Ape-praising The Apes: Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (1973) - DVD Review

'Aldo and his band of men don't even approach terrifying, instead looking rather like a gang of schoolboys laughing at their more intelligent peers from behind the bike sheds'

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes carries on nicely, in stylistic terms, from its predecessor Conquest, thanks mainly to the uniformly similar direction by J. Lee Thompson. In fact, Battle is almost the exact mirror of Conquest, with the time sufficiently advanced and the setting moved mainly to a village commune established by apes and humans after the destruction of Conquest's city in a bomb blast whose origin is only mumbled about.

Unlike the previous film, Thompson manages to keep the lack of budget hidden for the most part. The ruined city is doubled for by what looks like an industrial works and the village in the woods doesn't need much to make it feel fairly authentic.

Where the film starts to fall down on this front is towards the end when the by now obligatory climactic battle appears to take place between the apes, a motorcycle and a bus. There are very few extras on the set and the battle moves along at a snail's pace, at one point stopping entirely so that Governor Kolp's (Severn Darden) driver can carefully park his car. Its lame and wasteful and Darden, who is fairly awful throughout, hardly makes for a convincing villain.

The same could also be said of General Aldo (Claude Akins) who provides some sub-antagonization for Caesar (Roddy McDowall) from the get go. This is really the first time since the first two films that gorillas have been used to show the negative side of the apes but something (costume, physicality, scripting?) is lacking from the character and he and his band of men don't even approach terrifying, instead looking rather like a gang of schoolboys laughing at their more intelligent peers from behind the bike sheds.

Like most of the sequels, Battle feels like it has nothing to say and, for the first time, that it really doesn't need to be saying it either. This was almost certainly a step further than the original set of films was willing to go. Nothing is really added to the story that couldn't have been inferred from the end of Conquest and the change in the character of Caesar from revolutionary to meditative governor damages his overall character arc. A disappointing, if unsurprising, way to bow out for a set of films that took twenty-eight years to get themselves resurrected on the big screen.

Look further...

'stilted dialogue and unbelievable (even for a movie like this) characters' - feoamante.com