Bookshelf:

Planet of the Apes

Tonight I drove up to Debbi's since she'd offered to make dinner (marinated pork chops and rice pilaf - mmm!), and she rented the original Planet of the Apes (1968) on video.

For a 1960s science fiction film, it's actually quite good. That's right, I've never seen it before (or perhaps I saw it as a child and just no longer remember it), although by now I'd become familiar with the essentials of the plot (especially with Tim Burton's remake in theaters).

Earth sends a four-person mission to another world. Hundreds of light-years away, it takes them a year and a half ship time to get there, but two thousand years of real time. George Taylor (Charlton Heston, looking remarkably young and buff for a man of 44) is the commander, with his crewmen Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton) survive the landing, though their female crew member does not. Their ship accidentally lands in a huge lake and sinks, and the trio make their away across a lifeless desert to a jungle at the western edge. There they encounter a group of humans - all primitive and mute - and are promptly captured by a band of more advanced, intelligent apes.

Dodge is killed, and Taylor's throat is cut, rendering him temporarily mute as well, and he's kept in a cage by anthropologist Zira (Kim Hunter). Eventually he persuades her and her boyfriend Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) that he's intelligent, quite a feat since the apes regard humans as primitive, mindless ancestors of apekind. But Taylor's very existence violates ape scripture, and he, Zira and Cornelius are tried for heresy and forced to flee for their lives, where the ultimate secret of the planet of the apes waits for Taylor to discover.

While the film has the usual list of Star Trek-like scientific difficulties (I don't think the math on the ship's relativity works out; the mission's planning seems shoddy at best; the expedition into the barren Forbidden Zone seems ill-advised as it's not clear what the horses - for instance - will eat), it's not really about the science. The screenplay was co-written by Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone (which has a fair claim to being the best SF&F TV series in history), and feels like an extended episode of the series, dealing with weighty moral issues in an exotic environment.

Bluntly, the film is about how we humans treat our animals, and what they might think of us. But more deeply it's about blind faith and how it deals with evidence that contradicts it. Most obviously, it parallels Galileo's experience of being excommunicated by the church for disproving Ptolemaic theories: Confronted with irrefutable evidence, the reaction of the true faith is to do everything possible to cover it up and try to ensure that no one will try to contradict its theories again. The "good guys" range from the blustery man of action (Taylor) who's given a challenge particularly ill-suited to his strengths, to a couple of thoughtful individuals (Zira and Cornelius) too inexperienced to work against the system which is poised against them. It's actually a pretty thoughtful film, and more rewarding than its contemporary, 2001 (though admittedly I have disliked nearly everything I've seen by Stanley Kubrick).

The cinematography is interesting, featuring wild camera movements and odd angles, perhaps presaging the style of some 1970s science fiction such as Space: 1999 and the Pertwee-era Doctor Who. The desert landscapes are impressive and lovingly filmed, feeling at once like an updating of Robinson Crusoe on Mars (an underrated 1964 SF film), and a precursor to the later TV mini-series of The Martian Chronicles (which I also quite enjoyed, as it cut much of the chaff from Bradbury's novel).

Then of course there are the ape costumes, which don't hold up very well after 33 years, especially in that it's sometimes difficult to tell the apes apart (although this might be deliberate), though for the time it's obvious that they were wonders of film technology in their ability to convey expression while looking decidedly inhuman.

Quite a good film. Too bad I hear Burton's remake is something of a dog...

This week I also finished reading Rachel Pollack's novel Unquenchable Fire, which Ceej had loaned me some months ago. Although the story picked up some in the second half, on the whole I didn't think it was a very good book. It seemed to lack focus, and was generally rather depressing to read, with many tedious asides as the narrator related some of the myths that people in Pollack's world lived with.

Okay, I admit I'm not a big fan of fantasy anyway, so that probably colored my outlook somewhat, but mostly I just felt there wasn't much payoff to this story. It felt short on purpose. Ah, well.

I'm continuing to crank away at work. I'm having a great time, learning about our code base and ripping things apart to put them together again in a different way elsewhere. As I master one piece of the code, I start looking around for other pieces I don't understand as well, to see if they might be useful to use to make the end result better. It certainly keeps me out of trouble!