Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

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Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Director	J. Lee Thompson
Production Company	20th Century Fox and APJAC International
Writers	Paul Dehn, John William Corrington & Joyce Hooper Corrington
Released	June 13th, 1973
MPAA Rating	G
Runtime	86 min. / 96 min. (extended version)
Continuity	Movies

Primary Cast:

[edit] Synopsis

Economic students should study 'Battle for The Planet of the Apes' for a lessen in the law of diminishing returns. This fourth sequel to the Planet of the Apes is a lesson in cashing in, low rent sets, poor acting, nonsensical plot and ignorance of science. This film is as cheap as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was.

After conquering the oppressive humans in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, some 30 years before, Caesar tries to keep the peace amongst the humans and apes, albiet with apes in charge.

Gorilla General Aldo views things differently, and tries to cause an ape civil war (of, like, 200 hundred monkeys). In the meantime, other human survivors learn of the ape city, and decide they want to take back civilization for themselves.

This sets up the most ludicrous battle scene possibly ever filmed in the entire history of bad films. The army from the city rolls up in their 3 motor bikes, a jeep with a canon and a school bus and burns a few monkey tree huts. Sensing victory they interrogate Ceaser who calls the foxing Apes to arms and they actually win the Battle for the Planet!

Cue an orangutan giving a history lesson to both ape and human children some 600 years in the future - Gasp! Ceaser changed the future! Earth did not explode! Chimps and Men can live in harmony!

While the previous four movies had some pretty dodgy paradigms, 'Battle for the Planet' seems to ignore the cannon and comes up with some pretty odd situations. You have to suspend your belief for a bit to accept that in 30 years all Apes and Chimps can talk and can rationalise about space time continuums. You have to accept that a nuclear bomb can destroy a city but that everything below the surface can survive intact and that the electricity still works. You have to accept Caeser can set up an Ape City a day's walk from the city and that the bomb only destroyed the city and nothing else. You have to believe that in 30 years the gorillas have formed an army ...of 30 gorillas.

It also sounds like they cut out a scene which would have given the movie some real relevance to the Ape series, in particular Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The cut scene was from the end of the film which shows the beginnings of the House of Mendez cult. The humans in the city are about to fire off the doomsday bomb but decide not to, as it would destroy the Earth. Instead they form a religion around the bomb.

Overall, after the brilliance of the first 3 movies, the good effort of the third, 'Battle for the Planet of the Apes' is an epic let down. Do yourself a favour and watch the original Planet of the Apes.

[edit] Cast And Crew

Supporting Cast (uncredited):

Paul Stader ... Stunt Coordinator
Roydon Clark ... Stunts
Erik Cord ... Stunts
Paula Crist ... Stunts
Nick Dimitri ... Stunts
Dick Durock ... Stunts
Whitey Hughes ... Stunts
Hubie Kerns ... Stunts
Hubie Kerns Jr. ... Stunts
Regis Parton ... Stunts
Victor Paul ... Stunts
Allen Pinson ... Stunts
Thomas Rosales Jr ... Stunts
Wally Rose ... Stunts
Jesse Wayne ... Stunts

Locations:

Filming Locations:

Items:

Production Crew

Producer ... Arthur P. Jacobs
Associate Producer ... Frank Capra Jr
Unit Production Manager ... Michael S. Glick
Script ... Paul Dehn, John William Corrington & Joyce Hooper Corrington
Director ... J. Lee Thompson
Assistant Director ... Ric Rondell, Barry Stern
Director of Photography ... Richard H. Kline
Editor ... John C. Horger, Alan L. Jaggs
Music ... Leonard Rosenman
Sound ... Herman Lewis, Don Bassman
Make Up ... Joe DiBella, Jack Barron, Werner Keppler
Hair ... Carol Pershing
Creative Makeup Design ... John Chambers
Special Mechanical Effects ... Gerald Endler
Special Photographic Effects ... L.B. Abbott
Art Directors ... Dale Hennesy
Set Decorators ... Robert De Vestel
Title Designer ... Don Record

