A Review of "Battle for the Planet of the Apes"

"What do you think, Caesar?" "I am thinking that cheesy Ghordita crunchwrap is backing up on me!"

Happy Friday and welcome back to another edition of our Ape movie anthology series of reviews. I was held up a week, hadn't sat down to watch the movie we're here to review today. Now, I've seen it, and I'm back on schedule to help move this banana-lovin' batch of films down the assembly line, and closing out with the last of the original Planet of the Apes saga of films.

♫"Now this is a story of about how our life got
flipped, turned upside. I'd like to take a minute
just sit right there... I'll tell you how Caesar
became the prince with ape hair!"♫

To once again sum up: Planet of the Apes continues to be a stellar sci-fi classic. Its first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes got weird with subterranean races of telepathic humans that worship bombs, followed by the dull reality-TV show-ish presentation of Cornelius and Zira coming to 1973 Earth in Escape from the Planet of the Apes. As mentioned, it was Conquest of the Planet of the Apes that immediately roped me back in with its stellar portrayal of a repressed slave-ape in Caesar uprising and fighting back against his persecutors. NOW... it is 1973, and we have our fifth and what would be final entry in the original series: Battle for the Planet of the Apes. A continuation of Caesar's storyline from Conquest, I was hoping to see a continuation of sorts of Caesar's quest for power and his reign of ape-terror being his ultimate ape-undoing. Did this movie manage to satisfy my raised expectations? In the first half, no. In the second half, very much yes. An unbalanced, awkwardly paced movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes can be considered a okay ending if you're in the right mindset. Let's dissect this simian conclusion and see what all it has to offer.

So rather than be a direct sequel that picks up right where Conquest left off, it instead is disappointingly told as a flashback to the early 21st century, with a wraparound sequence narrated by the orangutan Lawgiver (John Huston) in "North America – 2670 A.D.". While this sequel follows the chimpanzee Caesar (Roddy McDowall) years after a global nuclear war has destroyed human civilization, it doesn't do it right after the ending of Conquest, which I found disappointing. Living with his wife, Lisa (Natalie Trundy) and their son, Cornelius (Bobby Porter), Caesar creates a new society while trying to cultivate peace between the apes and remaining humans. Caesar is opposed by an aggressive gorilla general named Aldo (Claude Akins), who wants to imprison the humans who freely roam Ape City while doing menial labor. So right away we see that human society has already collapsed a mere twenty years after. So Caesar's ending speech was... entirely correct, and Mr. MacDonald was just waywardly wrong about how Caesar's cause could fizzle out. Take THAT, moral high ground!

That face you make when you slap your pockets and don't
feel your keys, or your wallet.

After defusing followers of Aldo who attacked a human teacher Abe (Noah Keen) for saying "No" to apes, Caesar ponders if his own parents could have taught him how to make things better. MacDonald (Austin Stoker), Caesar's human assistant and the younger brother of MacDonald (from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) reveals to Caesar that his brother told him of archived footage of Cornelius (also Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) within the underground, now radioactive ruins of what is known as the Forbidden City from the last film. Caesar travels with MacDonald and his orangutan advisor Virgil (Paul Williams) to the Forbidden City to find the archives. This MacDonald is not the same MacDonald character as the previous film. I know, it is tough; neither movie makes an effort to give them first names so the casual viewer in 1973 would probably have issues distinguishing the two beyond a simple recasting. I believe there was a line of dialogue that said "Oh you're the younger MacDonald" or something, again, I've only seen the movie once now, but it would be nice if first names were given to help distinguish the two MacDonalds apart from each other.

Anywho, as the trio infiltrate the city to find the lost recorded archives, is revealed that mutated and radiation-scarred humans are living within the city, under the command of Governor Kolp (Severn Darden), the man who once captured Caesar. Caesar and his party view the recordings of his parents, learning about the future and Earth's eventual destruction before they are forced to flee when Kolp's soldiers hunt them. Fearing the mutant humans may attack Ape City, Caesar reports his discoveries. When Caesar calls MacDonald and a select group of humans to the meeting, Aldo leads the gorillas away. So gorillas, originally depicted as being the militaristic species of ape... now are depicted as the racially biased spieces of apes. Wild to think about. Anywho, Kolp's scouts find Ape City. Believing Caesar is planning to finish off all mutant humans, Kolp declares war on Ape City despite his assistant Méndez's (Paul Stevens) attempt to get him to see reason. Aldo plots a coup d'état in order for the gorillas to take control. Cornelius overhears from a nearby tree, but is critically wounded when Aldo spots him and hacks off the tree branch he is on with his sword. I was hoping Cornelius would survive, I was like "there's no way they're going to kill a kid!"... but then I remembered, this is 1973. The next day, after a gorilla scouting pair are attacked by Kolp's men, Aldo takes advantage of a grieving Caesar's absence to have all humans corralled while looting the armory. Cornelius eventually dies from his wounds... see?... leaving a devastated Caesar with the revelation that Cornelius was not hurt by humans.

This must be how all Midwestern parents got to school,
according to their accounts anyway.

