Escape from the Planet of the Apes

Despite a conclusion showing the planet's destruction, 20th Century Fox requested another sequel, turning the films into a franchise.

Arthur P. Jacobs recruited Paul Dehn to a new script with a brief telegram: "Apes exist. Sequel required." Dehn immediately started work on what became the third film titled Escape from the Planet of the Apes. The film would once again change directors, Don Taylor was hired to direct and had a greatly diminished budget of $2.5 million dollars, which required a tight production schedule.

In the film, Zira and Cornelius are initially accepted by American society, but human fears that their child will bring about the destruction they predict to lead to their dates.

Compared to it's predecessors, Escape dwelt more heavily on themes of racial conflict, which became a primary focus through the rest of the series. The film opened on May 21, 1971, less than a year after the previous film and was well received by critics. It also performed really well at the box office, though not as strongly as the first two. Fox ordered a third sequel.

The story is just great, especially after the second film's poor story and the writer did a great job with creating this sequel's story. The direction and action is just amazing and cool. The film is really quick and amazing, but I just ran along with it.

The acting is just amazing in this one and the actors are just amazing. Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall are good in there roles. Natalie Trundy is really good and is fantastic in her role. Bradford Dillman, Ricardo Montalban and Eric Braeden are really good in their new roles and they are fantastic and amazing.

Overall, ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET of the APES is really amazing and fantastic and it is one movie that definitely makes up for the previous film.

8/10.

MORD39 RATING: *** out of ****

This third APES film ingeniously manages to keep the franchise alive and produces what is arguably the second best film of the five originals.

After the ultimate ending in BENEATH, who could have believed a new story was possible? Here the tables are turned from the original film with a remarkable twist: now three of our chimpanzee characters take off in Charlton Heston's spaceship and wind up going BACK in time, to "present Day" Earth (1973 A.D.) Once it is learned that Zira (Kim Hunter in her best performance in the series) is pregnant with the child that could possibly turn our future into the PLANET OF THE APES, she and her husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) go from becoming honored celebrities to dangerous threats to humanity!

It's a brilliant idea, and now it is possible to start the series anew (chronologically, this movie comes first) and see whether or not Taylor's nightmare from the first film can be prevented or will rear its ugly head for mankind.

A little defending is in order here. Many people get hung up on the story's notion that the chimpanzees can actually manage to fix Taylor's ship from the first film and actually launch it. Well, I say that if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the idea of a society of talking apes, why can't you accept that one of them (Dr. Milo) is a super-intelligent ape, sort of the "Albert Einstein" or "Thomas Edison" of his time? Besides, when folks get stuck on a point like that it becomes impossible for them to have a good time with a film. As Cornelius said in the movie: "Dr. Milo was a genius well in advance of his time." He was able to fly the ship. Case Closed.

Next case: the "TV Movie" look of the film. SO WHAT? People have become so accustomed to garbage like 1999's THE MUMMY that unless all films are over-swamped with spectacular sets and numbing effects, they can't enjoy them. Well, ESCAPE needs none of these to tell its simple story. It's got something that sci-fi stories today have lost..."heart".

You have Ricardo Montalbon, you have Soap star Eric 'mustache' Breaden, and you have Sal 'Rebel without a Cause' Mineo. How can you go wrong? You have guys in Chimp suits. You have Roddy. You have Kim Hunter from the first flick. It's great.

My chief memory/image of the flick is seeing them, the trio of apes, being given the Star treatment, getting outta a limousine in front of a crowded city street, etc. That is very much a part of the flick. It was made in '71, and yeah it really, really looks it-but ya gotta like it. William Windom as da Prez is pretty cool too, def. a knockoff of hostile Nixon in places I would say.

This sets up the next two fine, though its both better than them and better than #2 in the run also. I think you can do worse than to sit through this.......

**1/2 outta ****

In a brilliant solution for continuing the storyline after the ending of BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, three intelligent chimpanzees from Earth's future take off in Charlton Heston's salvaged spacecraft just prior to Earth's destruction; they wind up hurled backward in time to 1973 California and - in an interesting twist on the original theme - now find themselves the strange visitors in a strange world ruled by bombastic human beings.

Lovable simians Zira and Cornelius (expertly played by Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall) lose their friend Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo!) early on in a tragic accident, and find themselves in a strange situation when mankind first welcomes them as celebrities and garnishes them with gifts, but ultimately begins to fear when it is learned that Zira is pregnant with an ape offspring that could grow to overtake humanity.

We really grow to sympathize with the plight of the chimpanzee couple, and we fear along with them and the safety of their child when they become hunted fugitives later in the story. Eric Braeden is very good as the quintessential villain out to kill the ape family at any cost.

Some people enjoy picking on the APES sequels as they continued, but I've always felt this series consistently remained very intelligent and had something powerful to say about race relations and prejudice. People want to know how apes could ever manage to send Taylor's ship into orbit; I say that if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the notion of intelligent apes, then it shouldn't be that far a reach to accept that Dr. Milo was the genius of his time who just could pull it off; the Thomas Edision of his type, if you will.

The timeline in the five apes films is often admittedly contradictory, but there are ways that fans of the Apes movies have been able to make them work. For example, in this film Cornelius seems to talk about Ape History and Evolution in a way that actually doesn't follow suit during the next two installments. That's because the very arrival of Zira and Cornelius onto present-day Earth of 1973, and the subsequent birth of their baby, will accelerate the procedure from how Cornelius remembered it, as we'll see in the next two chapters. The circumstances for the future will be sped up and changed, and the apes will evolve at a much quicker rate.

Some of the other dubious complaints are aimed at the "lesser budgets," or supposed "TV Movie Look" of the sequels from this point on -- but this story in ESCAPE does not require mind-numbing special effects or hordes of CGI-rendered ape figures swarming Los Angeles to make it effective. It's got a lot of heart and good writing with characters we care about, and that's all it needs. ***1/2 out of ****

The 3rd film in the Apes series (after "Beneath..."), this one is easily the most whimsical, at least in the first half. The writers had to stretch believability in getting the two primary apes of the 1st 2 films into our present times from the future, when Earth is destroyed by a doomsday bomb, but the first few scenes are almost classic farce disguised as science fiction storytelling. We view our central characters first as 'ape-onauts' and then stuck in a zoo, followed by a brief turn at celebrity when our populace becomes enamored of the two as the latest fad. The best and most clever thing about this sequel is that it utilizes the already well-known captivating characteristics of the chimps, delightfully performed again by McDowall and Hunter. They're kind of like old friends by this time and seeing them get acquainted with our modern-day culture is just good times. It's also a neat reversal on the ape society of the first two films, which was visited by aberrant intelligent humans.

Things turn grim in the 2nd half, as the fad wears off and our leadership begins to take the threat of possible future ape domination rather seriously. The most interesting character becomes the chief human scientist, played by Braeden, who starts out typically dispassionate but soon reveals an intense personal desire to preserve the human race and society, to the point of fanaticism. In his coldly intelligent eyes, only he sees the truly apocalyptic threat presented by the chimps' pregnancy. He's the nominal villain, but he sees himself as the only one who gives a damn. Some of the sf plot lines regarding time travel are very clever, while others are a bit clumsy. It's clever that the two evolved time-traveling chimps may now be the cause of the future time-line ruled by an ape society. But they reveal to have a knowledge of their history that did not exist in the previous two films. Also, rather than letting events evolve over a century or more following what happens here, the next film accelerates everything to change the world in the next 20 years - see "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes."