On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.
Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.
Is it any good?
Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.
It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.
The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.
But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.
Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.
But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.
What else happened this year?
-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce. -- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle. -- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors. -- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs. -- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests. -- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick. -- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else. -- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...
SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira escape the destruction of Earth by traveling back in time (never mind how) to 1971. Trapped in a world they never made, they are hunted and killed by fearful humans -- but their son, Caesar, survives and is adopted by kindly, animal-loving circus owner Ricardo Montalban.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES starts twenty years later when Montalban brings Caesar (played, like his father, by Roddy MacDowell) to an unnamed North American city to help promote his circus. But an altercation in a plaza causes the government to suspect that Caesar is a talking chimpanzee, and so a new ape-hunt begins. Caesar, however, escapes and blends in with the massive servant ape population and is ultimately sold to the tyrannical mayor. From there, he plots and leads a city-wide ape rebellion that culminates in a night of savage fighting.
Is it any good?
In terms of story, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has the best raw materials to work with since the first installment in the series. In other words, it’s built on a very simple and gripping premise that’s hard to mess up: ape servants revolt against their human masters and dominate them. As an actual movie, it has a few problems, but it also has some great aspects to it -- and so I’d have to say that I consider it one of the high points of the series.
Things get off to a really great start simply thanks to the appearance of dozens of apes in jumpsuits in a modern American city. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES brought talking chimpanzees back to contemporary America -- but it only brought two of them. CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (which is set, by the way, in a vaguely fascist version of 1991) introduces a vast underclass of ape servants. In fact, the movie is a bit of a mirror image of the original PLANET OF THE APES. In this movie, a sophisticated human society maltreats and oppresses its mute and dumb ape population, in which a single talking and thinking member attempts to hide.
How there got to be so many apes in America is explained with a silly story about an epidemic that killed off all cats and dogs in 1983. Yearning for animal companionship, the people of the world don’t bother with parakeets or rabbits, but instead turn directly to chimpanzees and gorillas. They soon discovered that the apes can be taught to do all kinds of useful things, and so the new pets immediately turn into slaves. So in the eight years since 1983, thousands of ape servants have taken over all kinds of menial jobs. Cities are full of chimpanzees and gorillas (though orangutangs are oddly absent except in a couple of crowd shots) and entire industries have sprung up to capture, transport, condition, breed, and market the apes.
The intervening twenty years since ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES have also resulted in a harsher human government as well. In the movie version of 1971, the president only reluctantly hunted down the fugitive chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira. But by 1991, a jack-booted security force is in place to violently break up any ape or human disturbance. The mayor of the city acts practically like an ancient Roman consul. (Unlike the president back in 1971, he never worries about how excessive force might affect his chances of being re-elected.) Not much time is spent on how the human society functions in 1991, but it’s obvious from glimpses here and there that people have fewer freedoms and that the government has grown more oppressive and controlling in every way.
I’m personally a big fan of Ricardo Montalban in the PLANET OF THE APES movies. Sadly, he is only in the first forty minutes or so of this one. But he seems so wise and compassionate (and plays his character so passionately) that it’s a real shame when he makes his exit. There is one great moment when a couple of security thugs force him to yell “lousy human bastards” at the top of his lungs (they’re trying to identify the voice of a dissident), and Montalban practically turns it into a battle cry.
The middle of the movie -- in which Caesar blends in with the ape population and organizes his revolt -- is where things start to get a little weak. Even after seeing this flick about four times, it’s just not clear to me exactly how it happens. All we really see are a few shots of Caesar silently urging on defiant apes who refuse to do their jobs. I can’t figure out if he’s meant to be the literal catalyst for these minor acts of rebellion, or if he’s simply been symbolically inserted. (There’s a lot of evidence that the apes were getting uppity even before Caesar’s arrival -- he’s just the one who brings it all together into a coherent revolt.) Caesar also has a home base where the apes start stockpiling weapons, but I could never figure out where it’s supposed to be or why no humans are aware of it or even how he finds time to go there. There are just not enough details to make the preparations convincing or compelling.
But that part of the movie is short enough. Soon it moves into the out-and-out ape on human violence as the entire city erupts in open rebellion. There’s been some talk in the past year of re-making or re-imagining this movie somehow. I can understand the appeal since, as I said, I think it’s got great raw materials. But no re-make can ever capture the cognitive dissonance of Roddy MacDowell in full chimpanzee prosthetics running through the streets of Los Angeles letting off rounds from an assault rifle as he leads an ape uprising. This was Roddy MacDowell’s third PLANET OF THE APES movie -- and up until now he had played the meek and peace-loving Cornelius. (Cornelius was played by another actor in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but had essentially the same character.) Caesar is bitter, violent, and borderline nihilistic at times -- in other words, a huge departure from Cornelius. It would be like if Christopher Reeve had returned in SUPERMAN III playing Clark Kent’s son who wanted to burn down the world and turn it all into ashes. (Come to think of it, that would have been a vast improvement over the SUPERMAN III we actually got.)