The climax of the movie is one giant shootout. Kolp's ragtag force launches their attack, as Caesar orders the defenders to fall back. Finding Caesar lying among dozens of fallen apes, Kolp expresses his intention to personally kill him. The apes, however, are merely feigning death and launch a counterattack that captures most of the mutant humans. Kolp and his remaining forces try to escape, only to be slaughtered by Aldo's troops once they are out in the open. However, we're not quite done yet. Aldo confronts Caesar about releasing the corralled local humans and orders the gorillas to kill them. When Caesar shields the humans and Aldo threatens him, Virgil, having learned the truth from MacDonald, reveals Aldo's role in Cornelius's death. Enraged with Aldo for breaking their most sacred law, "ape shall never kill ape", Caesar pursues him up a large tree, their confrontation resulting in Aldo falling to his death.

With Caesar realizing that apes are no different than their former human slaveowners, he agrees to MacDonald's request for humans to be treated as equals, co-existing in a new society. They store their guns in the armory; Caesar and Virgil reluctantly explain to the armory's overseer, an orangutan named Mandemas (Lew Ayres), that they will still need their weapons for future conflicts and can only wait for the day when they will no longer need them. The scene, or I should say, the "flashback"... stops and the movie returns to the Lawgiver, saying it has now been over 600 years since Caesar's death. His audience is revealed to be a group of young humans and apes, the Lawgiver noting that their society still waits for a day when their world will no longer need weapons, while they "wait with hope". A closeup of a statue of Caesar shows a single tear falling from one eye. Cut to end credits, so ends the original Planet of the Apes series.

"Caesar, I hate to interrupt your son's bar mitzvah, but I have
to tell you I clogged your downstairs toilet.... oh, and
you're out of wet wipes, as I have eaten them all."

To sum it up, Battle for the Planet of the Apes does indeed show the struggle Caesar must endure to build and maintain an ape society that coexists with human society, but while Battle does have a lot of action, certainly during the climax, its not a very worthy conclusion to the series, certainly if you consider what we were shown in Conquest. Yes I know, I keep holding Conquest up on a high pedestal, but I just love that movie so much and it's easily the best one I've seen since the original. Battle had potential to show more of Caesar's chaos-hungry rise to power, but it instead decides to skip ahead to when not only the apes have built somewhat of a society together, but human civilization has already collapsed and coexists with the apes who conquered them, or whose uprising helped lead to their downfall.

Not to mention, it doesn't really capture Caesar's desire to spill human blood anymore. He's kind of mellowed out and changed his tune in this film. If you watched the ending speech from Conquest, you'd know Caesar's ultimate goal was to rise up and tear down human society and instill an ape society in its place. All of a sudden here, Caesar's will is to co-exist with humans. I think this movie actually follows the re-cut ending of Conquest, in which Caesar mellows out and reneges on his bloodlust. It isn't, in my view, an accurate portrayal of the events as they would have transpired. Plus like, I didn't care for Kolp as the top bad guy of the humans. He was a side character in Conquest and kind of disappeared by that movie's end... to have him as a surviving member of Governor Breck's troupe. Both Hari Rhods (MacDonald in Conquest) and Don Murray (Breck, in Conquest) refused to reprise their roles for this film, so they kind of had no choice in picking a follow-up villain. I guess Kolp it had to be.

"I'm just going to leave these words plastered on this blackboard
for all you all to see... call it a need for a constant reminder, given
the shit I've seen, so far."

Roddy McDowall also is back as Caesar in what would be his final film portrayal of an ape in these films. Having appeared in four of the five movies, sans Beneath, this was definitely his franchise and he  led it quite well. He was a brilliant actor and I enjoyed watching him in all these films. While Battle marked his final film appearance as an ape, he did star in a short lived Planet of the Apes TV series that came out afterwards. Unfortunately, it only ran for fourteen episodes the following year in 1974, failed to find a following and was cancelled soon after. In the series, McDowall played "Galen", a young chimpanzee that is sent by Zaius, played in the series by Booth Colman, to ensure the safety of two humans that have survived a crash landing on Earth. It's the third ape that McDowall played, and yet he looks like a distant cousin of Cornelius and Caesar... but you can tell McDowall didn't care, he was just happy to be involved. That's all I'll say about the Planet of the Apes TV series, as I haven't watched it.

To conclude and rank the five original Planet of the Apes movies in order, worst to best, and rank them... I would put Escape at number five, only for its lack of action and gripping storytelling throughout eigthy freakin' minutes of runtime... Beneath is at four for its bizarre storytelling that took what was established in the first film and radically run a completely different wayward direction with it. Battle I would place at three, as while I do love Roddy McDowall as Caesar, the macguffin quest to find tapes of his parents coupled with a lackluster villain in Kolp and Aldo make for a not-so-interesting cast of supporting characters he surrounds himself with. Conquest is an easy two, Roddy plays Caesar so well and the action, suspense, and drama coupled with the gruesome imagery and violent uprising make it for one hell of a ninety-minute revolt... and naturally, the original Charlton Heston Planet of the Apes sits comfortably at number one.