamboo spears, they were far, far more likely to be armed with Kalishnikov automatic rifles, which were roughly equivalent to the M16s used by the American GIs (and in some ways superior, Kalishnikov's being more rugged and easier to maintain in the jungle).

Second, Vietnam was funneled billions worth of weapons, ammunition, artillery, tanks, anti-aircraft batteries, and jets (complete with Russian pilots) by the USSR and China. 

There is no question the US enjoyed a military edge, but it was hardly rifleman vs. spearman. 

Third, the ewoks are short with stubby limbs. They move slowly and awkwardly. In Return of the Jedi, they can barely manage a trot, much less run. They are not capable of throwing spears, or swinging weapons, with the force or range that a human sized equivalent could. They're cute and cuddly, sure, but not particularly capable. The latter feeds into the former: they read as children, or puppies. Space puppies!!! Their obvious helplessness is part of their endearing appeal and cuteness. 

Fourth, there is no compelling reason for nearby tribes to join this one village in its fight against The Empire. The tribe is likely at war with them to begin with (hence their tree fort). Otherwise, what threat does The Empire even pose? They are only there to protect the shield generator. 

A fierce human 6 year old with equally fierce looking ewok warriors

Fifth, the Emperor claims an entire legion of his 'best troops' are on the surface of Endor. This suggests at least divisional in size, so between 5,000 (Roman legion) and 15,000 troops (US division). How is a hunter gatherer village of 150-300 ewoks (300 being the typical cap on hunter-gatherer community size) taking on such a force? How are they even gathering up enough villages to match it in size, and transporting all those troops into one area to fight? Where is all the food coming from? Are they just planning to eat the Imperials? 

 

Sixth, the Vietnamese never won a full on assault against a large, well supplied American division-sized force. Yes, they laid siege to isolated outposts very successfully, employing copious amounts of artillery, but that's not the same thing as attacking a tank armed with a stick, while toddling about like a four year old. And while the Tet Offensive was a tremendous political success while simultaneously being a costly military failure, the only option open to the ewoks was purely military in scope. 

If I absolutely had to pick a military comparison, I'd pick The Battle of Isandlwhana over any comparison to Vietnam. The Zulu defeated a modern British army (equipped with rifles, rockets, cannon, and even a couple gatling guns, if memory serves), using only asegis and guts. It was one of the worst military defeats in British military history. 

But the Zulu were not hunter-gatherers: they were farmers, hence they were able to assemble a large fighting force (thanks to surplus food production provided by agriculture). They were tall and capable of running all day, whereas ewoks weeble wobble and fall down. As originally conceived, with wookies, yes, it'd feel much, much more plausible (though it doesn't solve the population density issue). Throw in scary rancor-like trained monsters, the wookies (or even the ewoks) kept as 'pets', and it's at least believable in the moment.

Battle of Isandlwana: now imagine the Zulu were waddling, 3 feet tall chubby toddlers covered in thick fur yelling their blood chilling battle cry, "Yub yub"!

Are the ewoks a stand in for those oppressed by Colonialism? Did George Lucas intend for the wookiee/ewoks to represent the Vietnamese? Yes and yes. Do they, as presented in the actual film, match the capabilities and effectiveness of the Vietnamese? Not in the least.

It should also be noted that the narrative of Evil Imperialist USA and Good Noble Freedom Fighter Viet Cong is an oversimplification of what happened in South East Asia, just as the counter narrative is. Yes, the US body count obsession contributed to a lethal mind set, there were massacres like Mai Lai, and the carpet bombing of the Ho Chi Min trail, and factories in North Vietnam (in operations like Linebacker, which killed large numbers of civilians... perhaps inspiring the Death Star? Or is that more sperm and egg?). At the same time, the communists were arguably even more oppressive and brutal than their corrupt South Vietnam counterparts, and racked up quite a body count of villagers who opposed their policies. We know far more of American failings, thanks to a free press (particularly Seymour Hersch), than we do of what went on behind the scenes in North Vietnam. 

Lucas did what he could to make the ewoks look formidable with traps, and the scenes depicting walkers being taken down by rolling logs and such were a lot of fun, so entertaining I didn't care about feasibility. But that didn't work for the ewoks themselves. It felt like Lil Leia running from bounty-hunters: an indulgent parent play fighting with their kid. 

Which ties in nicely to George Lucas' emphatic view that Star Wars is for children. For him, this sort of staging is a feature, not a flaw. 

I would argue that the first two films were all-ages, general audience, and that it was with Return of the Jedi he swerved heavily towards children (okay, also The Christmas Special. And the ewok films. And, and, and...). Phantom Menace also felt like a kids flick. With the conflict built around trade negotiations. Go figure. 

