Thin line between apes and humans
As cinema's great simian saga adds a new episode, Mathew Scott looks at the socio-political issues that fuel Planet of the Apes' appeal to audiences
To fully appreciate the impact Planet of the Apes first had, it helps to look back to the turmoil throughout the world in 1968.
When director Franklin J. Schaffner launched the original franchise - presenting box office hero Charlton Heston, embodiment of the all-American man, as an astronaut who stumbles on to a planet that is strangely familiar - the Vietnam war was still raging, while the civil rights movement had gripped America and shaken that nation into facing up to issues of freedom and basic human rights.
“I was struck by how these films were about violence, fear, hatred and oppression, but also about the struggle for forgiveness, the importance of compassion and the necessity of taking risks to side with the vulnerable.”
In many ways, the world as people had known it was being turned upside down and for the studio heads at 20th Century Fox, Frenchman Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel La Planète des Singes provided a temptation too great to ignore. The fantastical story was designed to force its audience to question man's place on this planet and was tweaked first by one of the masters of the macabre, The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, before Michael Wilson - the once-blacklisted writer behind It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Place in the Sun (1951) - was brought in to fine-tune things.
The original budget had crept towards what was in 1968 an incredible US$6 million - but the money (which mostly went towards John Chambers' ground-breaking make-up designs) proved well-spent. The filmmakers had conjured up an imagined world that was frightening because it was so believable, backed by a razor-sharp script and impassioned lead performances (as humans and as apes) that dared the audience not to believe.
The film collected an estimated US$32 million from the box office and thrilled audiences despite a number of critics looking down their noses ("It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch," said The New York Times).
And then there were the themes explored by that first film, and by the novels, television series, comic books and reboots - the latest being Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is released on Thursday - that have been developed from it since. For California-based civil rights activist Eric Greene, author of Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture (1998), the impact the original films had on him as a youngster were immediate and the issues they forced him to address still resonate today.