An astronaut (Charlton Heston) exploring the vast reaches of
space crash lands on a far off planet inhabited by a superior race of speech
capable apes who keep primitive humans as slaves. Captured, tortured, and set
for experimentation he now must prove his supremacy to his subjugators while discovering the
horrible truth of this new land. Cheesy, shoddy looking, and carelessly
directed by Franklin J. Schaffner with a hammy Heston performance,
Planet of
the Apes is still watchable and fun at first plus it contains the justifiably
famous finale. Rod Serling’s dumb dialogue in a screenplay he cowrote from a Pierre Boulle novel belongs more so to his Twilight Zone than a full-length
feature film.
** ½ out of ****
