DVD Review: Beneath The Planet of the Apes
Star: James Franciscus, Kim Hunter, Charleton Heston
1970, 20th Century Fox. Run Time: 1:35
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The beginning of this story moves much more quickly than the previous film, as a second spaceship crashes, leaving only astronaut Brent alive. He quickly meets up with Nova, the female human companion to Taylor from the first movie. They travel to Ape city, where they find a great military buildup of gorillas who, due to a famine, have decided to explore and conquer the “forbidden zone” that Taylor went off to explore at the conclusion of the first movie. After a quick check in with Cornelius and Zira, the friendly Apes we met last time, Brent and Nova are briefly captured by the Gorillas but easily escape. Up to this point, everything feels like a condensed version of the first movie. As Brent escapes from the gorillas, he hides in a hole in the ground, which leads to a tunnel, and this brings the story into new territory.
As General Ursus marches his army off to war (complete with anti-war protesters), Brent and Nova explore the New York subway system. There are many landmarks buried in the rubble; Radio City Music Hall, the New York Stock Exchange, and others. How these places came to be buried under rock is never explained. Eventually, Brent meets a group of human survivors, living underground for thousands of years and developing mutations in the meantime. These telepathic humans spend their time worshipping a “holy weapon of peace,” an atomic bomb, Realizing that they have no defense against the coming Ape army, the mutants decide to blow up their God, destroying all.
During the invasion of the humans realm by the Apes, Brent is reunited with Taylor, who explains that the bomb is actually a doomsday weapon which will ignite the atmosphere, destroying the entire planet.
mutantsThis Ape movie doesn’t have the clever social parallels and commentary that the first one had. The only real point seems to be an anti-war message. Being released in 1970, at the height of the cold war and in the middle of Vietnam, nuclear attack was still a day-to-day worry for many people, that was probably enough of a message for one film. This one is
nowhere near as extravagant as the first film, with many of the Apes looking like men in cheap rubber masks, and not as much seen of Ape City either. With the resolution of DVD, much of the underground looks like a matte painting, which of course, it was. The scarred mutant’s makeup was decent, but nothing out of the ordinary really. Overall, this lookThe-Bombed like a much lower budget film. It did, however, expand on the history of the planet, and did add a few interesting new ideas.
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