Day 20 - What's the best adaptation of a sci-fi book/story?

Now I like this question. One option would be to go for an adaptation that radically changed the source novel like Blade Runner or Minority Report. Or I could look for a more faithful adaptation like Dune or Fahrenheit 451. Then there is another category, films which made an appalling travesty out of great books like the Will Smith I, Robot.

Having considered all that I'm going to return to an earlier theme on this blog. Like most other geeky children of the seventies I was Planet of the Apes mad at the time. After being shocked by the dramatic conclusion of the original film I sought out the original novel Monkey Planet by the French writer Pierre Boule. This was quite a different planet to the one shown in the film. In the book the Apes are very civilised and technologically advanced, and the differences between the Apes and the stranded astronaut are intellectual and philosophical.

So this is a film that, in my humble opinion, improves upon the source material. The best adaptation of a book is the original Planet of the Apes movie.

Rise of the planet of the motion captured sprites

My Planet of the Apes marathon finished yesterday when I paid my £6.35 and sat in an empty cinema to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

All the fanboy stuff first. There are lots of nods to the original film, the Statue of Liberty is in there along with all the famous lines and clips of old Charlton Heston films are showing on TV screens in the background. Draco Malfoy gets to be a bad guy again and his character is named after the other two astronauts from Planet of the Apes. There's also the nice touch of background news items about a manned mission to Mars and suggestions that the spacecraft is missing. Plus the planet of the apes font is used for the titles.

I thought that the writer did a good job establishing that the virus that increases ape intelligence is also the cause of the disaster which presumably send humans back to the stone age. This is not quite the apocalypse that Taylor thinks has happened by the end of the original film but it still fits. However it makes no sense for the four sequels, not that it sets out to.

The performance capture of Andy Serkis playing the part of Caesar is very impressive, or at least it is when he's not moving about much. There is the usual problem of CGI and fast movement, the apes don't seem to have any weight when they are making their huge leaps. But the close up stuff is fairly impressive, especially in the baleful malevolence of Serkis as Caesar.

The science in the movie is a bit dodgy. If James Franco's character really had developed a drug that could reverse Alzheimer's disease for even 5 years then it would be worth millions and he wouldn't keep it to himself. There is also a lot of confusion about genetics, the scientists in the film should remember the work of Lamarck on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. They do fudge the issue a bit by suggesting that the virus affects genes so it could be passed on to some extent.

Overall it was an enjoyable romp. It's been a box office success so I guess we will be seeing a sequel. For the time being however my apes marathon is over.
All that remains for me to say is "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

Mark of the Apes

My Apes marathon moves on to Tim Burton's 2001 remake (or re-imagining) of Planet of the Apes. Based on the original film and Pierre Boule's 1963 novel Monkey Planet which inspired the whole franchise.

Let's look at the positives first. The ape costumes and make-up have obviously improved immeasurably, although they seem to have a problem with the female chimpanzees' hair. Likewise the actors have obviously all been to an ape movement class and so they leap, climb and swing more like real simians. There's also a more accurate depiction of the difference in strength between humans and apes. And Michael Clarke Duncan gets to deliver the apes' version of Charlton Heston's famous "Get your stinking paws off me!" line.

After that the film rapidly deteriorates. Mark Wahlberg has gone on to do better things but he struggles here. Why is his character out of breath all the time? Is he trying to convey a sense of urgency, or is he having an asthma attack from all the flying fur? And would it have killed them to call his character Taylor instead of Davidson. It's not as if that is even a nod back to the original novel where the hero was called Merou.

Talking about flying fur how do the apes do the huge jumps that they manage in this film? A certain degree of bouncing about seems OK but here they do huge Crouching Tiger, Hidden dragon leaps. There's clearly wire work going on when General Thade flies on to the back of his horse.

Everything happens too quickly, before we know it Davidson and a rag-tag bunch of apes and humans have escaped to the forbidden zone and he has inspired the human slaves to rise up against the apes. There's a bloody battle, then a literal Deus ex Machina appears which just leaves Davidson to hop back in his spaceship, do the time warp again and make his own date with destiny and another twist ending. Incidentally if he's such a hot-shot pilot how come he crashes two separate ships when the chimpanzee makes such a perfect landing? And to think he left behind Estella Warren's cleavage to just go and crash on another ape planet. Epic fail!