Star Wars is for children. I get it. Arguing it still makes sense as cogent political commentary, plausibly presented, however, doesn't fly (unless we are talking about Andor, which is fabulous and quite definitely not focused on toddlers). On an abstract level, sure, I can take away the underlying sentiment, but the ewok victory is STILL not plausible, on a practical level, as presented in the film.  It works as kids' logic (I wish it so it's true!) but not on an adult level. If you classify it specifically as a children's film, the criticism goes away, as it's not relevant. We don't expect adult logic to constrain kids films. 

That said, I thought the ewok victory was implausible as a kid, too. 

I guess it depends on the kid, and what age range you're looking at (6-8 vs. 9-10 vs 11-12... they can all be very different in terms of what they'll accept narratively).

Matrix Resurrections: The poison pill anti-sequel sequel

Neo with hand out. Is he trying to tell us something?

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

I had high hopes for Matrix Resurrections. It paired Lana Wachowski (and Aleksandr Hemon) with David Mitchell, the writer of Cloud Atlas. I saw the film adaptation of that in the theatre, and while it didn’t quite work for me (maybe I didn’t really get it), I was blown away by how wildly ambitious it was. The Wachowski’s take big chances, which I really admire. 

 

Lana Wachowski also said she made the film as a way of processing grief over the death of her parents. 

 

Whoa. 

 

That sounds like one heck of a solid emotional core for a film.

 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I was hoping for (not that this is relevant, but hey… subjectivity). 

 

Resurrections is two movies in one, giving you more bang for your cinematic buck: it’s a metatextual commentary on the film industry loosely tied into a continuation of the story concluded in Revolutions.

 

The metatextual commentary is fascinating (even as a primal scream of frustration) but the continuation of the story… not so much.

 

It begins with a redo of the first movie’s opening sequence: agents closing in on Trinity. This time, Agent Smith is a younger Morpheus (what?), and the entire sequence is being observed by an interloper named Bugs. She seems to be our new protagonist, and sports blue hair. She knows the whole story of the Matrix, so she’s perplexed seeing a rehash of earlier events.

Turns out, it’s a 'modal', a training subprogram that endlessly runs a single scenario. Kind of like how fictional characters in mass media are forever trapped in an endless sequel/reboot cycle.

 

Clever! 

 

We go on to find Neo, now mere Thomas Anderson, at a software company (Deus Machina), where he’s the star programmer who created the revered Matrix video games. Agent Smith is his manager/partner. 

The Matrix: the video game

 

Clearly Anderson is an avatar for Lana Wachowski. 

 

Several drones are introduced, including Jude (Judas?), a sycophantic, blinkered, obnoxious and base being who is… I forget. The Creative Director? 

 

Neither Smith nor Anderson are aware of their previous life; it’s all just part of a video game now. 

 

Smith informs Lana/Anderson that Warner Brothers isn’t interested in the new game (‘Binary’) that Anderson’s working on; instead, they want a sequel to The Matrix trilogy. And they’ll do it without them if they don’t go along. The seated Lana/Anderson is stressed and appalled and begins clawing at his/her knees.

 

This kicks off a series of scenes that dive down the rabbit hole of the film making sequel sausage machine, where marketers present research documents (the two key words audiences associate with The Matrix are original and fresh, so make an unnecessary sequel… original and fresh. What?), and the development team engages in ‘brainstorming’ sessions, in which people throwing around obnoxious statements without thought or consideration. It’s the corporate idea of creativity and it’s nausea inducing.

 

They’re the most powerful in the film because they’re actually saying something. I bet they’re Lana Wachowski’s opinion of real life meetings with Warner Brothers, and oh boy, she was NOT happy with Warner Brother’s threat to make sequels against her (and her sister’s) wishes. 

 

Sure, Warner’s owns the property, and from a legal perspective I’m sure they’ve got plenty of lawyers to justify making a sequel (along with profit projections), but from a creative viewpoint I totally understand the Wachowski’s not being happy about it. As an audience member, I’m not happy about it either.

 

I’m also part of the problem, because I go and see sequels in the vain hope they’ll recapture the magic of the originals. The Same But Different! Rarely do you see a sequel switch into another genre (Alien to Aliens). The latest Star Wars sequels seemed to be generated by putting the first trilogy in a blender and hitting puree. They become meaningless recycled gibberish.

 

As an artistic statement, The Matrix films concluded with Revolutions. But the story cannot end because, thanks to people like me, studios can make money milking dead cows.

Walk (fly) away from explosions

Matrix Resurrections isn’t the red pill, it isn’t the blue pill: it’s the poison pill. 

