Of course, the monolith isn’t real – it’s a nice theory, but I figured things out myself. Then again, I’m sure those apes thought that, too…
PLANET OF THE APES
( Director: Franklin J. Schaffner; starring: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans - 1968)
Gary McMahon
Rod Serling’s extraordinary and philosophical screenplay for Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (adapted from French novelist Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La planète des singes – perhaps better known as Monkey Planet) contains many a memorable quote, but mine appears about half an hour into the film, when Charlton Heston’s astronaut George Taylor is outlining his character-defining misanthropy:
‘I’m a seeker too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.’
To me that resonant piece of dialogue encapsulates the entire theme of the film, and supplies an additional element of pathos to everything that follows. You could almost say that it’s quintessential Serling. Those words have haunted me since I first saw the film on television as a child, and they will remain as ghosts inside my head until the day I die.
Watching the film all over again, after a gap of several years, I was struck immediately by certain aspects: Jerry Goldsmith’s superb pounding score, the intensity of every scene, the fact that the film is actually quite terrifying, even now after over 40 years. I’d originally planned this to be a light-hearted essay, but the gravitas of the film wouldn’t allow it. It would be lazy of me to make light of such a serious and intelligent piece of film-making.
Planet of the Apes is a film that could never be made now – there aren’t enough pointless action scenes, the lead character of Taylor is far too cynical, the themes are well handled yet up-front, and there’s a real sense of menace in every frame. Tim Burton’s weak remake surely proves that the original was a film of its time; a flawless piece of art whose power will never diminish, no matter how much it’s diluted through imitation or silly piss-takes.
The opening scenes are as good as anything I have seen in film: the sedate prologue with Heston recording his final ship’s log before going into hyper-sleep; the crash landing of the astronaut’s ship into the water; the discovery of the only female onboard withered and ancient because of a crack in the protective glass of her sleep chamber.
A subsequent trek through ‘The Forbidden Zone’, which contains my aforementioned favourite quote, is bleak and imbued with a gradual accumulation of genuine dread, particularly when the astronauts encounter giant furry scarecrows perched on the high rocks.
The first confrontation with the apes is perfectly orchestrated. It’s a brilliant composition of camera angles – static shots, crane shots; sweeping aerial shots as the human prey flee through a cornfield in total silence, pursued by ‘beaters’ who are only recognised by the sight of their long thrashing sticks above the tall stalks of corn. Afterwards, we are shown a succession of brutal images: a gorilla carrying a boy on his shoulders, walking past half-naked men strung up by their feet like slaughtered wild stock; a shallow pit filled with corpses; the captured Taylor as he is carried strapped by hands and feet to a long pole held between two apes. A brief moment where gorillas pause to have their photo taken beside a pile of bodies puts the viewer in mind of real-life war atrocities: Native American Indians massacred by the U.S. Cavalry, whole villages wiped out in Vietnam, the tribal genocide in Rwanda. For me, it’s one of the strongest scenes in any science fiction film, and remains relevant to each passing generation.
When finally we get to see the apes’ habitat, the set design is a joy to behold. It’s difficult to remember how powerful and unusual this vision must have been back in 1968. The costumes and make-up look great even by today’s standards; I’d even go as far as to say that the ape make-up is among the finest in the history of cinema. You forget that you are watching actors, and begin to see only simians. The performances, of course, add weight to this illusion – the way the actors walk and move and carry themselves is simply masterful, and I feel a much underappreciated aspect of the overall effectiveness of the film. Roddy McDowall was never better as Cornelius and it is impossible to take your eyes off Kim Hunter’s feisty female chimp Zira, but the stand-out for me is Maurice Evans’ subtle and nuanced turn as the single-minded Dr. Zaius.
