Le Secret de la planète des singes

It took two years for the sequel to Planet Of The Apes to get to the big screen, henceforth 20th Century Fox would space them out about a year at a time. Beneath The Planet Of The Apes seems to have been inspired a lot by Dr. Strangelove played far less tongue in cheek by the cast.

Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison, and Charlton Heston return for this first sequel. And James Franciscus is the only survivor of a rescue ship sent after Heston and his crew. Of course he finds the same simian civilization that Heston found and with the same problems and friends among the apes.

Franciscus goes into the forbidden zone that Heston entered, but now the apes have a military chieftain who wants to enter and conquer the previous forbidden zone. He's played by a thuggish James Gregory.

Maurice Evans is the scientist who has a vested interest in keeping the ape orthodox traditions inviolate. He doesn't want to go into the forbidden zone where Heston and Franciscus have gone, but the force of public opinion is working against him. He tags along with Gregory's military expedition to watch out for their culture.

Of course there are humans there and of a higher order than the simple creatures who were thought to be below the simian on this planet. What happens when they encounter those humans is for you to see the film for.

No doubt the force of public opinion influenced 20th Century Fox to make this sequel. Today's sequels to popular films are the result of certain teaser questions put into the plots of the originals. That was not done back then clearly because of some rather clumsy writing in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes. And certainly the ending here did not anticipate yet another sequel.

Despite that though a lot of good social commentary about the world and America got into this film, maybe even more than in the original Planet Of The Apes. Nobody could mistake the protests of the young chimpanzees to the military expedition for anything else, but criticizing the war in Vietnam and Nixon's incursion into China.

As in the first film my favorite is foxy Maurice Evans, protector of the orthodox ape religion and culture. Fans of the series will be pleased with him and the film.

In terms of follow ups to surprisingly great films that should never have had a sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is almost the exact kind of movie that it should have been to come after Planet of the Apes. It expands the world of the film in a new and interesting direction, continues the feeling of weirdness that helped the original, and even moves the thematic ideas of the original into even darker directions. However, to even get to that the movie repeats the original, almost beat for beat, in its first half, introducing a new, not terribly necessary, protagonist, and spends so little time actually establishing the conflict that defines the second half that it all feels like wasted potential more than anything else.

The problems originated from the fact that Charlton Heston gave a flat refusal to starring in the sequel, eventually being talked into working on the film for two weeks total as long as his character of Taylor died. So, the writer and director decided that the best way forward was to give us a new astronaut, Brent, who had followed Taylor into deep space and ended up in the same place at the same time. That means that all of the revelations about the planet need to happen again to a character who's a full movie behind the audience. He finds Nova, follows her to Ape City where he discovers the upside down nature of the place, meets Zira and Cornelius for reasons, and then escapes again. At the movie's halfway point, he ends up in an abandoned New York City subway station and has his revelation in much smaller and less visually impressive environs than Taylor got at the end of the previous film.

Along with this action is some really ill-defined brewing conflict between the apes led by Dr. Zaius and General Ursus, a gorilla, and the Forbidden Zone. There's a line of dialogue about how scouts had gone missing which seems to be the sole motivation for taking an entire army into the Forbidden Zone, and it's thin stuff. The thing is that Dr. Zaius spoke in ways, at the end of the first movie, that seemed to indicate that the ruling class of the ape society knew a lot more about history and the Forbidden Zone than they told everyone else. It would have been easy enough to make the connection that Zaius knew of the mutant humans under the ruins of New York City, but not in any great detail, and assumed that Taylor was part of them, creating the argument that the mutants were expanding into ape territory, providing the impetus for the entire action. As it is, we spend so little time with them and so much time with Brent discovering what the audience already knows, that it all ends up as thin as possible.

The movie doesn't even really feel like a sequel until the second half once Brent and Nova go deeper into New York City through the subway. It feels like that's the actual beginning of the movie, and it should have been Taylor going in instead of this new character Brent. And the second half of the film has a bunch of stuff that I love. The mutants who worship an atomic bomb? Yes, please. I love that. They're wearing masks that look like real skin to hide their mutated selves beneath? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I love it. The religious ritual that's held in the remnants of St. Patrick's Cathedral and uses Catholic prayers with bomb and fallout replacing any mention of God? I love it even more. It's the exact kind of twisted stuff that 60s and 70s science fiction excelled at. Another thing that that era of science fiction loved was nihilism (which made Star Trek stand out because it was hopeful in a sea of nihilistic science fiction), and the movie ending with Taylor blowing up the world because screw it, it all sucks, is something I love.

Not everything in the second half is great, though. The use of Brent requires a late introduction to Taylor that feels out of place. There's a fight scene that doesn't really work for me. And, most important of all, the conflict between ape and mutant was so thinly established that when the gorilla army shows up and attacks, it feels really empty. There are some surprisingly great visuals here like when the gorilla army is marching into St. Patrick's with the sole remaining mutant standing before the golden doomsday bomb, but they're empty because, again, the conflict itself is empty.