 

It deliberately undermines itself and the originals, attacks the sequel machine, avaricious film corporations, obnoxious fans who completely misinterpret meaning, and obnoxiously inserts frames from the earlier trilogy as nostalgia pellets… akin to what a rabbit would drop. 

It feels like the film is trolling the audience. It’s our fault movie characters are caught in these endless, torturous loops, each more awful than the last. 

 

The Matrix was storyboarded up the wazoo. The new film? It was shot on the fly, and it shows. It looks like the high budget version of home video.

 

The epic aspects of the Matrix are pointedly deflated. Morpheus-Smith appears to Lana/Neo in a lavatory, lamely quoting his earlier self and desperately grasping for gravitas that isn't there. It's like Luke tossing away his lightsaber. 

 

Is Wachowski annihilating aspects of the original she feels we incorrectly latched on to? The original series fetishized violence; is that why it’s deemphasized/poorly done here?

 

People excuse Keanu’s lackluster fight scenes by blaming his age, which is nonsensical, because he kicks ass in John Wick. Here, Neo just holds out his hands to stop bullets; it's his power move. Over and over and over and over again.

Neo does this. A LOT.

 

The fight scenes in Cobra Kai are more compelling, at a tiny fraction of the cost. 

The Resurrection characters make a point of saying they no longer need to escape through phone lines, but they don’t establish new rules. Which makes the chase scene at the end confusing: what are they trying to escape to. 

 

The metatextual aspect of the film has much greater passion. 

I’d rather see a documentary by Lana about the whole Matrix phenomenon and her journey through the film industry, than this. 

 

The sequel… I get the desire to bring Neo and Trinity back. Hey, they become 'a binary' (wasn’t that Anderson’s new game?)! I enjoyed the idea of long lost love, of cosmic connection inevitably bringing two people together. But the rest of it doesn’t hold water, and devolves into a meaningless chase scene, where I don’t understand the stakes, where they’re going or why. 

They don’t need a phone line… so where are they going again?

Is the 'swarm' idea a commentary on social media mobbing? Herd mindedness? Zombie movies? 

I don't know and don't really care.

 

The Analyst was a step down from The Architect. I detected real anger coming through his character, contempt for both his POV and the target of his frustrations (us). Nasty as he is (and he turns conspicuously misogynist in the last scene), he’s not wrong about people believing our emotions validate our actions, and us being immune to facts when feelings run hot. 

I am as guilty of this as the next person.

 

It’s difficult to escape subjectivity (and hey, that’s what this review is). 

 

I cannot recommend seeing Resurrections in a theatre. On the other hand, I would be very interested in watching it again on TV, with a director’s commentary track. 

 

(As I walked to my favourite café to write this review, a black cat crossed my path. I’ve walked this path for 10 years, and that’s never happened before. It made me laugh. A glitch in... you know.)

 

The leap of faith I couldn't make

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The nature of story: why sequels suck but we want them anyway.

I'm as guilty as the next person of wanting great stories and characters to, well, keep going. And going and going, like the Energizer Bunny. After all, it's so good, why stop? I wanted a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Arc. I wanted a Star Wars sequel, and a Matrix sequel, and a sequel to Batman.

And, God help me, I've wanted sequels to the sequels.

Be careful what you wish for, because you may just get it. Sequels infest the theaters: Ted II, Avengers II, Spiderman v2 II, Mad Max IV, Terminator V, and Jurassic Park IV to name a few. Heck, sequels are reviving Roman numerals.

And if isn't a sequel, it's a reboot. It's less about story and more about the franchise, and this is changing the nature of film.

Blockbusters are expensive and such risky undertakings, after all. Film execs are reluctant to stick out their neck and back an unknown property when they can green light a sequel instead. Batman worked before, it can work again. It's got an established track record, which is very reassuring when you're about to spend $120 million bucks. Hits in other mediums are also grist for the movie mill: Harry Potter, comic books, TV shows, games, anything with name recognition that can cut through the noise. Studios go big now or stay home, so we get micro budget indie projects for the Oscars and megabudget sequels for the bank account, and not much in between.

The film industry is becoming 'franchisified', and more like episodic television. Meanwhile, cable is becoming… more like the movies used to be.

With film, you start with the ending and work your way backward to the beginning. You push your characters as far away from the climax as you need to so they have a decent dramatic arc. They need space for their emotional, physical and spiritual journey. 

If a character must learn to be responsible, you start them out on their best buddies' couch playing video games all day. That establishes distance between who the character is and who they have to become. They need a flaw, like video game addiction, that must be overcome. And the flaw is  determined by the ending of the story and the challenge they must face in the film's climax.

Everything is tied in together. It's holistic.