Given the choice between this remake and the original choose the Charlton Heston version every time. Heston does show up in this version briefly and gets to repeat his "Damn them all to hell!" line but I would much rather watch him kneeling in the surf, pounding his fists than this expensive mess of a movie.

More Monkey Business

I have a surfeit of things to blog about today, almost a plethora. Having watched the five original Planet of the Apes in order I finished off the box set by watching the two hour documentary "Behind the Planet of the Apes".

Roddy McDowell (who else?) hosts the documentary and all the major players show up including Charlton Heston, Ricardo Montalban, Kim Hunter, the make-up wizard John Chambers, and the director J. Lee Thompson.

It covers much of the ground that I have been talking about for each film. In particular the social commentary about race relations, animal testing, the Vietnam war and so on. There were bits and pieces which were new to me. In particular the early make up tests of Edward G Robinson as the Orangutan Dr Zaius. Strangely their first attempts look more like a real ape to me than the appliances they finally ended up with. Maybe Edward G Robinson just looked more like an Orangutan. Sadly the actor didn't feel well enough to commit to the brutal shooting schedule although he did go on to have one great performance with Charlton Heston in Soylent Green.

The other interesting thing was that the budget was reduced for each successive sequel which seems strange when the studio was making so much money out of them. Four sequels, a TV show, comic books, a Saturday morning cartoon and all the merchandising which would lead the way for what happened after Star Wars. I'm sure the studio made their money back several times over.

Let's step back from the documentary and finish by considering the ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie. At some point in the 1970s I think the BBC showed a series of science fiction films including Silent Running, Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. And wow! What a shock ending that was back when there were no spoilers. The only thing we had was word of mouth in the playground the next day. I remember being stunned by the scene of Heston kneeling in the surf pounding his fist into the sand and howling out his rage at what had happened. It was all we talked about at school for days afterwards. Nowadays films with twist endings are ten a penny but had any film ever managed such a shocker before Planet of the Apes?

Looking at wikipedia suggest a few possibilities for earlier examples but this must have been the first one I encountered. A fantastic moment in film history.

Now onwards to the Tim Burton reboot, and from there to Andy Serkis and some performance capture?

Those Battling Apes

It's the last of the original Planet of the Apes films. Number five is Battle for the Planet of the Apes from 1973, directed by J. Lee Thompson.

Even though this film came out only a year after number four we start with a recap of the last two films. This is delivered by the Orangutan known as the Lawgiver who is played by John Huston. Let's just say that again, John Huston dons the make up, wig and orange suit and plays an ape. Hollywood was really taking this stuff seriously in the early 70s.

It's ten years since the slave uprising in the last film and a raggedy group of apes and humans are trying to scratch out a living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. They are led by Caesar (Roddy McDowell again) who has won the war and now has to win the peace. He's got dissent in his own ranks coming from the gorillas led by General Aldo, and he has to deal with attacks from a group of human survivors living under the ruins of a radioactive city. This bunch of scarred, gun crazy loons are well on their way to transforming into the mutants who we saw in the second movie. So at least there is a suggestion of building the continuity of the whole time loop that links all the films.

This is probably the first Apes film I saw when I snuck into a cinema under-age in 1973 or 1974. But it was the film I couldn't remember anything about at all. So it all came as a complete surprise to me. Caesar has now moved from the revolutionary we saw in Conquest and here he more resembles Nelson Mandela trying to build a peaceful community after a terrible war and a reversal of fortunes for the oppressed apes and their human masters. Of course we know the peace won't last. The clue is the word Battle in the title. So soon he has pissed off the mutating human neighbours and then there are plenty of guns and explosions, including one shot of an exploding tree that they liked so much they kept using it over and over again.

Style notes: in the ten years since the last film the apes have all adopted the familiar coloured outfits that we remember from the original film. The mutants have started to wear their skull caps. And the rest of humanity get to wear rather grubby, grey uniforms. Clearly the apes get all of the soap in this post-apocalyptic society.

