Conquest of the Planet Of The Apes (1972)

Review: written February 2012, updated September 2024

Servile simians provoked to riotous revolution.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes suffers from the lowest budget of the original pentalogy. It is the darkest, least family friendly in its levels of violence as we chart the beginning of the Apes rise to supremacy as they start the revolution. Given the more limited budget the makers had, they did a pretty good job, with MacDowell giving arguably his best performance in the series. His character is significantly less toothless and benign, despite his gentle upbringing under the care of Ricardo Montalban who returns as the circus owner hiding young Milo – who will soon gain his new name of Caesar.

Essentially fleshing out some lines from the previous movie “Escape from The Planet Of The Apes” about how the apes “rose”, two changes have happened since the young baby ape was born. Now grown up, he finds himself in a world where apes have become slaves, trained through cattle prods and torture (or “reconditioning” in the movies parlance) to perform mundane tasks, from shoe polishing, to waiting on tables in restaurants and even filing documents in the control centre for everything ape related. Secondly, the United States has become a totalitarian state, with soldiers in black garb reminiscent of Nazi uniforms, keeping the ape population under control by strict control and subjugation.

It’s a bleak outing in the series, and perhaps the least thinly veiled social commentary. Paul Dehn, the screenwriter since “Beneath The Planet Of The Apes” was himself a gay ex-spy, so it’s perhaps unsurprising he held such strong anti-war feelings, and railed against discrimination for being different. As in the other movies, the treatment of the apes has much more to do with how man treats other men, than about how man treats apes. In comparison to what has gone before it feels considerably more claustrophobic, filmed amid concrete and glass brutalist architecture, (actually Century City in Los Angeles) and not in the largely rural setting of the others. Even the framing of the movie is often closer up, with faster edits, accentuating the violence in the story.

Although perhaps tame by todays standards, the final act with the revolution kicking off a full scale war on the streets between apes and man, is bloody and unflinching. It’s an uncomfortable treatise on whether violence is justifiable in the cause of a righteous revolution – an idea doubled down on, in the original edit which is available on some blu-ray versions, which does not have the reshot ‘happy’ ending which graced the movie in cinemas.

It has a TV ‘movie of the week’ feel at times, with a lesser score and limited location scope, making this a less well loved outing by many – made hard to like with its bleak message after the comparative cheerfulness of its predecessor. The action scenes lose scope by the limitations of how many extras they could muster into a few street locations which are used over and over. Compare these scenes to “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, which was essentially a loose remake of this movie, and there’s no doubt how superior the later movie is in that regard. And yet it is good sci-fi – using a high concept (apes rebel from servitude to vie to become the dominant species) to discuss some real topics on how we treat each other and the insidious nature of fascism.

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