The ending dictates the beginning, and the nature of the challenge dictates the problems the protagonist has, which are inextricably linked to the climax. Supporting characters are inversions and/or reflections of the main character, and exist to flesh out the protagonist and throw the hero's personality and values into sharper relief.

Take Star Wars. Luke is the naive farm boy who needs schooling in the ways of the world, so up pops Obi Wan Kenobi as the wise old man. Luke's earnestness and youthful enthusiasm is thrown into sharp relief by Han Solo, the cynical rogue. Princess Leia's pragmatism contrasts with Luke's idealism.

Characters bounce off of each other. They reflect. In Game of Thrones (which does this sort of thing extremely well) Varys is Order and is opposed by Littlefinger, who represents Chaos. Edard Stark is honor and principle, and he's played off against Robert, debauchery and indulgence, and Cersei, who's Machiavellian corruption.

G.R.R. Martin, an excellent writer with a background in television (Beauty and the Beast) constructs his characters not in isolation, but specifically in relation to the people they are in proximity to. The Onion Knight and Melissandra, for example, are externalizations of the struggle going on inside Stannis. We better understand them because the person next to them is an opposite in at least one personality trait or value.

Stories are delicately balanced webs of characters, events, and meanings. Nothing exists in isolation, and all the elements must relate to each other and make sense in all the ways real life doesn't. Even the environment is a reflection of internal struggle.

And there must be an emotional payoff at the end: we want to see characters who change profoundly after enduring terrible ordeals, emerging on the other side all the better for it. Why? Because this is dramatically satisfying. We all want to know that if we go through hell, there's a point to it.

Even if it's anti-story and the point is to know, and accept, that there is no point.

The bigger the change in the character, the greater the obstacles they overcome. The farther they fall, the higher they can rise, the more satisfied we are when the curtain goes up. Each story is, in a sense, a step towards enlightenment and meaning.

Everything in the film is a balanced part of a whole, and it works because it is part of a whole.

And this is why so many sequels suck: if the first film did its job right, everything has been resolved and the story is over. The main character has solved their crippling issue(s) and grown as a person. Which means there's nothing for them to fix in the sequel.

As movies are incredibly lean story telling machines, a good screenwriter is not going to waste time putting in extraneous problems that have no bearing on the plot, as they need that precious time for issues that are actually relevant.

In addition, when you plot backward from the sequel's ending, you can't just push the character anywhere you want. You need to take into account the ending of the first film, or the audience will be confused.

Which leaves you with characters who have no compelling issues, living happily ever after in peaceful places. So writers must shoe horn the character into a new conflict. This can feel unnatural and forced. Because it is.

A film is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end.

Or it did.

Our franchise saturated age has changed all this, which is why films are becoming more like television.

Writers and marketers now plan ahead and include extraneous material in movies specifically to set up sequels. Loads of sequels.

I'm looking at you, Marvel Universe.

They're embedding trailers inside the movie itself rather than running them beforehand. That's not all bad, as I rather like trailers. It's an art form in and of itself. But it should never be at the expense of the primary story. Sequel seed planting can slow down and hampers the main narrative. In addition, these hoped for spinoffs (unless they're Marvel) often don't happen because the film didn't do as well as expected.

So a film that's been made as a stand alone, such as the original Star Wars (George Lucas made it self contained because he never expected to be able to make the sequels, but still left threads untied to exploit in case he could… which just made it better), is inevitably a more satisfying emotional experience by its very nature. It has a self-contained, complete story, with meaningful arcs for the characters, and a satisfying conclusion. Sure, Vader gets away, which was a serial trope. But it doesn't take away from the fullness of the film's resolution. It's a real, solid ending, which can be a tough trick to pull off: create something self-contained and fulfilling which is also a stepping stone to a new narrative.

Any film with a cliffhanger is not a full story. It can't be, by its very nature. The journey is not completed, and so it is dependent, in part, on the other films in the series. If one of them fails, it diminishes the whole.

This is why so many 'grand arc' television series fall apart. They start out strong, filled with intriguing ideas and mysteries and twists. But they lead nowhere. Shows are all premise and no conclusion. Why? Because the writers do not start at the ending and they don't work their way back to the beginning.

They don't come up with an ending at all.

Why not? Studio executives don't want one. They want TV series to go on and on and on, forever, because they have yachts and summer homes and bills to pay (so do the actors and the crew), and they want to, understandably, keep their jobs. Who wouldn't?

The perverse thing is that the more satisfying a movie is, the more we want a sequel. Yet what makes a movie satisfying is that it tells a full, complete story. With resolution and character transformation.

So what do you do? The answer is to go for one of the two.