It's a short film with not a lot to say either for or against it. However it is very nice to see Austin Stoker who played the police lieutenant in the brilliant Assault on Precinct 13.

So if I had to rank the ape films in order of greatness then the original is still the best and then it goes Conquest, Escape, Battle and Beneath in diminishing order.

Next up, the apes documentary and then it will be time for Marky Mark

Normal Conquests

It's apes number four. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes from 1972 directed by J.Lee Thompson who also directed the original Cape Fear. They were certainly turning these sequels out fast, one a year regular as clockwork.

This one jumps forwards 20 years from the previous film to a futuristic 1991 filmed in and around the concrete walkways and high rises of Century city, Los Angeles. Roddy McDowell plays Caesar, the son of Cornelius and Zira from Escape, who arrives in the city at the start of the film. It's all very strange with apes acting as servants to bored humans who seem to spend all their time shopping, getting their hair done and eating in fancy restaurants. Luckily Ricardo Montalban is on hand to explain it to us. A virus from space has wiped out all the cats and dogs on the planet so mankind adopted apes as pets and then started to train and condition them as servants and a virtually free workforce. It's not explained how apes have changed into the more humanoid shape portrayed in the film, or how humans can man-handle fully grown gorillas so easily.

A word about clothing here. The Planet of the Apes movies like uniformity: all chimpanzees wear green, orang-utans wear orange, and gorillas wear black, although in this film the gorillas wear Guantanamo bay orange jump suits. In this future setting all the humans wear black or grey suits with all the men wearing turtle neck sweaters under their jackets. And the police? Well they wear black uniforms with silver piping and shiny peaked caps. It's strange that whenever science fiction wants to depict some oppressive police force they reach for the design book marked SS. At least George Lucas gave the storm-troopers white armour as a break with tradition.

Let us look past the uniforms, the humanoid apes, the problems of crowd control and the numerous extras wearing rather poor ape masks. This film is all about the birth of a revolutionary. Caesar is soon separated from the kindly Montalban and forced to hide in plain sight amongst his fellow apes. As he witnesses the brutal tactics used to subdue his ape brothers and sisters so his revolutionary spirit grows. Soon he is recruiting apes to his cause, stockpiling weapons and planning a campaign of civil disobedience which will lead to the film's climax and the conquest of the title.

Roddy McDowell does pretty well here in probably his biggest role in all the ape films. I would have liked to have a bit more time to watch his growth from friendly circus chimp to the leader of a slave uprising but at least we get much more action than in the last film. Again there is plenty for the stunt men to do and particular credit to the two guys involved in the flame thrower fight.

This may be the high point of the ape sequels. Of course the future depicted is pretty unlikely but if we can look past the many improbabilities this is an entertaining film and certainly my favourite of the sequels so far.
Next up is Battle for the Planet of Apes and memories of teenagers bluffing their way in to films they are too young for.

Escape Act

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programme. And it's number three in the Ape franchise: Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Released in 1971 and directed by Don Taylor. Roddy McDowell returns as Cornelius having handed his ape mask to David Watson for the second film while he was away directing a film in Scotland. Kim Hunter plays Zira for the third time and and Sal Mineo is briefly in it as a third Chimpanzee called Dr. Milo.

It is Dr Milo who has set up the major plot device for this film. Apparently he recovered Taylor's sunken spaceship from the first film and has been working to understand it. With remarkable prescience the three chimps have foreseen the war and the destruction of the planet that took place at the end of the second film, and have left in Taylor's ship just in the nick of time. The explosion and shock-wave have somehow propelled them back through the same space-time thingy that Taylor and Brent encountered and they find themselves in 1970s America. This is a bit of a cheat really, we were given Taylor's time travelling as a consequence of Einsteinian time dilatation but now we have some space time portal that is apparently two way. Anyway they need that bit of physics cheating to set up the memorable scene of the three space-suited astronauts climbing out of the beached spacecraft and then shocking the welcoming party by removing their helmets to reveal themselves as Apes. Where did they get those spacesuits and helmets from anyway?