Once it’s established that, unlike the indigenous humans he was discovered among, Taylor is capable of speech and independent thought, the film shakes off the overt horror of its barnstorming first act and enters more familiar science fiction territory – which isn’t to say it is in any way predictable. Themes of social and racial prejudice, science-versus-religion, medical experimentation and good old-fashioned repression are examined, while a stream of ideas (the very building blocks of the genre) pours from the screen. We even have a massive conspiracy theory thrown into the mix, which leads eventually to the justifiably legendary shock ending.
But along the way the film expands upon its themes and is allowed to find its own pace.
The action set-pieces are few and evenly placed throughout the running time, (unlike the empty ‘onslaught approach’ of modern SF cinema) and those ideas I mentioned are given time and room enough to develop and resonate. Room to breathe. We see a social hierarchy among the apes – a distinct caste system which places the war-like gorillas as soldiers, the peace-loving chimpanzees as scientists and the regal orang-utans (or Jimmy-Savile-Apes, as I’ve always called them) as the philosophers and religious gatekeepers of the entire ape civilisation.
Much like human society, the world of the apes has its draconian rules and punishments, and this serves to hold up a mirror to our own lives and the way we treat those around us.
Despite my somewhat po-faced focus on the serious nature of the film, there are a few moments of humour – the three wise monkeys in the kangaroo court Taylor is forced to stand before, some of the interplay between Taylor and Zira, which is quite racy for the time and context – but none of these laughs is cheap and the overall feeling one is left with is that this is a film of great integrity. In my opinion at least it’s all the better for such a purposeful approach.
I will end as I began, with a quote from the film:
‘I never met an ape I didn’t like.’
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN
(Director: Robert Wise; starring: Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson, Kate Reid - 1971)
David J. Schow
Hall: ‘Where’s the library?’
Dutton: ‘No need for books – everything’s in the computer.’
One of the few regrets of my adult life is that I never got to meet Michael Crichton, who died too young, November 2008. Eminently emulatable, he had conquered publishing, film and television and remains a personal hero. I was hooked from the moment my father returned from his Arctic DEWLine duties bearing a paperback first printing of The Andromeda Strain, which I plowed through while in high school. Then immediately re-read, and re-read again.
I still have that paperback.
Subsequently I devoured everything Crichton wrote – the ‘John Lange’ potboilers written to pay his way through medical school; the landmark A Case of Need (written as ‘Jeffrey Hudson’; a stingingly strong pro-choice novel done prior to the Roe v. Wade decision); even the dope fantasia Dealing, written with his brother as ‘Michael Douglas’. Even his book on the artwork of Jasper Johns. Even the one Crichton book not likely to ever be reprinted – his prescient rumination on home computers, Electronic Life, written in 1980.
And the attraction was always: This guy really knows what he’s talking about. He convinced me.
About halfway through the novel Timeline – not one of Crichton’s best – there is an explanation of quantum physics that even I, science mook, could clearly comprehend. Crichton came to represent for me that bridge between incomprehensible technology and common understanding.
But, it has been argued, hi
s characters all suck.
But, it is further argued, he uses the same plot over and over. A motley team of high-tech wise guys are collected into an exotic location where they become outfoxed by their own security systems.
Both essentially true.
Both criticisms were brought heavily to bear when Crichton was profiled in Time magazine. So I wrote Time a letter saying I never read Crichton for characters; I read him because he allowed me to cross that bridge. At least I got to defend him in print, not that he needed it.
The Andromeda Strain novel is loaded with citations, some of them from scholarly works authored by the characters in the story, a revelation that just blew me away. Crichton made up those references credibly enough to veneer his characters with academic respectability; they, too, knew what they were talking about.
Therefore, Crichton lied brilliantly, to escort readers to places they might never venture willingly.
That, to me, sums up the charter of a really good writer. (Which is why the fast-and-loose pseudoscience of Jurassic Park doesn’t bug me. The reader has been cunningly pre-biased toward being convinced because he or she, more than any other consideration, wants to get to those dinosaurs.)
In 1970, I decided there was just no way that a movie of The Andromeda Strain could be as engrossing as the novel.
