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| Isn't it ironic? |
What immediately stands out about
Planet of the Apes, at least when watched from the perspective of jaded millennial movie-goer, is how earnest it is. This, after all, is the yesteryear equivalent of a modern Hollywood blockbuster- 1968’s answer to
The Dark Knight Rises or
The Hunger Games, something designed to put asses in seats and keep them there with garish displays of pop opulence. And yet no modern blockbuster has the courage, or the folly, to be this straight-forward about its message.
In fact, no modern blockbuster would even go near this kind of message-
Planet of the Apes is a sci-fi action movie built to tell us that humans are corrupt, war-mongering beasts doomed to destroy their own planet. Pretty heavy for a movie that stars people dressed in monkey costumes that look only a few steps more realistic than something you’d see on
The Muppet Show. Camp and solemnity march hand-in-hand here. That could give anyone who wants it plentiful excuse to mock the movie as outdated, but it’s also an interesting look into a time when audiences weren’t so ready to reject any message they didn’t have to drill through several layers of irony to unearth.
The plot of
Planet of the Apes is pretty well-known. Charleston Heston stars as a grizzly-faced astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet where intelligent apes rule all and humans gape at each other and forage for crops like so many loin-cloth clad locusts. Heston is taken prisoner, and all of ape society is aghast at this talking, properly walking freak of nature. Adorable reversals of popular phrases follow. “Man see, man do,” one ape says. The
Scopes Monkey Trial is reenacted with apes in the roles of both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the latter arguing that apes could not have evolved from humans since the ape scriptures clearly state otherwise.
Today, all of this stuff would be incredibly tongue-in-cheek, and according to
reviews written at the time, they may have been true even then. But whatever its original audience thought, the movie at least has the confidence to play everything with a straight face. That leaves it open to ridicule- it’s very hard not to roll one’s eyes and crack wise when some guy in a Halloween costume flaps his lips vaguely in time with his line and says “To apes, all men look alike,” and yet, by wearing its heart so obviously on its sleeve, the movie can land on images of surprising power. The famous last shot, where Heston comes across a ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of a beach and realizes that humans are responsible for the sorry state of the world, is stark and haunting and effective.
It’s been said we’re living in an
Age of Irony. People today simply know too much- about their friends, about their society, about other people’s society- to be surprised or delighted by much of anything. In a world where we can safely assume that everything will eventually go downhill, treating things ironically is the only way we can squeeze enjoyment out of them.
Planet of the Apes comes from a different time, one where people actually enjoyed things for their own sake and believed that warnings against letting humanity’s darker impulses take it over might actually be useful. And yet there are those who argue that
the Age of Irony is over and that most people are ready to embrace simple things like family and country and to enjoy them sincerely. Whether
Planet of the Apes plays like an artifact from a time long gone or a rousing action-adventure with a pertinent warning about our future as a species may depend on which camp you fall into.
Except for the monkey make-up, which is goofy no matter how you look at it.
