The Newest ‘Planet of the Apes’ Movies Are Inspired by Two Old Sequels

It should have gone more like the Tim Burton version. In 2001, one of the most popular and distinctive filmmakers working in Hollywood remade the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes, a project that 20th Century Fox had its eye on for years. Famously, it didn’t go so well. Burton’s version, rushed into production without a completed screenplay (Burton apparently saw a teaser poster displayed at a theater before he had even begun shooting), was a big hit thanks to strong marketing, pent-up demand, and the director’s good name, but it was a dead end as far as inspiring a new franchise was concerned. Maybe it was simply too difficult to compete with vivid memories of the original film, and its famous twist ending. (Spoilers for a half-century-old movie: Charlton Heston’s astronaut has not reached a new planet; he’s time-traveled into a future where Earth is dominated by apes, rather than humans.) This is often the way of remakes; a brand name attracts audiences who find something that, fairly or not, struggles to match what came before.

So when Fox revived the series again in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there was no reason to expect a new series to continue for thirteen-plus years. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth entry in this new series, is opening to positive reviews and at least some audience anticipation, following an initial acclaimed trilogy. Part of this success is just the fundamental soundness of the new Apes movies, which are thoughtfully made and entertaining science fiction stories with cutting-edge visual effects. But there’s also an unusual strategic gambit at play, in that all four movies feel less like descendants of the original Planet of the Apes and more like remixes of the fourth and fifth movies in the original series: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), both directed by J. Lee Thompson.

None of the old Apes sequels are as well-regarded as the 1968 original; it wasn’t uncommon at the time for sequels to have their budgets slashed, in expectation of consistent but ultimately diminishing box office returns, and that’s more or less what happened here. At the same time, lower budgets and lower profiles gave the Apes sequels a sense of daring not always seen in other series – and Conquest is particularly bold. Set in 1991, it joins a world where a virus has killed off all cats and dogs, mankind enlisted apes to replace them as pets, and man has now moved on to treating apes – sophisticated, but unspeaking – as slave labor. This has happened in part because of time-looped events from the previous movies: A pair of far-future apes traveled back in time to contemporary San Francisco, and were eventually murdered out of fear that they would trigger the very mankind-ending events they were fleeing in the first place. Their unknown child, Caesar (Roddy McDowall), has been hidden away all these years – and he is the one who leads an ape rebellion.

This story is essentially rearranged and retold for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with some story elements carrying over to its immediate sequels. Apes haven’t been enslaved by people in these versions, but they are subservient to them and often mistreated. Caesar, an outlier for his medically-enhanced intelligence that he inherited from his mother (just like the original version), uses his sophistication to lead other apes, bringing them to his level and taking a stand against the humans. Rise does a great job of using the materials of a fourth movie to start the story over from scratch; it somehow manages to avoid feeling too prequel-y or sequel-y.

This is impressive, because Conquest is kind of both: It technically takes place before the events of Planet of the Apes, setting into motion the war that will eventually result in widespread destruction of the human race, but these things may only be happening in this particular way due to time travel – because of the already-written future, in other words. Does that make the future inevitable, or is this bloody uprising going to somehow shift the world’s fortunes?

Either way, Conquest is a terrific, propulsive picture, despite a lower budget. Thompson makes great use of the film’s relatively limited-location shoot at Century City in Los Angeles to create a world that feels both futuristic and oppressively boxed-in, and stages the eventual ape uprising with both exhilaration and dread, often using hand-held camera. The movie really lets the sequence play out – most of the 87-minute film’s final half-hour plays out as a brutally extended apes-versus-humans melee. The original cut, which is now widely available on Blu-ray, is even more violent and downright unsparing in its revised ending. (This is reflected in how Rise ends with peace between the humans and apes – as a simian flu begins to wipe out the human population.)

Thompson returned to direct Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which finds apes and humans living in relative peace, though Caesar remains in charge and the humans living alongside the apes must play by simian rules. The species are thrown back into direct conflict when Caesar and company discover an underground society of radiation-scarred humans who are hostile toward what they see as ape oppressors who have seized control of their world. A gorilla faction eager to subdue the humans, led by the fanatical Aldo (Claude Akins), fans the flames of this conflict. The cut corners in both budget and storytelling emerge more visibly here, yet Thompson still does put together some dynamic and well-composed images, particularly in the depths of a presumably-abandoned bunker, where he makes repeated use of split-diopter shots (allowing two objects – usually faces – to remain in clear focus within the same frame despite considerable distance between them, distinguished by a blurry edge separating the two objects). Thematically, the movie retreads some ground from its predecessors; narratively, it sometimes feels like filler; and viscerally, its climactic skirmish simply isn’t as impressive as the equivalent material in Conquest. Still, among the Apes films, it’s arguably underrated.

It’s also easier to forgive Battle’s slower approach to filling in ape history now that the slow-march prequel has become standard operating procedure for so many series. That standard makes it hard to tell whether Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, War for the Planet of the Apes, and the new Kingdom are directly borrowing from Battle, or simply sharing too many elements amongst themselves. But given the obvious influence of Conquest, Dawn and Kingdom in particular feel like they’ve divvied up the Battle dynamics: Dawn takes the idea of an uneasy human-ape alliance broken by a bad-acting ape, while Kingdom takes the idea of jumping forward in time, landing in between periods of all-out war, while producing a variation on the apes-versus-apes-versus humans triangle.

These debts create neat parallels for longtime fans of the series, and at their best feel spun out from the ambiguity that haunts the ending of Battle for the Planet of the Apes – which includes wraparound material set hundreds of years after Caesar’s death, at a time when man and ape seem to be living more comfortably in peace. The provocative final shot shows a Caesar statue weeping; is it with gratitude or sorrow? Has Caesar’s time-travel-affected action actually changed the grim course of history, or just given the same bad ending a different origin story?

That’s essentially the game the entire new Apes series is playing, because it still hasn’t circled back around to the original premise of an astronaut crashing into an ape-dominated world that’s actually a version of his own. Even if this approach actually just leads to more prequelizing, and/or to the uninspired remake of the 1968 movie that the series has cleverly avoided so far, the evolutionary shift has already happened: The lowest-budget sequels feel even more like vital texts.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.