Planet of the Apes (1968) / YMMV

Adaptation Displacement: One of the more prominent examples in Hollywood history. The original novel's very existence is a rather obscure fact, at least outside of the author's native France. And most of those who are familiar with it (even the author himself) would agree that the movie's serious take on the story was an improvement over Boulle's work.
And You Thought It Would Fail: The film took years to get off the ground because nobody believed it would work.
Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith's great score, especially the track "The Hunt".
Ensemble Dark Horse: While the character focus is more on Taylor and Zaius, Kim Hunter’s turn as Zira often steals the scenes she is in. This is confirmed by her small role in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and then her major role in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Fair for Its Day:
- The only female among the astronauts is killed without a single line of dialogue, and later implied to have been intended as a brood mare for a new human colony. And the only black member of the crew is killed soon after, leaving only the two white males alive to see Ape City. Cringy as this is nonetheless, the fact that Stewart and Dodge are there at all, and treated as equals by their companions without a hint of inferiority (Dodge is the expedition's scientist, even), is rather commendable for a 1968 film. Consider that this expedition is said to happen in 1974, but NASA did not actually put a woman or an African-American man in space until Sally Ride and Guion Bluford flew in 1983.
- Bringing the movie in casual conversation will invariably lead to a joke about how Taylor must have been a little dim to not realize sooner that an inhabitable planet with plants, horses, humans, apes, and even the English language must have been Earth All Along. However the sci-fi genre of the time was riff with Casual Interstellar Travel, Human Aliens, Aliens Speaking English, and Planets of Hats; it wasn't until Soviet probes landed on Mars and Venus in the early 1970s when they were found to be Death Worlds and the uniqueness of Earth entered popular consciousness. Thus the reason the Twist Ending is so well known and enduring in popular culture today is, partly, because it was very much an unexpected, shocking, and scary twist at the time, one that was not even present in the source book (where the astronauts do travel to a different planet that just happens to be very similar to Earth). The movie further tries to make things plausible by introducing Time Dilation, making the ship a Sleeper Starship, having the astronauts check if the air is breathable before jumping out, and having them note that the planet has no moon (implying the Moon was destroyed at some point, and explaining why they didn't realize it was Earth's Moon as soon as night fell).
It Was His Sled: The planet was Earth All Along, following World War III. Tied with "Darth Vader is Luke's father" and "Soylent Green is people" for the most famous example of this trope, and so well known that no less than five separate films were made to explain it.
Memetic Mutation:
- Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
- Taylor's line "Damn you all to hell!" is often used as a grieving response for netizens.
- The shot of Taylor laughing at the sight of Landon planting a miniature American flag has also seen use as a popular reaction GIF.
Mis-blamed: Some people have accused this movie's producer, Arthur P. Jacobs of effectively stealing the Academy Award for Best Makeup from 2001: A Space Odyssey — which had ape suits widely regarded as even more convincing than those from this movie — as Jacobs was notorious for wining and dining the members of the Academy, which earned his previous film, Doctor Dolittle several Oscar nods despite it being a critical and commercial failure. One slight problem with this accusation, however — the Academy Award for Best Makeup didn't actually exist until 1981, well over a decade after this film and 2001 were released. Even if Jacobs did somehow persuade the Academy to give this movie an Honorary Award for the make-up (which was what it actually won), he can hardly be blamed for conspiring to steal a non-existent award from 2001.
Moment of Awesome:
- "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"
- A more subdued example is the moment Taylor derails all of Cornelius' and Zira's attempts to debunk his claims of a modern human society by building and flying a paper airplane.
Narm: It's Charlton Heston in a movie where apes are masters of the world and rule over humans. This was unavoidable.
- "IT'S A MADHOUSE! A MAAAADHOUSE!"
- "You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!"
- "You MANIACS! You BLEW IT UP!"
- HAW HAW HAW HAW. In context, it makes sense, but that laugh...
- Charlton Heston visibly pinching his nostrils closed as he dives in the water from the sinking spaceship.
Nightmare Fuel: The scene where Landon is shown to have been lobotomized. Also Dodge being stuffed and put on display at the museum.
Signature Scene: Again, it was Earth All Along, with the iconic Statue of Liberty reveal being one of the most famous Wham Shots of all time.
Spiritual Successor: As James Rolfe pointed out in his review of the film, it's easy to consider this story a missing episode of The Twilight Zone. Many of the same themes pop up: a fantastical (and somewhat goofy) science-fiction situation, An Aesop about the follies of Man, and the Mandatory Twist Ending. It helps that the initial draft of the screenplay was actually done by Rod Serling, and that a previous episode of The Twilight Zone ("I Shot an Arrow into the Air") dealt with the same story situation and even had a similar Twist Ending. Additionally, a lot of Planet of the Apes actors would later turn up on The Twilight Zone's other Spiritual Successor, Night Gallery. There actually exists a Fan Edit of the film that turns it into an episode.
Technology Marches On: One of the big Wham Line moments of the movie occurs near the end when the group is investigating the cave with human relics and comes across a talking human doll. Everyone reacts in shock to this, with Taylor underlining the moment by asking Dr. Zaius, who up to this point had been dismissing the relics as ape-created in origin, if an ape would have made a human doll that could talk? At the time the film was made, talking dolls were a relatively new invention and limited to talking baby dolls like Chatty Cathy. The implication is you'd only making a talking doll of a species that could actually talk, therefore an ape society equivalent to 1960s American society would likewise only make talking ape dolls. Flashforward to the 1980s and beyond when talking animal toys are pretty much the norm, not the exception.
Visual Effects of Awesome: 50 years on, the ape makeup continues to look excellent and convincing throughout. What likely makes it still work is how simple the makeup actually was; much of the actors' faces remained uncovered by prosthetic (the bulk of it being two pieces attached to the upper and lower jaw, covering the nose and mouth), giving them plenty of facial expressions and even allowing their voices to not be muffled.

YMMV / Planet of the Apes (1968)

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