Of course, cynicism and violence are nothing new to the PLANET OF THE APES series. When I was writing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, I alluded to the fact that the movies traditionally have very depressing endings. In the original, Charlton Heston finds out that the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war right before the credits roll. In an amazing act of one-up-manship, he manages to literally destroy the entire planet at the end of the second movie. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES ends with Cornelius and Zira -- two beloved characters from all three movies -- brutally gunned down. And yet, despite all this, the first time I saw CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES I can safely say that the transformation of Roddy MacDowell into a violent revolutionary pretty well blew my mind.
My mind would have been even more blown if CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES still ended the way it was originally supposed to. The ape rebellion eventually carries the violence to the mayor’s command center. Caesar and his crew burst in with guns blazing and drag the mayor to the streets outside. Caesar then gives a rabble-rousing speech about the ascendency of apes and summarily denies a request for compassion and mercy from the movie’s only surviving sympathetic human character. Originally, the movie ended with the assembled apes beating the mayor to death with the butts of their rifles after the end of this speech while Caesar looked on approvingly. But for whatever reason (probably to get a PG rating) this was changed before the movie was released. Now, instead, Caesar goes on to make a second speech where he calls for apes to put aside their vengeance and to dominate mankind compassionately. In this version -- the final version that showed in theaters in 1972 and is on most home versions of the movie -- nobody is beaten to death. Despite the fact that we know from the first two movies that humans will end up dumb and primitive, hunted for sport by gorillas on horseback, this ending still seems to preserve a little glimmer of hope that things will be okay. (More on this later.)
In some ways, I prefer the original dark and cynical ending. It fits with the hopelessness of the earlier movies, and fits much more organically with the rest of the movie. The sudden switch in tone from rampaging bloodlust to even-tempered peacemaking still strikes me as totally jarring and unbelievable. (The editing on the new ending is also distracting in its horribleness. It’s obvious that lines are being dubbed and shots are being re-cut.) But I have come to believe that the new ending is not a complete disaster either.
One of the most interesting things about the PLANET OF THE APES series is how the overall storyline develops. There’s no hint in the original movie that any thought was given to continuing the story, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES ends in such a way that any additional movies should have been impossible. But the film makers kept finding new ways to keep the series going. As they did so, they began to include more and more information on how apes came to rule the world in the first place. Later movies then went on to dramatize much of what had only been talked about in earlier movies. But not exactly.
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, Cornelius and Zira tell a story about the ape revolt that is similar to what happens in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -- but it differs in several key details. For one thing, the dates are moved up considerably -- before Cornelius and Zira arrived in 1971, the rebellion wasn’t scheduled for several hundred years. The leader of the rebellion is obviously then a different ape, rather than their son. Other events that are later shown in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (the fifth and final installment) happen differently than they are described in earlier movies as well.
No doubt what really happened is that the film makers were making things up as they went along, and so they had to fudge a few facts when their old ideas no longer meshed with what they wanted to do with a particular sequel. But there is another, more interesting possibility too -- that Cornelius and Zira changed the timeline when they traveled to the past, accelerating some events and modifying others. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES embraces this idea more fully, and by the end of that movie it no longer appears that the Earth is inevitably headed towards a world where humans are dominated by apes. Instead, it seems there is a chance for humans and apes to coexist and live together in relative peace.
This is important because if the future cannot be changed, there is a hard expiration date on the Earth only a thousand or so years down the road. If the events of the last three movies are just documenting the inexorable march towards the final battle between man and ape that destroys the Earth, then that is a very depressing story indeed. But as the subtle differences accumulate, that ending is more and more in question. The movies are then no longer simply counting down the doomsday clock -- instead, they are the story of how a handful of seemingly insignificant acts of mercy can change the entire course of history for the better. Caesar’s sparing of the mayor -- as out of place as it seems in the moment -- is the first act that points towards the possibility of redemption in the future.
Caesar knows the future history of the world as it was experienced by his parents, so it’s even possible that his change of heart is motivated somehow by this knowledge. The ending would have no doubt been far better if the film makers had decided to go down this path originally, rather than patching up a make-shift fix to appease the studio executives who were increasingly uncomfortable with the grim direction of the series. But despite the awful execution of the new ending, I think the way it changes the story is a very interesting and exciting and development in the series.
