Film
Planet of the Apes
- Director
- Franklin J. Schaffner
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 114 mins
“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”
Yep, it’s the very first Planet of the Apes film from 1968 with Charlton Heston as an astronaut who lands in the distant future to find Roddy McDowall in an unconvincing rubber ape mask. Despite the rather rudimentary effects, this is an excellent screen realisation of French novelist Pierre Boule’s dystopian creation, which he used to explore some pretty weighty themes – animal rights, racism, slavery, militarism, organised religion, etc.
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s April The Sound of Sci-Fi season, which is in turn part of Filmic 2018, to highlight Jerry Goldsmith‘s avant garde score, which, legend has it, he conducted while wearing an ape mask.
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