I.A.M. Musing About…

Another year, another Ape film. There must have been a group dedicated to the non-stop creation of these things in the Los Angeles area by this point. These days it’s tough to see a sequel or ‘next in the series’ in less than 18 months, so who knows how they got these done so quickly.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

When we last saw our happy couple, they were dead, thus making them rather less than entirely joyful. They didn’ however, put one over on The Man and ensure their child wouldn’t be a victim of ignorance and bigotry. Yes, their offspring would be able to live free and develop his talents in a safe environment: a travelling circus operated by Ricardo Montalban. Yes, really.

While it’s dealt-with in one of the more blatant “let’s ask some questions about some back-story so the answers are given to the viewer”, the back story is true to what we’ve heard previously about how dogs and cats suddenly died off in 1983 (we’re in 1991 here), then apes became pets – probably partly owing to the arrival of Cornelius and Zira in the mid-1970s – and were soon after put to use as manual labour around the house and so on. The nation of the USA seems to have become a Big Brother-style police state at some point (I blame Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), and the State of the California Republic (their actual name, by the way) has Governor who rules more like an Emperor than an elected official.

A quick word about the information download mentioned in the paragraph above. The only facts relayed there are about the pets, the adoption of apes, and the change to simian labour that is now beaten in the same way as slaves were a century before (the governmental character is merely shown, as apparently a Civics lecture might be too much for the boy). The fact that all of this happened less than a decade ago is key, as this makes our young chimpanzee somehow ignorant of what was going on around him for the most recent half of his life. Our lad is 19 years old here (in human years, at least), so how Armando the Circus Impresario kept his adopted son away from all information sources when the public had regular access to the boy’s part in the show as a horse-back rider, is something I find difficult to comprehend, especially as there’s already a public statue commemorating every dog and cat who are now dead, which seems equally impossible, given most of this kind of art requires more committee meetings than it takes to market a movie.

Anyway, one thing leads to another, and our young chimpanzee originally called “Milo” is now named “Cæsar”, and leaves the staff of the Governor in order to help with the filing in the local Important Central Control Place (so-called because I can’t remember the proper name of it, and it’s not anywhere to hand on the sites I’ve glanced at). He ends up leading a revolt against humanity, thus bringing to fruition the title.

The use of the conceit of “talking monkeys” continues to provide a structure upon which Very Important Questions might be considered. Here we – predictably – give some time to ‘why is someone good enough to carry your dry cleaning or bring you books not good enough to be treated like someone you respect?’ Seemingly, the nation is incapable of learning from the past about the importance of manumission, and the treatment of others as beings. Logically, any revolutionary force can be considered as being the equal of our simian forces here, or a group of homosexuals publicly demanding to be considered for elected positions / employment benefits without having to justify their equality, or even the whole Occupy Wall Street movement of late. Any group of like-minded individuals saying “there’s lots of us, so what’s your problem?” really. The fact they’re apes is merely a symbolic or metaphorical construct.

Again: excellent, intelligent, but try to ignore the low-rent costumes and set-pieces (some of the latter reminding me very much of both Simon Fraser University and bits of downtown Vancouver).

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Twentieth Century Fox presents
an APJAC PRODUCTIONS, INC.

Director:
J. Lee Thompson

Writers:
written by Paul Dehn
using characters created by Pierre Boulle

This year, I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.

The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2011 at 5:40 pm and is filed under movies, Personal, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.