The focus is now on either high concept stories, where the characters are secondary, or they're built around characters who are themselves high concept. Self-contradicting archetypes who don't evolve but are so interesting, we don't care that they don't. Nihilists with hearts of gold, moral serial killers, cruel doctors, OCD detectives, sentimental assassins, and cannibal gourmands are the order of the day. Character flaws remain. Any flaw the protagonist has that's related to the climax is minor, so small and piddly that if it is resolved, it really changes nothing and can be forgotten in the next installment.

Welcome to The Franchise Era!

It started way back when Victorians demanded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle produce more Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle tried to kill the deductive detective off by throwing him over a waterfall, but it wasn't enough. Later the public clamored for John Carter and Tarzan and Solomon Kane to return, and then Buck Rogers and Philip Marlowe and Batman and Superman. High concept characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and more flooded into Penny Dreadfuls and later comic books and public consciousness.

They don't change, they don't evolve, they don't learn, and they've never gone away, God bless 'em.

Franchise characters, like most TV characters, remain static, frozen in time at the height of their entertainment value, frozen in cinematic amber, with at most only minor changes from season to season. Why? Because if they changed in any meaningful way, the adventures would naturally change along with them, because character and climax are inextricably linked. Change one, and you have to change the other to fit.

And if you fundamentally change the character, then they no longer fit with their supporting cast (who reflect old traits), or with the established challenges and villains (who opposed who the protagonist was, not who they are now).

Everything has to be revamped as a unit, or it becomes unbalanced, senseless, and unstructured.

And if you change the nature of the conflict, you change the premise of the show, the franchise itself, which changes the appeal of the show, which changes the audience, which changes the advertisers, which changes the budget, which changes the cast and the writers and the viewing time and so on.

Sure, our lovable archetypes are refreshed from time to time, but never fundamentally altered. At most, they are just changed into a new, updated form that will remain frozen until the next refresh. There will be no organic growth. Periodic updates are hyped like crazy but are more like someone applying a coat of contemporary paint than anything else. 

As a writer once told me, people watch movies for plot and arcs, and they watch TV for reassuring archetypes.

Episodic TV leads cannot have meaningful character arcs, as that would ultimately evolve the character out of the franchise, destroying it. Instead, we get static but compelling high concept characters going through the same sort of challenges, over and over again.

Which is much more like episodic television than what we once knew as cinema.

Meanwhile, cable shows are making limited length series that allow for complex character development precisely because they are not locked into the perpetual motion narration machine of the franchise model.

Cable is now producing more interesting, nuanced material than what we typically see on the silver screen.

Along with all the sex and violence, that is.

The franchises have their place, but so does film that illuminates the human condition.

Franchises provide magnificent thrill rides at the cost of deeper meaning and emotional impact. Those threads in the story web have been cut for the sake of…

Monkeys, mutants, and Marxists

The classic twist ending. A post-apocalypse tradition is born.

“Somewhere out there there has to be something better than man.” - Taylor (Charlton Heston)

As if.

For a thoroughly satirical post-apocalypse, look no further than the first two Planet of the Apes pictures.

They're far more than Apes in Spaaaaace.

We're lucky the series got made at all, despite having producer Arthur P. Jacobs leading the charge and Charlton Heston being attached. Studio execs feared the apes would be unconvincing, even laughable, and wouldn't give the green light until makeup tests proved otherwise.

Nor did the script come together easily. Rod Serling spent a year writing thirty drafts before he finally got the script right, and then only with the help of the formerly blacklisted Marxist, Michael Wilson. Wilson is better known for classics like Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

Pierre Boule's book La Planéte des Singes, on which the film is based, has little in the way of action or fisticuffs. It also depicts a highly advanced ape society, which the filmmakers did not have enough money to recreate on screen. Due to budget constraints, the films' ape civilization would be much more primitive.

The series opens in the cockpit of a spacecraft, the ultimate antiseptic, finely controlled environment. This is human civilization at its peak. All of the crew are asleep, in cryogenic stasis, save Taylor, the misanthropic captain played by Charlton Heston. He's entering a log, Captain Kirk style, but being considerably more introspective because he's got time to kill and themes to advance:

"Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me though. Does man that marvel of the universe that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?”

That's the set up. High tech ship soaring through the stars, mankind's best aboard, pondering the meaning of life. Mankind is on top and in charge.

All is right with the universe.

Heston and his sleeping beauties.

Then the rug gets yanked out and we enter free fall.

They didn’t have enough money to show the ship crash landing, so they shot it from the ship’s POV, using footage taken by airplane. The camera spins and yaws, then careens down into a lake, pulling the viewer along with it.

It’s a stunning, delirious sequence, born of necessity, but it works fabulously, establishing an eerie, artsy vibe, thanks to the fantastic cinematography, the magnificence of the Arizona desert, and the unnerving score. 