In 1971, I was proven about as wrong as I could be.
The plot recounts ‘the four-day history of a major American scientific crisis’, in this case the microbiological Armageddon posed by a ‘brand-new form of life’ brought to Earth by one of our own space capsules, which touches down in a small town and immediately wipes out most of the population. In a state-of-the-art lab complex buried in the Nevada desert, our assembled team of specialists races against time to determine the nature of the enemy.
With nearly forty years of hindsight, The Andromeda Strain remains one of the most flat-out suspenseful movies ever made from a science fictional premise. Watch the early scene in which console men gradually stop what they’re doing to listen to a horrific encounter solely via radio speaker; it’s a textbook of tension-building at the hands of director Robert Wise, who wisely stuck to Crichton’s compressed timeframe (96 hours) to make every plot turn seem imminent and threatening.
It is one of the last science fiction films to be wholly populated by adults. No celebrities, prettyboys or youth-demographic compromises.
It is one of the few not overwhelmingly beholden to the spectacle of special effects.
It is one of the very few in which scientists act like scientists, and one of the even fewer which depict the numbing tedium of procedural research – albeit efficiently (the pacing never lags).
It is rife with aching ironies. The entire earth is threatened by an organism the size of a pencil point. The Wildfire lab’s deep technology is subjugated by a sliver of paper. When Andromeda mutates to a noninfectious form, it is at its most dangerous. If the fifth member of the team had not been waylaid by appendicitis, then Dr. Leavitt would not have suffered an epileptic blackout while doing the other doc’s job.
In the novel, the team is all male. Screenwriter Nelson Gidding suggested making one of the scientists a woman. The result: Kate Reid’s Dr. Ruth Leavitt is the single best piece of casting in any science fiction movie, ever. Middle-aged, paunchy, outspoken, wise-cracking and rebellious, she smokes, has shitty eyesight and allergies, and keeps her epilepsy a closely guarded secret. She’s about as far away from Ripley or Raquel Welch as you can imagine, in an award-worthy performance never considered for any trophy.
You don’t get more rock-solid or utterly believable than her colleagues, either – Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson (in his single best performance in a feature film, period) and Paula Kelly. (You’d never know it from this movie, but Kelly, an accomplished singer and dancer who enjoys the weird distinction of being Playboy’s first full-frontal non-Playmate nude [in 1969], stepped away from acting after two Emmy nominations to pursue her musical career. She still gigs!)
No characters die off in reverse order of their credits.
Gidding and Wise concocted a form they called the ‘cinescript’, which incorporated all the printouts and schema seen in the book, as well as the multi-screen effects seen in Wise’s subdivided Cinemascope frame – a very visual approach, at the time, to mirror Crichton’s inclusion of graphs and charts (laboriously handcrafted on an IBM Selectric). Wise’s masterful command of composition for the ‘scope frame is seen in numerous split diopter shots.
The film also features Gil Mellé’s groundbreaking electronic score, the most arresting aural furniture since the ‘tonalities’ of Forbidden Planet. The first issue of the soundtrack album was a hexagonal disc inside a silver sleeve that ‘flowered’ open, to compliment the Andromeda organism’s stop-sign shape. Watch closely and you’ll see this ‘hex’ theme reiterated all over the film.
If trivia is your heroin, try spotting the following actors in bit parts: Michael Pataki (Count Dracula in Dracula’s Dog) as the Mic T., Bart La Rue (Irwin Allen and Star Trek regular) as a medic, Lance Fuller (of This Island Earth, Voodoo Woman and The She Creature) as a bystander, or Glen Langan (The Amazing Colossal Man himself!) as a cabinet secretary. For a long time, Crichton’s own silent cameo (during James Olson’s first operating theatre scene) was obliterated by the pan-and-scan nature of VHS. Wise himself donned surgical greens as a stand-in for the same shot, though he’s unrecognizable. And visual effects maestro Douglas Trumbull named his daughter Andromeda after working on this film.
