DVD Review: Battle for the Planet of the Apes
Star: Roddy McDowell, Claude Akins, Natalie Trundy
1973, 20th Century Fox. Run Time: 1:33
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“Every Caesar must have his Brutus”
“Ape has killed ape!”
You knew it was coming, right? The fifth and final installment of the series takes place around 20 years after “Conquest,” and finds Caesar running a colony of talking apes living in the wasteland that used to be civilization. How did they all learn to talk in 20 years? Shhhhh! Don’t ask that, it’s a plot hole, and if you poked into every plot hole in this film, you’d have nothing left! Also don’t ask how Mandemus could have been Virgil’s teacher as a boy, since that would obviously have been during the time of the humans.
But I digress. Caesar has set up schools where humans teach apes to read and write. A human teacher gets into a conflict with General Aldo, a not-so-bright gorilla who hates humans. In a discussion with Caesar, MacDonald, the brother of Caesar’s protector from the previous film, brings up the topic of the end of the world and the recordings made of Cornelius and Zira from the third film. Caesar wants these recordings, which may exist in archives buried under the destroyed city. Film footage isn’t the only thing they discover under the ruined city: Human survivors, disfigured and already starting to resemble the mutants from “Beneath” are living in the tunnels. There is a short chase and gunfight, but Caesar, MacDonald, and Virgil escape. The humans quickly prepare for battle and set out on the way to the apes.
Not long after their return to ape territory, Caesar’s son is murdered by General Aldo. While Caesar is distracted with the lingering death of his son, Aldo takes over. The big battle between ten thousand apes and two dozen sickly old men with a cannon takes surprisingly little time. Then Caesar and Aldo have their little face-off, and the film ends, probably on a brighter note than the rest of the series would have us expect.
As I’ve already pointed out, the biggest flaw in this movie is the logic of the plot itself. The movie is simply set too early in the timeline of the POTA universe to have actually supported this plot. There just could not have been changes of the magnitude we see here in only 20 years. I can understand the producer’s desire to reuse characters from the previous film, but most of the plot and dialog problems would have been resolved if they had simply set the movie 100 or so years later. We do learn one important thing about the apes in this installment: they can climb trees (well, sorta). There really isn't much new here, other than the idea that Humans and Apes worked together at this point in the timeline.
This is easily the weakest film of the five, but the series wouldn’t be the same without it. I’d recommend buying it to complete your collection, but watch it last and leave your plot-hole finder switched off throughout.
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