DVD Review: Conquest of The Planet of the Apes (1972)

DVD Review: Conquest of The Planet of the Apes
Star: Roddy McDowell, Don Murray
1972, 20th Century Fox. Run Time: 1:28
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Around 20 years after the events in “Escape from…” this film picks up with Caesar, the now-grown talking baby ape from the previous installment. Caesar and Armando have come to town to promote their circus. In the intervening years, all dogs and cats have died, leaving apes as the only viable pets. Caring for pets evolved into slavery, and witnessing some humans abusing their slave ape, Caesar yells, “Dirty Human bastards!” Which alert the police to his existence.

Armando is captured and interrogated, while Caesar blends in with apes fresh from Africa and goes through the new ape training program. After breezing through training, the very-intelligent Caesar is purchased at auction by Governor Breck. Caesar passes as a regular dumb ape until he hears of the murder of Armando. At that point, he begins to work against the humans. Somehow, Caesar silently convinces the other apes to revolt, at first individually, and then en masse. How he manages this is vague at best. I wouldn’t call this a plot hole so much as one of those “suspension of disbelief” situations.

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There is some social commentary in this one, although it’s a bit out of date. Mr. Macdonald, the only man in the film to speak up about slavery is a black man. This is no coincidence, as the film makes clear. Is slavery wrong? Well, duh! If it was intended as social commentary, it’s about 150 years late. I suppose there could be some parallels drawn to the race riots of the 1960’s, but that might be stretching things. Anyway, Caesar is captured and tortured by the humans. MacDonald assists him in his escape and in no time, Caesar is back planning a revolution. After a long and violent battle, Caesar declares victory and calls it “The Birth of the Planet of The Apes.”

Generally speaking, the makeup here was pretty good, none of the apes looked as cheaply made as those in “Beneath,” although it was odd that there were very few orangutans shown in this film (only one near the beginning, none in the battle scenes). I wonder if their makeup simply cost more than the others. All humans wear nothing but black, and government people dress like Nazi SS. I guess that’s so we know they’re the bad guys. Overall, this was not a subtle movie, and although it did fill in the history of the story, it really wasn’t that good overall; a definite decline from the previous films in the series.