After this great opening and the further revelation that these apes are intelligent the film gets very talky for a while. Poor Dr Milo is rapidly dispatched by a depressed gorilla in the zoo. A truly terrible man in a furry suit performance by the gorilla by the way. Then Cornelius and Zira are presented to the world and get caught up in a whirl of parties, shopping and social events. Meanwhile serious men are talking serious talk in secret rooms. Zira manages to let slip pretty much the whole plot and all their secrets about mankind's future. There is a nicely sinister performance by Eric Braeden as Dr Otto Hasslein, the physicist mentioned by Taylor in the first film who now becomes the driving force in the campaign to neutralise the apes. His accent seems a little variable (German? South African?) but he's a restrained and creepy bad guy.

Once we learn that Zira is pregnant (and in convenient fashion she blurts this out herself, not very good with secrets is our Zira) then we can see exactly how the plot is going to play out and there are no surprises from then on. And here we get another huge time paradox of the sort that makes my head hurt if I think about it too  much. The sort of thing that Doctor Who cheerfully bashes through week after week. I don't think I am giving too much away if I say that Cornelius and Zira's son survives to the end of the film and sets up the next sequel and in fact the Planet of the Apes itself. But if Taylor hadn't gone into space, and if the chimps hadn't found his ship, and if ... Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, number three is a much better film than its predecessor. There's not much in the way of action but the central performances are good. There are also brief appearances from notable character actor M. Emmet Walsh (Deckard's boss in Blade Runner) and Ricardo Montalban (old wrathful Khan himself). Montalban's limp, the result of a nasty horse riding accident, is quite obvious in this film.

Despite the physics cheating and the major time travel paradox this is a much better scripted film than number two and quite a fun watch. Now onwards and upwards to Conquest!

Beneath Contempt?

The second film in the series is Beneath the Planet of the Apes. And if the first one zipped along then this one is just rushed. The success of the original obviously pushed the studio to make a quick sequel and the pressure shows. It starts out as a classic sequel as Joe Bob Briggs would say, which is to make the exact same movie again. So another Astronaut crash lands, meets up with Nova, is soon in a fur loin cloth and gets captured by apes and then we get some escape and recapture excitement and a lot of chasing around on horses. The stunt men really earn their pay here as there are several big falls and horse stunts plus a tricky fight on top of a horse drawn carriage. Considering that the stunt men and women were doing this in ape costumes and probably had their vision obscured by the masks it's all pretty impressive. There's also quite a few horse falls which I don't think they would get away with nowadays.

But all this impressive action can't conceal the padding that goes on in the first half of the film. The writers were looking for something to make the film different to the first and they certainly found it in the second half! The astronaut, Brent, and Nova escape to the forbidden zone and find themselves in the remains of the New York subway system. Then there's a bunch of telepathic mutant humans who worship an atomic bomb. For no obvious reason they seem to be at war with the apes who are currently marching towards them. There's some weird telepathic visions that the mutants are using to keep the apes away. And then Charlton Heston turns up again to be forced to fight Brent before a final shoot out with all the Mutants pulling off rubber masks to reveal their hideously scarred faces.

The writers seemed to have just been throwing stuff at the screen and hoping some of it made an impression. There's a lot less talking and symbolism than in the first film. Although there is one brief moment when Ursus and Zaius lead the Gorilla army out of Ape City towards the forbidden zone and their path is blocked by some Chimpanzee peace protesters who are swiftly bundled off into nearby prison carts. The film was released in 1970 and presumably they were trying to make a point about Vietnam. Perhaps we are meant to ask the same question about the Apes march into the Forbidden zone as people were asking about America's involvement in South Asia: Why would you want to go there at all?

So the script is not up to much; the stunts are pretty good; the extras wearing monkey masks are far more obvious in this film (perhaps the new director Ted Post wasn't at skilled as concealing them as his predecessor Franklin J Schaffner) and the telepathic mutants seem to have wandered in from a different film all together. James Franciscus does a pretty good job as Brent, he seems to have been cast because with a beard he looks like a younger Charlton Heston. Although once he meets up with Taylor and with the Mutant guards you do notice that he's a bit on the short side. Charlton Heston is not in the film very much and made it pretty clear that he wanted Taylor to be killed off and to hopefully end the franchise altogether. It's also obvious that between the first and second films is when Heston made the actor's decision to start wearing a hairpiece.

