Went to my local shoestring arthouse flea-pit last night to see the original Planet of the Apes flick. Odd to sit down and watch in full a movie that you’ve effectively seen many times over, but only through the accumulation of a patchwork of quotation and parody, plus random chunks presumably half-watched over the edge of a book on the tiny screen of summer Sunday TV re-runs as a child in the 1980s.

As a result, the story is doubly spoiled: not only do you know where it’s going, you already know most of how it’s going to get there, and the few steps that are revelatory are not particularly impressive. But somehow, even that doesn’t quite prepare you for the affect of the thing, the aspect that transcends the high-end B-movie material. Yes, the ape make-up is still pretty impressive—almost endearingly camp in hindsight—and arguably the star of the show. But you realise that the film’s success had nothing to do with the acting, the action, the plot or the dialogue—all of which presumably looked pretty clunky even when it was first released—but to the idea.

Even the ham-handed attempts to make it relevant to the contemporary issues of what was just about starting to be thought of as “the Sixties” can’t quiet obscure the cosmic-scale mind-fuck of the core notion: that of a deep future in which Man¹ persists, but where his great works have become mere archaeology. That, I think, is the truly durable hook; the knowingly ironic inversions of ape and human moralities, even the evergreen tension between faith and science, have nothing on the simple premise (or perhaps promise) of a world with us, yet also without us…

Well, I dunno, maybe I’m just projecting a personal preference, here. Nonetheless, the success and durability of the franchise, plus that almost unparalleled status as a pop-cultural short-hand—a meme before memes, if you will—suggests that it did something for a lot of other people as well. Given the movie as a movie has (let’s be honest) little else going for it (other than some glorious location shots and a surprisingly charming old-school orchestral sound-track), it’s surely the premise that endures.

1. Yes, masculine and capitalised, as is appropriate to both the text itself and the para-text of a reading of it in the present. You could probably get a whole ultra-meta Masters thesis out of the proposition that the specific sense of human civilisation that prevailed when this film was made was always already history, and the film thus best seen as a fragment of archaeological evidence for such… but I’m not gonna go there. Mike Hunt of the Wonderstuff may have sung that “celluloid is more fun than paper”, but I think I’ll stick to the less flammable form of pulp. ↩︎