At first glance, it’s easy to write off Beneath the Planet of the Apes as little more than a meaningless and cynical cash in on Franklin J. Schaffner’s runaway success. There’s the run time stretching re-cap intro (come on, seriously? who walks into Beneath the Planet of the Apes without having seen Planet of the Apes?!), there’s the suspicious casting of Chuck Heston look-a-like James Franciscus (replete with 2000 year old facial fuzz) to seemingly take up the baton following Heston’s apparent reluctance to climb onboard for another simian outing, there’s the absence of Roddy McDowall (busy filming the wonderful Tam Lin) as Cornelius and the gnawing feeling that Pierre Boulle’s material had been sufficiently dealt with in Schaffner’s picture. Everything seems to point towards an ill advised attempt to repeat performance the first installment, grab a quick buck and hot foot it all the way to the box office.
In truth, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is unequivocably the sickly sister to a muscular older brother. Yet on closer inspection, and particularly with regards to matters concerning the Apocalypse, there is still plenty to mine from the troubled waters of this less than perfect sequel.
Post’s film is drenched in latent nihilism. There’s the gorilla politics that seek for war upon the people of ”the forbidden zone” in a quest for lebensraum, awash with fascist undertones. The use of humans for shooting practise and their caging takes an even darker turn than in Schaffner’s film. The apes, and especially the gorillas, are a much more sinister bunch than in 68… There’s the altogether depressing ending which seemingly wipes everyone out (including, Good God! Charlton Heston) and of course the faux mysticism of the Doomsday Device, an atomic god to which the subterranean dwelling, mutant humanoids of the aforementioned forbidden zone have turned to. Taylor disappears into a fraggle rock almost as soon as the title card has dissolved, leaving the film in uncharted territory with Franciscus to pick up the pieces. Whilst the first twenty minutes are little more than a rehash of Planet – Brent is incarcerated by the apes, prodded by the orangutans and sympathized with by chimps Zira and Cornelius (played here by David Watson), Beneath the Planet of the Apes is smart enough to take a dramatic left turn forthwith. Clever touches, include a right on chimpanzee protest at the impending war (“freedom and peace!”) which leads to cries of gorilla brutality and James Gregory’s Gorilla war monger Ursus, a simian Heinrich Himmler, who famously remarks: “The only good human, is a dead human!”
It would be wrong to describe Beneath… as a brave sequel – the suspicion here, is that anything with the Ape moniker would have received the ailing, Zanuck era, 20th Century Fox rubber stamp of approval. However, it is an intelligent move on from the first film, bloodier, darker, weirder and unashamedly bleaker in its dealing with the fate of mankind.