And, to top it off, I think that the inclusion of Brent wasn't just unnecessary from a storytelling perspective, but it was unnecessary from a production perspective as well. Some judicious use of body doubles and scheduling could have gotten Charlton Heston to carry his part of the movie completely in just a couple weeks of filming. The thing is that the ape society stuff needed to stand on its own without a human involved, having Taylor get lost in the mutant city early, spending time with Dr. Zaius to convincingly build the conflict with the mutants in the Forbidden Zone, and then leaning into the conflict as a continuation of the damnation of humanity that is the first film. I think it could have worked really quite well if there wasn't a need to remake the film unnecessarily in the first half.

Oh well, it's a mixed bad, but it definitely has stuff that works. Unfortunately, that stuff is outnumbered by the more mediocre material that supports it. It's far from one of the worst sequels to a great film ever made. It has too many interesting ideas and visuals to dismiss it completely, but it could have been better.

Very high quality sequel to the original. No, it was not quite as good as the original but the performances and the story were both strong. Just watched it on DVD and forgot about how creepy the underground mutant people were. Especially when they were chanting to their "god". James Franciscus gave a very good performance and Linda Harrison is simply HOT! The ending was a little too abrupt but the movie is well worth seeing and owning on DVD.

Beneath was the best Planet of the Apes film bar none. Everything was bigger and better this time around: bigger sets, more gorillas, the whole of New York instead of a mere Statue of Liberty, and, best of all, faceless, telepathic mutants than can kill with the mind. Yes, I was once ten years old.

Watched again with many years of hindsight, it's clear that, while entertaining, Beneath was produced without anything approaching artistry. The ultimate in sequels, it tries to tell the same story twice as big, but with only half the success. Until Battle came along and picked the flesh off Apes' rotting carcass this was the worst sequel because it did nothing new with the format. Even the working title - Planet of the Apes Revisited - betrays the lack of thought and the desire for finance that went into this one.

A virtually identical plotline rattles along at a fair pace, meaning all subtlety is jettisoned. The allegories are also confused by not really being allegories at all. Look at the metaphor for anti-war protestors by casting chimps as ... er, anti-war protestors. A look at how man often judges another man on the colour of his skin is alluded to ... er, by having an ape judging a man on the colour of his skin. (On this note, perversely for a film that purports liberal satire, the only one of the mutants to demonstrate real cruelty was Don Pedro Colley, the sole black character in the film. And despite its worthiness, I don't think I've ever seen another film where a man's credit is given as "Negro"). However, I did have to smile at the chimp that punningly complains about "gorilla brutality".

The decreased budget (a sensible studio idea to cut the finance of the sequels to a hit movie) shows with some of the ape extras having decidedly ropy masks in the crowd scenes. The opening of the picture also recaps the first, cannily highlighting the glaring difference between Roddy McDowall's and David Watson's performances as Cornelius. Watson, standing in for an absent McDowall, does reasonably well but really doesn't look anything like him, even under latex. Note too how all the ape masks give the actors lisps, something I never noticed before. Never mind apes, anyone would think James Franciscus had landed on the planet of the Pertwees. There's also some abysmal back projection work when Franciscus is wrestling on top of the horsedrawn carriage. The mutants are pretty good, though their prayers to "The Holy Fallout" are a little silly. Why do they wear human masks anyway? Where do they make them? I dunno, I don't make the rules up, do I?

Of course, the main problem is the pointless game of one-upmanship it plays with its source. There's no longer any element of surprise that this is Earth, so the ruined monuments, nice as they are, no longer have any great effect. It misses the point, also: the Statue of Liberty is not just a relic, but a symbol. New York Subway is just where people caught trains. And as impressive as the effects are, if not directed well – which they aren't, particularly – then it becomes fatuous.

It's weird how all four sequels were made within a year of each other, yet at least two of them tried something new. Beneath came two years after the original yet has a rehashed "in it for the money" feel all the way through, right down to its abrupt, slightly unsatisfactory climax. Yet despite the many, many faults I've levelled at it, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is still a very enjoyable film. Not in the sense of the first, which genuinely had something to say, but in the guise of pulp SF then this sequel is well worth seeing. In fact, despite the slating I've given it, I still awarded it 6/10.

Quite a far way off its predecessor, even if 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' is still a good film.

Charlton Heston reportedly wasn't initially interested in returning for a sequel, though, to his credit, did in the end return briefly to tie up his character's loose end - and apparently even gave his fee to charity. That's why we don't see much of him here, which is a shame but given the aforementioned it came out well enough.

James Franciscus takes over from Heston and does a fine job, the latter is definitely the better of the two but Franciscus is passable. Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and Linda Harrison do return, though the first two basically play second fiddle to others - including newcomer James Gregory's bunch of characters; Gregory is solid, fwiw. As for the film's other parts, make-up etc., it's basically the same as the original. The plot even feels similar for a fair chunk of this production, though it eventually goes its own way.

I'm even more interested to check out the subsequent sequels, given the ending to this 1970 film was apparently intended - by those on the ground, so to speak - to be the final entry; the studio evidently wasn't in agreement.