If it weren't for the title, the last thing you'd expect is for the astronauts to run into a bunch of talking gorillas. It starts out posing as fairly Hard SF.

Heston and two bright-eyed, bushy-tailed comrades, Landon and Dodge, escape their sinking spacecraft, but the fourth member of their expedition, a woman who would be the new eve, dies before landing due to a malfunction in her cryotube.

The barren Arizona desert makes for a wonderful alien world. Lifeless from horizon to horizon. The cast is framed against the vast landscape, without a single plant to be seen.

Eventually the stranded astronauts find a weed, which fills the crew with hope, despite Taylor razzing them every step of the way. Soon the wastes give way to lush forest and grassland. They find a pool right out of Doctor Doolittle and jump in, only to have their clothes and equipment mysteriously stolen before they can get out.

They encounter a herd of mute humans, who have been reduced to the level of animal intelligence.

Heston figures they’ll be running the place in short order.

His ambitions are quickly dashed as they hear hunting horns sound.

Because these human beings are being hunted like animals. The pursuers are at first unseen. We catch glimpses of poles thrashing the cornfield, rifles firing, horses charging. Humans are flushed like birds, herded like cattle, shot like dogs.

Finally Heston catches sight of the horsemen and realizes… they're apes!

One of the astronauts is killed, a second captured, and Heston wounded in the throat. 

Smile! Apes proudly pose over fresh trophies. Wait, aren't those... Soylent Green?

As the hunt concludes, trophy photos taken over their corpses. By making apes the oppressors, Serling set into very sharp relief man’s barbarity to man, and comments on racism and colonialism.

Granted, it's pretty obvious what planet this is, as the apes speak perfect English. There was some talk of having the apes speak a kind of gibberish at first, which becomes intelligible (English) as Heston picks up the local language. But this was abandoned as being too complicated for audiences of the time.

Heston is injured and separated from his friends, and gets thrown into the upside down world of ape politics. It’s a simplified mirror of our own world, of course, with ape society broken up into three castes: orangutans are authority figures, gorillas are soldiers and workers (presumably farmers as well), and chimpanzees are the middle class and ineffectual intellectuals.

This class based view of society fits with Wilson's Marxist leanings, and actually enriches the picture, adding further depth to the social messages and sharp witted satire.

In fact, the ape actors so took to their race / class based roles that they all ate by group: gorilla with gorilla, chimp with chimp, orangutan with orangutan.

Heston with his chimpanzee patrons. It's like Uplift, except they dissect you.
So it totally, like, isn't. Never mind.

Taylor is paraded around on a leash, threatened with castration and lobotomy, and kept in a cage. The world is now fully inverted: privileged astronaut and American hero Taylor is now a mere animal. From top to bottom in under thirty minutes.

Due to his throat injury, Taylor cannot speak, and his attempts to try are mocked by apes as mere mimicry.

For such a man as Taylor, the fall could not be greater.

Heston's fellow astronaut, post-brain surgery.

The threat of having his balls lopped off compels Taylor to escape. He leads the apes about in a merry chase around their village and gets pelted with rotten fruit and finally snagged in a net. As the gorilla guards move in to apprehend him, Heston utters the classic line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" 

He's quickly rushed to trial. Dr. Zaius, the orangutan Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith (in a nice satirical touch), is hell bent on having Taylor put down, and his chimp patrons censored.

See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
Just a tad on the nose, but it does emphasize the film's satirical intent.

This anti-human attitude just makes Taylor, the devout misanthrope, earnestly wonder why Dr. Zaius fears and hates him so. He should just ask his earlier self.

Taylor views man as weak and pathetic; everything he says about humanity drips with scorn, from his disgust for his fellow astronauts to his sneering contempt for the weakness of a long dead man who once possessed ancient artifacts (a pacemaker, spectacles) that the apes unearth.

Near the end of the film, Cornelius, at the behest of Dr. Zaius, reads from The Sacred Scrolls:

"Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair for he is the harbinger of death."

Whereupon Charlton promptly goes out and discovers his destiny, and the truth: he was home all along. Man is indeed the harbinger of death, and by the megaton.

Taylor is an arrogant, smug narcissist. A self-made God. As Grouchy Marx might say, he is someone who 'would never belong to any club that would have him.'

And humanity, ages ago, delivered on Taylor's low expectations.

He ends the film pounding his fist helplessly into the surf, bowed before the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty.

It's an image laden with symbolism, and the scene is a slap in the face, a visual scream, a wake-up call for all humanity, demanding us to do better, to not let the writers, and ourselves, down. To prove we're better than what Taylor (and the writers) believe us to be.