Anyway the film is a bit of a mess altogether. Let's see if Escape from the Planet of the Apes is better.

Monkey Business

Before we get started on the 30 day British invaders challenge let's pause (or paws) to consider the Planet of the Apes films. There's a new CGI film out that is set up as prequel to the original film, and to possibly kick-start the franchise that the Tim Burton film seemed to have killed off.


Now I haven't seen the new one yet but what I have done is bought the box set of the original five movies which was nice and cheap on Amazon, less than the price of a cinema ticket in fact. I'm planning to watch them all in order. I know I have seen them all over the years but I only have dim memories of the four sequels, although the final film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, is a fond memory for me because it is the first film that I can remember getting in to see when I was under age. That's interesting in itself, I presume the film had an AA certificate which meant 14 years or older. It was released in 1973 when I was only 11 so I suspect I saw it on a re-release a year or two later. I seem to recall it was a double feature but I can't remember what the other film was. All I know is that myself and some school friends were very pleased with ourselves for getting in to see it before out fourteenth birthdays. Kids, huh?

So anyway I have just watched the original Planet of the Apes movie which is the one I'm most familiar with. Isn't everyone? In fact the covers of both the DVD and the box set features one of the most famous spoilers in movie history in that the famous image used gives away the ending of the film!


The film is pretty much how you remember it: the costumes and make up are good although some of the extras are clearly wearing full face masks rather than the prosthetic appliances that won the first ever Oscar for make up. The setting of the Ape city seems rather small although there are a few nice touches like the chapel sequence when Taylor crashes through an Ape funeral as he tries to escape. Then, of course, Charlton Heston gets to deliver his famous "damned dirty ape" line before escaping with Zira and Cornelius to head for the archaeological dig and from there to Taylor's date with his own destiny.


It all zips along quite nicely. There are several bits that don't make much sense. What was the purpose of the space mission in the first place? Why was there only one woman on board if they thought they would have to start a new human race? How does a talking human doll prove anything at all? And when Taylor and Cornelius have their strange, shouted conversation from opposite sides of a river gorge how did one of them get to the other side? There is also the odd moment when the stranded astronauts find a small plant as the first signs of life on the new planet and immediately dig it up.


But the really interesting thing about watching it now is that the main human protagonist Taylor is, let's face it, a bit of a dick. He clearly has strong views about the foolishness of humanity which he expresses in his captain's log recordings at the start of the film (and which, of course, set up the final shocking sequence). He spends much of the early parts of the film insulting one member of his crew, Landon and generally being obnoxious. He howls with laughter when Landon plants a small American flag in the ground by the lake where their spaceship has crash landed. And when he finds himself the prisoner of intelligent Apes and put on trial by them he doesn't resort to reason to try and argue his case but spends a lot of time shouting, resisting and generally behaving much as the conservative Dr Zaius expects him to.


It's an interesting choice by Charlton Heston. We know that Heston was involved with the screenplay and he practically chose the director himself so clearly this characterisation of Taylor was a deliberate decision by the actor. Heston has left a strange reputation behind, mainly for his involvement with the National Rifle Association but we have to remember that as a science fiction actor he played some very interesting, flawed characters. Think of him in The Omega Man or Soylent Green. He wasn't a straight-forward good guy in those films either.


The other nice feature that I had forgotten is the relationship that Taylor strikes up with Zira's teenage nephew, Lucius, who helps our hero escape. Taylor and Lucius get several nice exchanges about youthful rebellion and his dissatisfaction with the actions of his elders. It's an interesting bit of social commentary from the year 1968 when the film was released and there was plenty of youth in revolt all around our Planet of the Humans.


I was also struck by the fact that the image of Charlton Heston on the wikipedia page about him was taken at the 1963 civil rights march in Washington. The same march that Martin Luther King made his famous "I have a dream" speech on. And in another interesting echo that speech was made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial which was used as the setting for the twist ending in the Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes.


Anyway, enough musings on the original and on Charlton Heston. Next up is Beneath the Planet of the Apes which I remember features mutants, my first encounter with the word Omega, and the actor James Franciscus who was the Simon Baker of his day. Plus there's more of Linda Harrison in a cave girl outfit. So how can it go wrong?