I've always had a fascination with this film, since I was a kid who didn't fully understand what I was seeing when I inevitably watched the last third of the film without the vital context of the first two-thirds, and as an adult, I thought it had very severe pacing problems, with way too much time taken up by underdeveloped astronauts wandering around an empty desert waiting for something to happen. It was only when I learned that Rod Serling was responsible for much of the modern incarnation of the script that everything clicked.
The beginning feels too long because it is; the story is a fantastic, classic Twilight Zone episode's worth of material stretched across an extra hour of screentime, and while script doctors made a noble effort to try to at least attribute informed personality traits to Taylor's teammates, only the bitter, cynical, misanthropic, borderline-unlikable Taylor is really that important to the rest of the film.
That said, once we get past the brutal opening stretch, then through a lot of unfunny satire that seems halfway between a bunch of lame jokes about apes doing human things and showing off the (admittedly very impressive for the 1960s) makeup technology on crowds of extras, things really pick up.
The film makes two smart moves that save it at around the 1/3rd mark, and the first is having Taylor show off some more human, relatable qualities, which actually works to sell the situation even more given what a miserable prick he is in the opening. The second is moving past just having the apes as setpieces and actually molding them into characters, and compelling ones at that. The obvious standouts are Cornelius and Zira, the relatable paternalistic scientists working under a lot of political interference, and their evil boss, the paranoid asshole who clearly knows more than he should, Dr. Zaius. All three have great chemistry with one another and Taylor, and all three do a fair bit of high quality acting under all that makeup, especially considering it was a far less well-mapped field than it is today.
It all culminates in a twist that actually works pretty well given the facts of the film established up to that point, and some well-done classic speculative fiction moralizing about human (and, to a point) ape nature, and the theme of arrogance and violence leading to downfall and destruction. It's a bit too in love with conflict thesis for my tastes, but in context it works very well, and has the helpful side effect of highlighting the irony of bigots blind to the qualities they despise in the targets of their hate being present in themselves. I also appreciate that while Dr. Zaius is an asshole, and the film never takes its eye off the ball there, that's not all he is, and while I'm not sure I agree with its decision to give him reasons and excuses for some of it, I appreciate giving three dimensions to a character that could easily have had one.
Again, it's a great Twilight Zone movie; cerebral, thematically rich, full of good characters, and using a well-executed science fiction premise to both entertain and provoke. I just wish it had had a bit more work done to make it feel less like a Twilight Zone episode pulled too thin early on.
Film The Twilight Zone Movie We Never Got
I've always had a fascination with this film, since I was a kid who didn't fully understand what I was seeing when I inevitably watched the last third of the film without the vital context of the first two-thirds, and as an adult, I thought it had very severe pacing problems, with way too much time taken up by underdeveloped astronauts wandering around an empty desert waiting for something to happen. It was only when I learned that Rod Serling was responsible for much of the modern incarnation of the script that everything clicked.
The beginning feels too long because it is; the story is a fantastic, classic Twilight Zone episode's worth of material stretched across an extra hour of screentime, and while script doctors made a noble effort to try to at least attribute informed personality traits to Taylor's teammates, only the bitter, cynical, misanthropic, borderline-unlikable Taylor is really that important to the rest of the film.
That said, once we get past the brutal opening stretch, then through a lot of unfunny satire that seems halfway between a bunch of lame jokes about apes doing human things and showing off the (admittedly very impressive for the 1960s) makeup technology on crowds of extras, things really pick up.
The film makes two smart moves that save it at around the 1/3rd mark, and the first is having Taylor show off some more human, relatable qualities, which actually works to sell the situation even more given what a miserable prick he is in the opening. The second is moving past just having the apes as setpieces and actually molding them into characters, and compelling ones at that. The obvious standouts are Cornelius and Zira, the relatable paternalistic scientists working under a lot of political interference, and their evil boss, the paranoid asshole who clearly knows more than he should, Dr. Zaius. All three have great chemistry with one another and Taylor, and all three do a fair bit of high quality acting under all that makeup, especially considering it was a far less well-mapped field than it is today.
It all culminates in a twist that actually works pretty well given the facts of the film established up to that point, and some well-done classic speculative fiction moralizing about human (and, to a point) ape nature, and the theme of arrogance and violence leading to downfall and destruction. It's a bit too in love with conflict thesis for my tastes, but in context it works very well, and has the helpful side effect of highlighting the irony of bigots blind to the qualities they despise in the targets of their hate being present in themselves. I also appreciate that while Dr. Zaius is an asshole, and the film never takes its eye off the ball there, that's not all he is, and while I'm not sure I agree with its decision to give him reasons and excuses for some of it, I appreciate giving three dimensions to a character that could easily have had one.
Again, it's a great Twilight Zone movie; cerebral, thematically rich, full of good characters, and using a well-executed science fiction premise to both entertain and provoke. I just wish it had had a bit more work done to make it feel less like a Twilight Zone episode pulled too thin early on.