Beneath the Planet of the Apes — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Plot

Time-displaced astronaut Taylor and the mute Nova travel through the desert of the Forbidden Zone in search of a new life away from Ape City. Without warning, fire shoots up from the ground and chasms open. Confused by this, Taylor investigates a cliff wall and disappears through it. Unable to reach him, Nova is left alone.

After being sent to search for Taylor and his crew, a second spaceship crash-lands on the Forbidden Zone. Brent, the only survivor, notes he is in the year 3955, but assumes he has travelled to another planet. After burying his fellow astronaut Skipper, he encounters Nova and notices she is wearing Taylor's dog tags. Hoping Taylor is still alive, he rides with her to Ape City and is shocked to discover the simian civilization. The gorilla General Ursus leads a rally for the apes to conquer the Forbidden Zone and use it as a potential food source, against the objections of the orangutan Dr. Zaius. Brent is wounded by a gorilla soldier and taken by Nova to the home of the chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira, who treat his wound and mention their time with Taylor.

Attempting to flee the city, Brent and Nova are captured by gorillas. Ursus orders they be used for target practice, but Zira helps them escape. They hide in a cave that turns out to be the ruins of the Queensboro Plaza station of the New York City Subway. Brent realizes he is in Earth's post-apocalyptic future. Upon hearing a humming sound deeper into the tunnels, Brent becomes agitated and erratic and attempts to kill Nova, before stopping and backing away to another room. Entering the remains of St. Patrick's Cathedral, he finds a population of telepathic humans who worship an ancient nuclear bomb.

Brent and Nova are captured and interrogated by the telepaths, who are descendants of the human survivors of a nuclear holocaust. They mutated over generations and claim to be a peaceful society, despite using mind-control and illusion on their enemies. The mutants force Brent into revealing the apes' march on the Forbidden Zone. Their attempts to repel the invaders with illusions of fire and other horrors fail, as Zaius sees through them. With the apes closing in, the telepaths plan to detonate their "Divine Bomb" as a last resort, holding a religious ritual. During the ritual, the telepaths remove their human masks to reveal disfigurements of sickly pale skin, scarring and vascular varicose disease.

Brent is separated from Nova and taken to a cell where he finds Taylor. One mutant, explaining that they cannot let them leave the city alive for fear of revealing it to the apes, uses his telepathic powers to force Brent and Taylor to fight each other. Nova escapes her guard and runs to the cell, screaming her first spoken word: "Taylor!" This breaks the mutant's concentration, freeing the astronauts from his control long enough for them to kill him. Taylor recognizes the bomb's insignia "ΑΩ" as a "doomsday bomb", which has a cobalt casing capable of igniting the atmosphere and incinerating the entire planet.

The apes invade the subterranean city, making their way to the cathedral; many mutants are either captured, killed, or die by suicide. After Nova is killed by a gorilla in the midst of the chaos, Taylor and Brent reach the cathedral as Mendez, the telepaths' leader, is shot dead after raising the bomb into activation position. The humans attempt to stop Ursus from accidentally setting off the weapon, but Taylor is shot in the chest while pleading to Zaius. Zaius refuses to listen and decries humanity's violence and the ruination of all things, unaware that his own apes are doing the same thing. When Brent is gunned down after killing Ursus, the mortally wounded Taylor curses Zaius, collapses and dies, bringing his hand down on the bomb's detonation switch. The bomb goes off, destroying the entire planet.

Development and writing

Soon after Planet of the Apes became a hit, a sequel started being considered by 20th Century-Fox. Screenwriter Rod Serling was consulted, but the producers wanted the script sooner than Serling, who was busy at the time, would have been able to provide it so Serling declined.