That's one hell of a political statement for a mainstream film. Very, very few filmmakers have the guts or the belly fire to try and pull something like that off.

It’s one of the bleakest films in all of Hollywood history, except for its sequel, Beneath Planet of the Apes. Written by screenwriter Paul Dehn of Goldfinger fame, Beneath indulges in the macabre. At one point it even had a bestiality subplot. Compared to Serling, Dehn is lightning fast at laying down prose: he wrote the script for Escape from Planet of the Apes in a mere three weeks.

New York City, above and below. The buildings were made up of torn photos of New York landmarks.
They did this pic on the cheap.

This film is a mixed bag, as the first half recycles the first film with a different cast and lower budget. About half way through, freaky new elements are introduced: mutated humans living under the nuked remnants of New York City, who worship an atomic bomb kept in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Just as the apes are superficially barbaric but underneath like us, the superficially sophisticated mutants turn out to be barbaric. They represent the upper class intelligentsia during The Cold War, mouthing platitudes about peace and non-violence while hiding behind a shield of devastating nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the planet a thousand times over.

Brent, the Charlton Heston lookalike, discovers the truth.
No. That everyone was speaking English was most certainly not enough.

When musicals go bad: the infamous Hello, Dolly
subway station interrogation of Brent by telepathic troglodytes,
 who consider themselves 'the only reality in the universe'.

It’s all explicitly MAD. As the mutant leader and high priest Mendez says, corrupting scripture, "Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen."

They upgraded the Holy Hand Grenade.

The mutants view torturing people with 'psychic deterrents' as acceptable because they aren’t inflicting physical harm. It’s the sort of hair splitting that got the United States into waterboarding.

They’re also terrible singers.

For all their talk about being defenseless and peaceful, the mutants torture someone every couple of minutes.

Mutant reveals her inmost self unto her god, and you kind of wish she didn't.

As one of the mutants declares, "Mr. Taylor, Mr. Brent. We are a peaceful people. We don't kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”

And then he pulls the old ‘let’s you and him fight to the death’ while I watch, all morally pure and peaceful like. It's perverted and twisted and deeply hypocritical. It's barbarism meets passive-aggressive narcissism.

Charming.

And the 'true self' they reveal to their A-bomb is grotesque. According to Dehn:

"At first, we were going to have them really mutated with monstrous noses and three eyes, real horror figures, but we didn't think that would have been nice for the children and after a great deal of research, it was the makeup department that came up with the idea that if you had been radiated, all seven layers of your skin would have been destroyed, and all that would be left was this terrible network of veins."

On the other side, gorilla General Ursus delivers gems like ‘The only good human is a dead human!’ to much applause from his troops.

Yeah, totally a show for seven-year-olds. 

Touring the underground sites.

And just in case you missed the other political parallels, there’s a scene where chimpanzee pacifists try and stop the ape army as it marches to battle… with placards and a sit in! The only thing missing is John Lennon in ape makeup singing 'All we are saying is give peace a chance'. The filmmakers couldn’t bash home their point any harder if they waded into the audience armed with two-by-fours.

The oafish, militaristic apes and the insufferably smug mutants naturally come into conflict, and the end result (spoilers) is the end of the world.

Or rather, the end of the post-end world.

Bored of it all, Carlton Heston sets off the doomsday weapon in order to rid himself of the franchise, and the earth is reduced to a cinder hanging in space.

A narrator solemnly intones:

"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."

"Screw you guys, I'm off to make The Hawaiians!"

Hard to top when it comes to bleak endings. 

It's one hell of a pointed anti-war statement.

Screenwriter Dehn didn't want to go full nihilist originally (never go The Full Nihilist), preferring a bestiality angle:

"The plot of 'Apes 2' was suggested by the memorable last shot of 'Apes 1': the half-buried Statue of Liberty. This implied that New York itself lay buried beneath what the Apes called 'The Forbidden Zone'. It remained only to people the underground city with Mutants descended from the survivors of a nuclear bomb dropped on New York 2,000 years earlier, and, thus, to motivate a war between expansionist Apes and peaceable but dangerously sophisticated Mutants resulting in the final destruction of Earth… I wanted a more optimistic end to 'Apes 2' than the destruction of Earth by the Doomsday Bomb, but my own end, the birth of a child half-human and half-monkey, proved intractable in terms of make-up, and anyway it was thought that Man-Ape miscegenation might lose us our G certificate!" 

So there you have it: the world was blown up because of the failure of a makeup test.

The executives wanted the whole series killed off: 

"I was under strict orders not to produce a sequel. Fox said there would be no further sequels after this, kindly destroy the entire world and wind up the series. So I duly did this and as you remember at the end the world blew up, the screen went white and the earth was dead."