Years later, Crichton noted that his very first visit to a movie studio was to Universal during production of The Andromeda Strain.He was shepherded around the lot by a young hotshot named Spielberg, then on the brink of directing his first Night Gallery episode. For years following the release of the movie, those glorious stainless-steel Wildfire sets were part of the studio tour (they pop up regularly in other productions, too, like the ‘Spanish Moss Murders’ episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker). A lot of viewers don’t realize that the top of the Central Core set is actually an Albert Whitlock matte painting.
This is also one of the first movies to regularly use a scrolling readout for time, date, and location to place action – a now much-overused device by film-makers who feel the need to tell the audience with a insert title that an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge means, in fact, that we are in San Francisco.
Forget the egregious 2008 TV-remake. Amid all its persiflage about buckyballs, wormholes and time travel, it didn’t even get the plot point about acidosis and rapid breathing right.
Forty years later, The Andromeda Strain has not only earned its slot as a modern classic, but also remains one of the handful of films that wears its respect on its sleeve, honouring the book on which it was based.
It convinced me.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
(Director: Stanley Kubrick; starring: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke - 1971)
Ian R MacLeod
It’s a strange truth that the fictions which try hardest to get the future right are invariably off the mark. It’s only those works that make no attempt at accuracy which occasionally turn out, as with A Clockwork Orange, to be astonishingly prescient.
Here is a film which displays none of the painstaking technological detail of Kubrick’s previous film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, 2001 gloriously failed to get the future right in its depiction of human space exploration. Kubrick’s next project, though, was a very different kettle of fish, and it’s easy to imagine that, after the effort of shooting so complicated and ambitious a work, he would have relished a looser and less rigorous approach, even with a subject which still supposedly dealt with ‘the future’.
With the exception of the central mind-control premise, Kubrick makes little effort to present a coherent vision of the future in A Clockwork Orange. Sure, Alex and his droog mates seated in the Korova Milk Bar in that famous opening shot have obviously come from somewhere ne
w and strange, but the scene then cuts to a drunken tramp slumped in the sort of grim concrete underpass of the kind which would have been even more recognisable in the 70s than it is now. Then we move on to the rubble and stained mattresses of the rape scene in the old casino, which switches in turn to Alex and his mates forcing a Volkswagen Beetle – hardly a cutting-edge car even then – off the road against an unconvincingly projected backdrop as they drive a stolen and supposedly ultra-modern ‘Maringo 95’ sports car.
And so it goes. Every futuristic touch in A Clockwork Orange is undercut with an ironic and unfuturistic counterpart. Even Walter Carlos’ extraordinary synthesiser soundtrack competes with old-fashioned orchestral versions of the classics, not to mention hammily sung renditions of such antique classics as Molly Malone and Singing in the Rain. Then there’s the tacky mix of candlewick bedspreads, false teeth, gas fires and pseudo-modern décor in Alex’s parent’s grim little high-rise flat, whilst the droog’s language is close to Shakespeare, and the strangest part of their attire is surely their codpieces. And what about the traditional milk bottle Alex gets smashed in the face with on his final victim’s doorstep, and those purple old-lady hairdos? No matter where you look in this film, Kubrick keeps drawing you back to a twisted version of the here and now.
Fact is, of course, Kubrick got the future nailed-on right. Rather like J. G. Ballard, his mix of alienation, social disintegration, meaningless violence and casual pornography – along with worn-out cityscapes and smug politicians – reflects what us poor sods who actually live in ‘the future’ have to put up with far more accurately than any consciously futuristic work. Maybe Kubrick missed out on the pointless foreign wars, the resurgence of racism, mobile phones and the advent of cyberspace, but they’re hardly core to what A Clockwork Orange is about. And he sure as hell addressed the rise of social conservatism, the thinness of so-called liberal tolerance, and the continued brutality of the state.
Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 8