Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (August 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
| Conquest of the Planet of the Apes | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | J. Lee Thompson |
| Written by | Pierre Boulle (characters) Paul Dehn (screenplay) |
| Starring | Roddy McDowall, Don Murray, Natalie Trundy |
| Release date(s) |  June 29, 1972 |
| Running time | 88 min. |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | Escape from the Planet of the Apes |
| Followed by | Battle for the Planet of the Apes |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) is the fourth film of the Planet of the Apes film series. It explores mankind's future history, as established in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), and is the most violent film of the series. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, directed by J. Lee Thompson, tells of the rise of the apes enroute to dominating the planet. It is perhaps the most controversial entry in the series due to its film noir flavor, graphic violence and clumsily re-shot ending.
Contents |
[edit] Cast
- Roddy McDowall......Caesar
- Don Murray............Governor Breck
- Hari Rhodes............MacDonald
- Ricardo Montalban...Armando
- Natalie Trundy......Lisa
[edit] Plot summary
Building upon the description given by Cornelius and Zira before the Presidential Committee in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), the previous film, a disease killed the world's cats and dogs, leaving humans with no pet animals. To replace them, humans began keeping monkeys and apes as household pets. In time, humans noticed the apes' capacity to learn and adapt; thus they taught them to perform menial household tasks. Moreover, by 1991, the United States of America has collapsed and devolved to autonomous city-states whose society is oppressive and fascist in culture, of uniformed classes and castes, based upon ape slave labour.
Armando (Ricardo Montalbán) and Caesar, a young chimpanzee horseback rider in Armando's circus, visit Central City to distribute flyers advertising the Circus's arrival to town. Armando warns the chimpanzee to be careful in the city; should anyone learn his identity as the child of Cornelius and Zira, it would mean their deaths. Walking the streets, they see apes cleaning streets, delivering packages, et cetera, and are disgusted by the atrocities done to disobedient apes. Seeing an ape being beaten and drugged, Caesar shouts: Lousy human bastards!; quickly, Armando takes responsibility for the exclamation, explaining to the policemen, who were beating the other ape, that it was he who shouted, not his chimpanzee; the surrounding crowd become agitated with disbelief, Caesar runs away; Armando follows.
Hiding in a stairway, Armando says he will go to the authorities and settle the matter, by bluffing. Meantime, Caesar must hide among his own kind (in a cage of orangutans from Borneo), and soon finds himself being trained for slavery through violent conditioning; he then is sold at auction to Governor Breck, the head of Central City. Gov. Breck names the ape by allowing him to name himself from a bible handed to him; the chimpanzee's finger rests upon the name Caesar. So christened, Caesar is then put to work by Gov. Breck's chief aide, Mr. MacDonald (descended from slaves), who sympathizes with the apes to the thinly veiled disgust of his boss, Gov. Breck.
Meanwhile, Armando is being interrogated by Inspector Kolp, who suspects his "circus ape" is the child of the two civilized apes from the future. Kolp's assistant puts Armando under an authenticator machine that psychologically forces people to be truthful. Rather than confessing, Armando commits suicide by jumping through a window. Learning of the death of his human pater familias, the only human he loved, Caesar loses faith in human kindness and begins plotting simian rebellion.
Secretly, Caesar teaches the combat arts to the other apes, mostly gorillas and chimpanzees (orangutans are not seen fighting) and bids them gather weapons such as knives, guns, and blowtorches. Yet, Gov. Breck learns from Inspector Kolp that the manifest of the vessel that delivered Caesar lists no chimpanzees. Suspecting Caesar is the ape the police are hunting, Breck's men arrest Caesar and electrically torture him until he speaks, thus betraying his identity. Hearing the confession, Breck orders Caesar's immediate death; Caesar survives his execution; MacDonald, feigning over-sensitivity to torture, reduces the electrical power of the machine; Caesar pretends to have been electrocuted. Once Gov. Breck leaves, convinced he has eliminated the simian threat to mankind, Caesar kills the torturer who electrocuted him, and proceeds to rebel against Gov. Breck and Central City. Previously, MacDonald had learned that Caesar is the articulate ape whom humans thought mythical.