Then the producers turned to the author of the original novel, Pierre Boulle, who wrote a draft for a sequel called Planet of the Men, where protagonist George Taylor would lead an uprising of the enslaved men to take back control from the apes as the gorilla general Ursus wants to fight humans. Boulle's script was rejected as it was felt that it lacked the "visual shock and the surprise" of the original. Associate producer Mort Abrahams then wrote story elements, and British writer Paul Dehn was hired to develop them into a script, tentatively called Planet of the Apes Revisited. Dehn drew on his trauma of the 1945 atomic bombings and the fear of nuclear warfare on the story. One of the elements thought up by Abrahams and Dehn was a half-human, half-ape child, but despite even going through make-up tests this was dropped due to the implication of bestiality. According to screenwriter Dehn the idea for Beneath the Planet of the Apes came about from the end of the first installment which suggested that New York City was buried underground.

Although Charlton Heston showed little interest in reprising his role as Taylor, studio head Richard D. Zanuck thought the actor was essential to the sequel. After some disagreement with the actor's agents, Heston agreed to briefly appear with the provision that his character be killed and that his pay go to charity. The writers decided to have Taylor disappear at the story's start and only return by the film's ending, and have a new protagonist for the major part of the story. James Franciscus accepted the role of Brent as a break from his usual TV fare.

Director Franklin J. Schaffner was invited to return to the series, but declined due to a commitment to Patton. Television and film director Ted Post was approached, and while objecting to the script for "not making a point at all", the producers asked what he did not like. Post then wrote a letter saying that "the loss of a planet is the loss of all hope". Post tried to get the other writer of the original, Michael Wilson, but a budget cut prevented him from doing so. Post and Franciscus – who wanted to help clarify the actions of and give depth to the character of Brent – spent a week rewriting the script, leading to over fifty pages of notes suggesting story ideas to fix some of the narrative problems in Paul Dehn's script.

Roddy McDowall could not return for his role in this sequel, because he was in London directing Tam Lin. Actor David Watson portrayed Cornelius in this film with McDowall only appearing briefly in clips from the first film used during Beneath's pre-title sequence. Along with the animated series Return to the Planet of the Apes, this film is one of only two 1970s Planet of the Apes productions in which McDowall does not appear. Orson Welles was offered the role of General Ursus, but he turned it down objecting against spending all his screentime in a mask and make-up. The part ultimately went to James Gregory.

Before Zanuck was fired as studio president during production, he suggested that Post add an element suggested by Heston, the Alpha Omega doomsday bomb, to end the series. However, before the film's release, the producers were considering ideas for another sequel.

Reception

A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that the film was "proof, in living color, that Heston is vulnerable and that a sequel to striking science fiction can be pretty juvenile." Variety panned the film as "hokey and slapdash," adding, "The dialog, acting and direction are substandard." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four:Missing from the sequel is much of the droll humor of the original as well as the adventure. It was a gross error to try to give the series a moral. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it a "striking, imaginative picture," adding, "Director Ted Post, writers Mort Abrahams and Paul Dehn are to be congratulated for sounding so timely a toll of doom in such an entertaining context." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film was: ...inferior in every respect to its predecessor—a condition common to virtually every sequel in movie history—but it's reasonably entertaining and fast-moving, a good enough Saturday matinee kind of movie. The Monthly Film Bulletin declared: Certainly it's nice to see some of the magnificent settings again, and most of the acting is of a high standard; but this isn't enough to transcend the script's limitations or the virtual annihilation of the original's deftly constructed atmosphere.

Frederick S. Clarke in Cinefantastique said:All technical departments are up to the standard of the previous film, and the special effects are much more plentiful. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the finest film that could possibly be made given Planet of the Apes as a premise. Keep it in that perspective and you’ll enjoy it.The film holds a 37% rating at the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 30 reviews, with an average grade of 5.1 out of 10. The consensus states: "Beneath the Planet of the Apes offers more action than its predecessor -- unfortunately, at the expense of the social subtext that elevates the franchise's best entries." On Metacritic, the film received an average score of 46 out of 100 based on 9 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews."

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

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Beneath the Planet of the Apes

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