Planet of the Apes
Year: | 1968 |
Director: | Franklin J Schaffner |
Writer: | Pierre Boule/Rod Serling |
Cast: | Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Linda Harrison, Maurice Evans |
With Taylor's horror at his colleagues fate (medical experimentation, stuffed for a museum exhibit), what else are the film makers doing but showing us the way we treat 'inferior' animal life today?
Deceptively simple but one of the strongest premises ever written for the movies. A team of astronauts travelling at near light speed crash on a Earth-like planet where intelligent apes run a political, social and philosophical society and humans are the animals wild in the bush, hunted and herded.
Searching for both truth and escape from the nightmare, Taylor and a young human (Harrison) are helped by moderate, betrothed scientists Zera and Cornelius (Hunter & McDowell) until they discover the truths about the ape world. The last scene is still the biggest, most shocking and most effective twist in the story of any movie ever made, and Tim Burton's 2001 version had no hope of surpassing.