They came to their senses as soon as they saw the box office returns.

Ironically, the franchise’s success with sequels and merchandising led to more sequels and more movie franchises.

Way to go, Charlton! Total backfire.

It's worth noting that all the authority figures in the film are unsympathetic. Heston takes a pox on all your houses stance, Ursus believes the only human is a dead one, Zaius views man as a pestilence, and Mendez, the leader of the mutants, believes his entire people, 'the only reality in the universe', exist solely to guard an A-bomb.

Apes as universal symbols for class struggle: military, intelligentsia, and bourgeois.
Humans are The Other.

The most sympathetic characters are the chimps Zira and Cornelius. They represent the bourgeois, the decency of the American middle class, sticking up for the little guy while objecting to abuses of power by corrupt higher ups. Even so, Zira works in the zoo, performing Dr. Mengele like experiments on human beings. They are not free of sin, but they are willing to recognize, and work with, The Other.

General Ursus is motivated by more than hatred: drought has brought ape society to the brink of catastrophe. Starvation looms. He intends to conquer The Forbidden Zone in order to expand their food supply, against the objections of Dr. Zaius. It doesn't quite make sense as nothing grows in The Forbidden Zone, but then, no one would accuse Ursus of being brainy, and it does add some nuance to his character.

Zaius is probably the most interesting. He's intelligent and might be willing to negotiate, even cooperate, with humans, save for the secret knowledge he's privy to. Alone among the apes, he knows mankind once ruled the earth and 'made a desert of it'. The vast wastes of The Forbidden Zone are testament to mankind's destructive capability. As such, Zaius distrusts anything to do with us, and believes 'man is capable of nothing but destruction.' 

All things considered, an understandable point of view. Should man get a second chance after nuking the planet the first time around?

Dr. Zaius doesn't think so. He rejects Taylor's pleas at the end of Beneath Planet of the Apes, so the petulant Taylor blows the planet to smithereens. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. So there, you bastages: the refusal of a simple kindness by Dr. Zaius, his unwillingness to empathize with The Other, costs everyone their lives, and the planet to boot.

Another strong statement in a series filled with them.

The series raises the hopes of the audience repeatedly, and then, just when you think a happy ending is nigh, they punch you in the face and deliver the dark.

The characters would have made great contestants on Big Brother, they're so well designed to conflict with each other. Super intelligent mutants clash with jock gorillas, empathic chimps chaff under the rule of overbearing elitist orangutans, and put upon Brent gets razzed by the snarky, misanthropic Taylor.

The rest of the original Ape films rant on about human short-sightedness and stupidity until the studio starved their budget into oblivion. The last film looks like half of it was filmed in a local park, and the other half in the studio basement.

Interspecies romance blossoms.

The series is radical cinema posing as sci-fi pulp. If any filmmaker had decided to cover political issues like slavery as bluntly, at that time, they’d never have gotten their project funded. The studios would have toned it down, smoothed the rough edges, turned it into inoffensive pap and had everyone singing Kumbaya by the closing credits. By setting it in a fictional environment populated with people in ape outfits, they were able to skewer anything they wanted. It's post-apocalyptic South Park. Satire with real bite.

One of the perks of well done science fiction.

Generally regarded as the worst film in the entire ape franchise, save for Battle for Planet of the Apes, it's my second favorite of the original run, primarily because of the funky mutants and their stylish, tonal telepathy. Also, doomsday bomb. KABOOM!

I can live with the first half because the second has the tinnitus inflicting mutants and a cranky hero who blows up the planet in the ultimate 'screw-you-guys-I'm-going-home' moment.

That’s the kind of stuff that fries little kids brains.

It's Marxism meets monkeys, and it all ends with nihilism stomping hope in the face, forever.  

Brrrrr.

The stuff about the dog and cat plague… PFFT! Please. Like we'd really get three hundred pound gorillas as replacement house pets, especially after the visit of three hyper-intelligent apes from a future where humans are hunted for sport.

Seriously, no one could take the hint?

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is another classic post-apocalyptic look at human intolerance, as human survivors try to wipe out genetically superior successors. Rather bleak Darwinian logic motivates the old paradigm to try and kill off the new, in order to prevent itself from being relegated, in the long term, to extinction. They know that awaits them eventually. It’s a rather zero sum view of the world, but then, over ninety percent of all the species that have ever lived are extinct.

Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, on the other hand, is not particularly political. It’s a fun trip through a wild post-apocalyptic landscape with little in the way of sharp satirical edge, and that’s fine. It’s aimed at a rather young audience, but it's wildly imaginative and filled with non-stop action.