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After the world ended when Taylor pressed the Doomsday button in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" Zira, Cornelius and Dr. Milo managed to get Taylor's spaceship working again and launched themselves into space and through time. They crash-land on Earth in 1973, two-thousand years before their own time and two years on since Taylor left Earth. They are found by the US military and taken to the zoo, but when they start talking to the humans they become celebrities and are wined-and-dined throughout the country. Dr. Hasselein, advisor to the President of the United States, is sceptical, however, and wants to know more about the world that the apes came from, something which they have been elusive about. When he discovers the truth, he believes that it would be in humanity's best interests if the apes were exterminated.

Where the first sequel was a carbon-copy of the original, up until the end that is, "Escape..." is certainly different. It would have been difficult to predict what they could have done with another sequel following the ending of the last one but they certainly did do a good job here. As likable as Zira and Cornelius were in the first two instalments, it is here that we truly start to care for them as characters. McDowall and Hunter are brilliant together. Bradford Dillman (Who would later take the lead in "Piranha") also stars. The last ten minutes came out of nowhere and were shocking and this time, we were left with no doubt that another sequel would follow.

MORD39 RATING: *** out of ****

This third APES film ingeniously manages to keep the franchise alive and produces what is arguably the second best film of the five originals.

After the ultimate ending in BENEATH, who could have believed a new story was possible? Here the tables are turned from the original film with a remarkable twist: now three of our chimpanzee characters take off in Charlton Heston's spaceship and wind up going BACK in time, to "present Day" Earth (1973 A.D.) Once it is learned that Zira (Kim Hunter in her best performance in the series) is pregnant with the child that could possibly turn our future into the PLANET OF THE APES, she and her husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) go from becoming honored celebrities to dangerous threats to humanity!

It's a brilliant idea, and now it is possible to start the series anew (chronologically, this movie comes first) and see whether or not Taylor's nightmare from the first film can be prevented or will rear its ugly head for mankind.

A little defending is in order here. Many people get hung up on the story's notion that the chimpanzees can actually manage to fix Taylor's ship from the first film and actually launch it. Well, I say that if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the idea of a society of talking apes, why can't you accept that one of them (Dr. Milo) is a super-intelligent ape, sort of the "Albert Einstein" or "Thomas Edison" of his time? Besides, when folks get stuck on a point like that it becomes impossible for them to have a good time with a film. As Cornelius said in the movie: "Dr. Milo was a genius well in advance of his time." He was able to fly the ship. Case Closed.

Next case: the "TV Movie" look of the film. SO WHAT? People have become so accustomed to garbage like 1999's THE MUMMY that unless all films are over-swamped with spectacular sets and numbing effects, they can't enjoy them. Well, ESCAPE needs none of these to tell its simple story. It's got something that sci-fi stories today have lost..."heart".

I've always had mixed feelings about ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES. As a kid forty-five years ago, I saw all five original films on television and I loved them all. ESCAPE I enjoyed because I had a huge little boy crush on Kim Hunter, and I thought Dr. Zira was so brave, funny, and even sexy. On the other hand, this is the one movie in the series with no battle scenes, no gorillas on horseback, and no epic excitement or adventure. So on that level I'm sorry to say this was my least favorite Apes film . . . Forty five years ago.

So the other day I got all five films on Blu Ray for about 15 dollars. And when I watched ESCAPE as a 55 year old I was very impressed. It's not really a kid's adventure film, or even a science fiction spectacle. This movie is a tragedy, in the most profound sense of the word. In spirit it's much closer to CHINATOWN than the original PLANET OF THE APES.

Everyone remembers Zira and Cornelius as a cute, fun couple. That's how I remembered them too. But when you actually watch the film you see that they are really tragic heroes. When they flee the hospital with their baby there are Biblical overtones. (The President actually compares himself to Herod!) But what's still more disturbing is the way Zira herself owns up to the savage things that went on in her own laboratory in the future world. Her self-knowledge is a grim component of her eventual tragic fate. Her insistence on truth only makes her more admirable after she reveals some truly terrible secrets.

It's a waste of time to point out that Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowell both give career best performances as Zira and Cornelius. But what astonished me after forty-five years was the incredible intensity of Eric Braeden as Dr. Otto Hasslein. (He was just as spectacular as the doomed werewolf in a classic episode of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER.) Dr. Hasslein is clearly meant to remind us of Nazi scientists and doctors who did unspeakable things in World War II. But at the same time he's like the tormented Christian heroes in THE OMEN movies, searching for the Anti Christ before the earth runs out of time. Each chilling thing he does is made more chilling by the fact that he's sincere in trying to stop what he thinks of as real evil. On the other hand, William Windom is surprisingly affable and humane as the President of the United States. STAR TREK fans will remember his epic meltdown in "The Doomsday Machine," but here he plays the voice of reason, a decent man who refuses to become hysterical in the face of mankind's doom.

Superb script, intense, haunting drama, beautiful tragic characters . . . All that's missing is the action, excitement, and gorillas on horseback!

In a brilliant solution for continuing the storyline after the ending of BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, three intelligent chimpanzees from Earth's future take off in Charlton Heston's salvaged spacecraft just prior to Earth's destruction; they wind up hurled backward in time to 1973 California and - in an interesting twist on the original theme - now find themselves the strange visitors in a strange world ruled by bombastic human beings.

Lovable simians Zira and Cornelius (expertly played by Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall) lose their friend Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo!) early on in a tragic accident, and find themselves in a strange situation when mankind first welcomes them as celebrities and garnishes them with gifts, but ultimately begins to fear when it is learned that Zira is pregnant with an ape offspring that could grow to overtake humanity.

We really grow to sympathize with the plight of the chimpanzee couple, and we fear along with them and the safety of their child when they become hunted fugitives later in the story. Eric Braeden is very good as the quintessential villain out to kill the ape family at any cost.

Some people enjoy picking on the APES sequels as they continued, but I've always felt this series consistently remained very intelligent and had something powerful to say about race relations and prejudice. People want to know how apes could ever manage to send Taylor's ship into orbit; I say that if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the notion of intelligent apes, then it shouldn't be that far a reach to accept that Dr. Milo was the genius of his time who just could pull it off; the Thomas Edision of his type, if you will.

The timeline in the five apes films is often admittedly contradictory, but there are ways that fans of the Apes movies have been able to make them work. For example, in this film Cornelius seems to talk about Ape History and Evolution in a way that actually doesn't follow suit during the next two installments. That's because the very arrival of Zira and Cornelius onto present-day Earth of 1973, and the subsequent birth of their baby, will accelerate the procedure from how Cornelius remembered it, as we'll see in the next two chapters. The circumstances for the future will be sped up and changed, and the apes will evolve at a much quicker rate.

Some of the other dubious complaints are aimed at the "lesser budgets," or supposed "TV Movie Look" of the sequels from this point on -- but this story in ESCAPE does not require mind-numbing special effects or hordes of CGI-rendered ape figures swarming Los Angeles to make it effective. It's got a lot of heart and good writing with characters we care about, and that's all it needs. ***1/2 out of ****

ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES is a tale set in the madness of a paranoid 1970's in which zira and cornelius must fight for their lives and the life of their unborn baby. Using taylors ship zira and cornelius time warp to 1970's earth and are embraced by mankind. They soon become the target of a government think tank who fears their unborn child. In a era that listened to HAL LINDSEY scream the anti christ is coming this film taps into that paranoid vein with the "john birchish" character of Hessline who fears ziras baby. The film deals with the two apes dealing with 20th century earth and attempting to survive the scrutiny of the government. One of the best and most original films in the series the story told in this film makes it stand out. A fine film.