STARRING:
Roddy McDowall, Natalie Trundy, Severn Darden, Paul Williams, Claude Akins, John Huston
1973, 92 Minutes, Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
Description:This 1973 film ended the Planet of the Apes film
cycle with McDowall again playing the chimpanzee leader Caesar, defeating
gorillas and human mutants to establish the hierarchy introduced in the
original film. -
Amazon.com
The law on diminishing returns, when it comes to sequels states that each film shall
generate less income than the one before.
After all, contrary to what cynics may believe,
people DO grow sick and tired of watching the same movie over and over again at some time.
To compensate for this progressive decline in revenue, the budgets of sequels become lower
and lower with each passing entry in a particular franchise. So it would go without saying that, for instance, with the fifth film in a particular
series the quality of said series would have degenerated exponentially by then.
While
there are (obviously) exceptions to this rule, this is nowhere more apparent than in Battle
for the Planet of the Apes, the fifth and last entry in the Planet
of the Apes series.
"The film's short running time attests to the fact that the
film-makers had very little to say anymore . . ."
The film is ill-served by an extremely low budget at a time when it needs money the most.
What is supposed to look like huge armies battling it out looks like a handful of
stragglers from a cheesy World War II movie, the battle scenes include the same footage of
a tree house being blown up just shown from different angles.
The ape makeup that looked so believable in the previous
films looks like plain old rubber masks here. And so forth.
None of this is helped by the trite screenplay and below standard acting. Along with
the previous entry in the series (namely Conquest of the Planet of
the Apes), it is also largely redundant because it merely fills in the details of
events we know are going to happen in any case since they were all foretold in Escape from the Planet of Apes.
But Battle tries to end
this pattern with an ending in which apes and humans happen to co-exist in harmony - an
ending that negates the entire series!
The film's (mercifully) short running time of a mere 92 minutes attests to the fact
that the film-makers had very little to say on the topic anymore.
Ultimately Battle is for Apes completists only and definitely counts as the worst in the entire series.