Caesar leads an ape revolt against Central City. The apes are victorious after killing most of the riot police sent to kill them. After burning into Gov. Breck's command post and killing most of the personnel, Caesar has Breck marched out to be executed. MacDonald appeals to Caesar's humanity to show mercy to his former persecutor. Caesar ignores him, and in a rage declares: "Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall - the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland out of which I will lead my people from their captivity! And we will build our own cities, in which there will be no place for humans except to serve our ends! And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty! And that day is upon you NOW!"
Lisa, later Caesar's wife, voices her objection: "N— N— N— No... "; other than Caesar, she is the first ape to speak. Caesar reconsiders — ordering the apes to lower their rifles just as they are about to beat Gov. Breck to death — saying: "But now... now we will put away our hatred. Now we will put down our weapons. We have passed through the night of the fires, and those who were our masters are now our servants. And we, who are not human, can afford to be humane. Destiny is the will of God, and if it is man’s destiny to be dominated, it is God’s will that he be dominated with compassion, and understanding. So, cast out your vengeance. Tonight, we have seen the birth of the Planet of the Apes!"
[edit] Original ending
Caesar has Breck marched out to be executed. MacDonald appeals to Caesar's humanity to show mercy to his former persecutor. Caesar ignores him, and declares henceforth apes everywhere will repeat the revolt that happened in Central City. The revolution will lead inevitably to mankind's fall after which the apes will dominate the Earth and enslave the few remaining humans. Breck and all the other humans are then beaten to death as the film abruptly ends.
Test audiences reacted badly to the original ending. The studio re-edited the ending with existing footage. The plot twist of the chimpanzee Lisa saying the word "no" was added to the film via dubbing a new voice-over and Roddy McDowall was brought back to record new dialogue. The new ending allowed Caesar to show some degree of mercy and to leave the audience with the hope of peaceful co-existence between apes and humans.
[edit] Paradox
 |
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007) |
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes implies that Caesar started the Ape rebellion, however, this is a temporal paradox, as Caesar is the child of two of the talking apes from the 40th century future, a future that resulted from the Ape rebellion. Specifically, Caesar's existence creates a predestination paradox and an ontological paradox.
The story implies that the Ape revolution, whilst nearly simultaneous to their becoming articulate, would occur whether or not Caesar existed.[citation needed] At the climax, a gorilla, whom Caesar calls Aldo, is seen beating Governor Breck. "Aldo" is the name of the gorilla Cornelius identified as the first Ape to speak "No" against his human master. The implication is that a more violent Ape rebellion eventually would have occurred under Aldo's leadership, yet the timeline has been changed with Caesar leading the rebellion, and, in the end, proclaiming that Apes must remain compassionate. Thus, the original timeline (Aldo leads the rebellion) that resulted in the Earth's incineration at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, might not be the same as that of Caesar's rebellion, thus, the possibility that the Earth will not be destroyed consequent to an Ape war of aggression in the fortieth century.
The world of which Cornelius speaks could have been one where slowly-evolving apes learn to speak on their own, with Aldo saying "No" to man.
Another possibility is that Aldo could have killed Caesar after the rebellion.
On the other hand, the history which Cornelius and Zira refer to in Escape where Aldo says "No" could be a fabricated story created by followers of Aldo's ideology after Caesar's death to jusitify the Ape society's future policies and practices in the original two films.
It is speculated that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes might occur in a timeline different from Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, that Cornelius and Zira's journey to the past and the events of Escape from the Planet of the Apes might have altered the future, but the theory is ambiguous.
Screenplay writer Paul Dehn, who wrote and co-wrote the sequels, said in interviews (quoted in The Planet of the Apes Chronicles, by Paul Woods) that the story he was writing had a circular timeline:
- "The whole thing has become a very logical development in the form of a circle. I have a complete chronology of the time circle mapped out, and when I start a new script, I check every supposition I make against the chart to see if it is correct to use it."
- "While I was out there [in California], Arthur Jacobs said he thought this would be the last so I fitted it together so that it fitted in with the beginning of Apes One, so that the wheel had come full circle and one could stop there quite happily, I think."
Yet, Dehn also said he was writing the story as a circle, and that his intention was that the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes dovetail into the story of Planet of the Apes, thus, story inconsistencies among the film stories are just inconsistencies — and not a suggestion that mankind's future had changed.
[edit] External links
- Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at the Internet Movie Database
- Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at Rotten Tomatoes
- Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at Box Office Mojo
|
|||||||||||||||||
