Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Starring Roddy McDowall, Claude Akins, Natalie Trundy, Severn Darden, Paul Williams, Lew Ayres, Austin Stoker, Noah Keen, Bobby Porter, John Huston. [G]

The original Planet of the Apes series storyline comes to a close in this fifth installment, and old tricks are ordinary enough to be boring by now. Caesar rules over the new society of intelligent apes—my, how quickly they’ve evolved—but a militaristic gorilla called Aldo (Akins) wants to wage war on the human survivors while Caesar is content to leave them be so long as they don’t intrude on all the “monkey business”. As a result, the titular battle is not just between human and simian, but also ape against ape. Not really a bad entry, but there’s hardly even a trace left of the philosophical quandaries and startling discoveries which made the first movie a near-great classic of the genre, and none of the allegorical concepts/conflicts are taken to the next level. The action-oriented script recycles a lot of the same old stuff, offers up no interesting new characters (if not for the fur, Aldo would just be your run-of-the-mill warmonger), and progresses on a well-rutted path toward the expected conclusion. Unless you’re really bored on a Saturday afternoon, this one is only for the die-hard fans who have a compulsion to see things finished off. Aside from the short-lived TV series (and the TV-movies hammered together out of episode pairs), it would be more than 25 years before the ape-human conflict would be reignited, this time as a reimagining of Pierre Boulle’s original novel from director Tim Burton.

46/100