Some of the Genius of "The Planet of the Apes" (1968)

            The Original 1968 “Planet of the Apes” is a science fiction classic.  It is so influential as to seem pedestrian by modern standards, filled with story elements ranging from cliché to thin.  But much like all classics in any genre, the reason it feels predictable or unremarkable is simply because we grew up in a world that it helped create.  The final twist is one of the most iconic moments in movie history, endlessly parodied and creating a demand for clever twists in the genre from there out…. Kind of.

The Plot

            A group of astronauts crash land on a primitive world, after taking a quick assessment of the local humans and concluding they will be running the place in short order, they are then confronted with a brutal reality, a race of ape-men control the planet and use humans as little more than cattle.  The presence of the astronauts, humans who can speak and possessing scientific knowledge beyond what the apes thought humans capable of, throws the social order into a spin.

            Ultimately, it is revealed that the Apes have been covering up the truth, that a once great human civilization ruled earth before destroying itself.  The last astronaut explores the ruins and reveals that the lost civilization was the USA.  The “Alien Planet” was Earth the whole time.  The Astronauts had been in suspended animation and arrived in the far future after a cataclysmic war.

The Twist

By today’s standards the twist is an anti-twist.  Why would an alien planet have humans?  There is a dead giveaway.  BUT, it is important to understand the world this movie was released into.  I kind of give the twist a pass because at the time Science Fiction was still more allegorical to old time adventure and exploration stories about being at sea and finding islands with natives that resembled us but had a differing social order.

For instance, look at "Star Trek" which was still on the air when the movie was released.  Star Trek had so many human populated planets that the whole thing feels cheap in retrospect.  But, it is a consequence of the genre, Star Trek was asked to use props the studio had on hand so as to squeeze all the utility they could out of them.  “We’ve got a Gangster Planet, an Ancient Rome in Modern Times Planet, we have a planet with a Haunted Castle, and another with Greco Ruins!”

The audience for “Planet of the Apes” was primed to say, "Okay, so this is a planet much like ours that fell to apes."  More akin to a cheap out rendition of the Elder Thing/Shoggoth civilization in, "At the Mountains of Madness" by HP Lovecraft.  Altho, the sub textual message of that story WAS SUPER DIFFERENT than the message of “Apes”.  (I should talk about that sometime.)

Having the twist of “Planet of the Apes” be that it was explicitly Earth might have rocked some mental boats because the audience saw Earth in science fiction as being safe from those kinds of story.  Or at least you knew what you were getting into, like “The Last Man on Earth”.  There weren’t any other post-apocalyptic movies from this era that took place on Earth and that was the big reveal, people were just used to certain genre conventions pulling them toward not getting the twist.  Kind of.

The Context

            Let us briefly travel back in time to the era of 60’s science fiction and look at what I would consider the most influential science fiction works of the time and why that presents an important context for “Planet of the Apes”.  At the time there were four shows that have remained in the popular consciousness because of their deep penetration into pop culture.  “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” which were more oriented toward exploration in the classic adventure story sense, and “The Twilight Zone” and the “Outer Limits” which were both genre-shows known for having twist endings.

            All four of these shows have an element of anthology storytelling to them.  “Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits” explicitly, but “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” often felt like standalone storytelling, continuity was not as strong an element as it is these days, the crew of the Enterprise or TaRDiS would show up at a place, be confronted with a science fiction story, and then solve the story and leave, you could watch a serial of “Doctor Who” or an episode of “Star Trek” and see it as a standalone story for the most part.

            Now, “Doctor Who” would travel to possible futures and show the world in various states of decay, or back in time to show the literal caves humans used to live in.  “Star Trek” would travel to human populated worlds and often times had embarrassing presentations of, “THIS COULD BE EARTH!” presentations with “The Omega Glory” one of the most obnoxious episodes of the series.  But neither of these shows was about seeing EARTH after the fall as a gotcha to the audience.

            “Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits” on the other hand HAD LOTS OF THIS KIND OF THING!  Tho, the “Twilight Zone” takes the cake in this department, I think there were multiple stories of Adam and Eve making the best of things in the post apocalypse of a civilization that preceded ours or being all that was left of our current world.

But, even the “Twilight Zone” twists come in a bunch of different ways, “Third from the Sun” is about people fleeing the planet in an experimental spaceship as a nuclear war is about to break out, turns out the habitable world they are fleeing to… IS EARTH!

Conclusion

            We have this era of science fiction in which Astronauts like the crew of the Enterprise go to planets *like Earth* that have some twist, only looking like Earth to make a point.  We also have “The Twilight Zone” which has twists all about saying, “And it was Earth all along”.  I think the reason “Planet of the Apes” works is that those two micro-genres in Science Fiction, “we are somewhere else” and “it was Earth” really had not mixed as much at the time.

            When the movie starts we think we are watching “Star Trek” by the end we realize we are watching “The Twilight Zone”.  "Planet of the Apes" bridged that gap and changed people's understanding of the genre so that such a twist wouldn't really work these days without some kind of setup that would require a lot more explanation (for instance, “humans have been space faring for so long Earth has been forgotten and the space explorers went there not knowing what it was”).

            Or, you know, maybe I don’t know what I am talking about.  “Planet of the Apes” had a lot going on with animal rights and the idea of a social order that strips the humanity and history from a people to make them into cattle.  Creating a metaphor that some would call “mixed”, but I prefer to look at as complex.  Trying to do too direct a comparison to real life issues always feels cartoonish to me, I prefer to have a blending of issues so that the audience has to do some of the work and can reach their own conclusions about the touched-on topics.

            Or, you know, maybe I don’t know what I am talking about.

"Oh shit.  There goes the planet."

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