Raised in secret, Zira and Cornelius’ son Milo (Roddy McDowall) has come of age in a world where apes are rapidly evolving toward the stage of his parents.
Forewarned by the events of the previous movie, humanity is moved toward a police state, where apes are treated as second class citizens.
Confronted with the brutality of the human dictatorship, young Milo is quickly radicalized and begins to plan for revolution…
After the relatively small-scale Escape, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes sees the franchise switch genres again, this time into future dystopia.
It is also notable as the first of two back-to-back installments to be made by veteran British director J Lee Thompson.
I cannot think of Ted Post or Don Taylor’s prior credits, but J Lee Thompson is easily the most distinguished filmmaker to be involved in the Apes franchise.
It is a pity that he is not more well-known nowadays. After a career making solid to great UK productions, he made the move to Hollywood with Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear.
He then became a craftsman, taking on movies in multiple genres.
I have not seen every movie he made, but of the ones I have seen, they all display a baseline craft that is enjoyable to watch.
And I like the idea that a filmmaker can go between different genres - the idea that the director of Guns of Navarone went on to make a slasher movie, Happy Birthday to Me - is exciting.
Set in the then-distant future of 1991, the US is a police state where Apes are a subservient class under a form of apartheid.
It is an inversion of the society we see in the original film, although apes are more integrated into the economic structure of this nightmare future. While we do not get a lot of detail about this world, the filmmakers dabble with some interesting ideas.
There is a scene early on, showing a strike by human workers,criticizing corporations for using nonhuman labor. While there is no mention that they are enslaved, the point of the strike scene is to show the hypocrisy of this world - one that stokes hatred against the apes, while also using them as a tool to oppress working-class humans.
Shot against the brutalist architecture of Century City, the film’s version of dystopia is more of an overt metaphor for divisions in American society of the early seventies - down to the fact that Breck’s troops resemble American SWAT teams rather than Nazi soldiers.
It is hard not to view the uprising at the end as a crude metaphor for the battle between the post WW2 generation, and post sixties youth, who view each other as completely alien to each other.
The film also attempts to represent the delineation in approach between different parts of the the civil rights movement, between non-violence and militancy.
This metaphor rendered explicit when Caesar is matched against government advisor MacDonald (Hari Rhodes).
In a slightly surreal exchange near the film’s end, Caesar howls at MacDonald to recognise the righteousness of his uprising by connecting the struggles of the apes to the oppression of African Americans.
MacDonald refers to himself as the descendant of slaves and pleads with Caesar to consider the costs of his revolution, and its potential costs. In a sign of the film’s attempts to have a foot in both camps, MacDonald becomes both the voice of moderation, and a link to the struggles the film is trying to allegorise.
It is a potent exchange although rendered slightly bizarre when it is a white actor in makeup, making the argument for revolutionary struggle. Drawing a parallel between human beings and apes does not quite work, especially since the apes of this movie are still closer to their real-life counterparts, not the articulate bipeds of the first three movies.
MacDonald’s reference to the cost of Caesar’s war is an interesting kernel of an idea that the reboot series would run with and expand upon.
The film is slightly shakier when it comes to the antagonists, although this might be the effect of having the 2010s reboot tackle similar ideas.
Don Murray’s governor Breck is an OTT Nazi analogue, and therefore less effective than prior antagonists. He has no definition and comes across as almost a pantomime villain.
More effective is Severn Darden as the cold, businesslike Kolp, who treats the torture and murder of apes with the slightly bored air of a minor bureaucrat tired of menial tasks.
While the aesthetic choices help cover the budget cuts, the storytelling ends up feeling a little truncated.
McDowall is absent for chunks of the movie, and most of his appearance in the latter parts of the movie is through visual story-telling, as montages showing his plans coming to fruition.
While it feels a little too economical, I appreciate the lack of fat. I also love how completely aligned the movie is with Caesar.
This might be the first movie in the franchise where the narrative perspective is almost entirely with the apes. And the movie takes pains to show the effect human cruelty has on Milo/Caesar.
Unlike other Apes movies, which make some attempt to show some kind of resistance within the dominant hierarchy (Zira and Cornelius in the original movie).
The closet we get is MacDonald, but the movie makes clear he is on his own.
Once Caesar has been tortured almost death, on top of all the other injustices he and the other apes have had, the film has earned a violent resolution.
And what an ending!
Once again, it is hard to ignore how radical the image of US SWAT teams gunning down and being overwhelmed by apes is. It is charged with the context of the early seventies (the Kent State shootings were recent, and the SWAT units - only introduced in the mid-sixties - were gaining a reputation for violence that has sadly endured). The fact that these soldiers are never granted empathy - not even close ups showing individual soldiers - is interesting. They are treated as a mass, armoured and helmeted to resemble machines.
The film’s climax is effective, as the apes overwhelm Breck’s forces and Caesar declared victory.
The overall effect might have worked even more if the ending did not feel so abrupt.
From what I understand, the film’s violent ending was reworked, and the film ends on a patchwork of shots of the ape extras while Caesar switches to preaching a rejection of violence (conveyed through ADR from McDowell over abstract closeups of Caesar’s eyes).
After such a radical escalation, it is a somewhat muted close, particularly for a franchise that had consecutively ending on epic downers.
Still, Conquest shows the later Apes movies were still had some fire in their belly.
Related
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
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