[edit] Notes

The 'Alpha-Omega Bomb' scenes in Battle were removed from the officially-released version in 1973, in order to avoid the suggestion that the events of Battle would inevitably lead to the destruction of the world shown in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The scenes were, oddly, restored for TV broadcasts in 1975, but did not recieve an official release until included on a Japanese Laserdisc (in the early ‘90s) and on North American-region DVDs in 2006.
Battle was later adapted into a novelization by writer David Gerrold.
General Aldo suggests re-naming 'Ape City' as 'Gorilla City' after he drives off the mutants, just before his own fall.^[1]

[edit] Inconsistencies

The year in which Battle is set has been the subject of some debate. While Planet and Beneath both gave definate (if contradictory) years, and Escape was set in or around a short span of the early 1970's, Conquest was clearly set in 1991. Battle, however, was much more vague. The characters who reappeared from the previous film hadn't aged much; the outline for the story that became the movie was set in 2000; Mendez says there has been 12 years of peace. On the other hand, Mandemus claims the Ape City armory has been his home for twenty-seven years, implying that the Ape settlement has been there that long. To allow for this claim, Rich Handley's Planet of the Apes Timeline places the movie's events in 2020.

[edit] Behind the Scenes

[edit] The Battle for the Planet of the Apes

The movie designed to be the final chapter in the long-running Apes saga went through a number of revisions before it was revealed to the public. The first draft story outline, dated 5 July 1972, was written by Paul Dehn (as were the three preceeding films) and titled The Battle for the Planet of the Apes. It was clearly intended to bring the saga full-circle and set up the events of Planet of the Apes.

An artists impression of Caesar's banner

Set in 'Modern City' - the same city as in Conquest.. (this name for the city is used in all versions of the script, including the final one) - in 2004 A.D., the opening scene is of human workers going about their early-morning tasks, reminiscent of the situation of the apes in Conquest.. - human males dressed in red uniforms, human females in blue. Some of the human servants are cleaning an imposing statue of 'Caesar I'. Nearby, a flag is unfurled representing the new ape society - a yellow background with the head of an ape (Caesar) rising from symbolically blood-red flames. Caesar is in a futuristic dressing-room with his human valet George, being prepared for his public, while MacDonald (the character from Conquest..) is by his side, wearing his own clothes, unlike other humans. Caesar refers to MacDonald as his servant. They are all preparing for a very special occasion in the city.

Caesar, with MacDonald, goes to address the Council, consisting of three chimps led by the young, intellectual, idealistic Pan; three gorillas led by Aldo; and two orangutans led by Zeno who hold the balance of power between the other two factions. Caesar makes a speach to the council announcing the thirteenth anniversary of 'The Night of Fires' - his glorious revolution. He tells them that 90% of mankind is now under ape control, with only pockets of human resistance to the north. A conversation ensues where MacDonald suggests humans should be entitled to a seat on the council; almost all the apes reject his proposal.

Proceeding to Modern City's Civic Center to address the public, the Councilors pass by the general populace - gorillas dressed in black, chimps in green, orangutans in orange-brown. In a playground a female human called Lindy teaches a group of ape children. Suddenly, a human dressed in an old-style suit steps in front of the procession from a public lavatory. When he is asked why he is not wearing the correct attire, he challanges Caesar's right to pass such a law, and further threatens to destroy the city if the apes attempt to harm him.

Taken away to be interviewed by Aldo, Caesar and MacDonald, the stranger reveals he has come as a messenger from someone called 'Nimrod' who has the means to destroy the city if his messenger is harmed. Meanwhile, in a tent to the far north, Nimrod ("a grizzled giant by John Wayne out of Royal Dano" according to the outline), dressed in the battered uniform of a US Army General, listens to the conversation with two aides, while outside a number of humans work on a vast array of old cars and other vehicles. Aldo orders gorilla guard Brutus to begin to torture the stranger but he finds a hidden microphone. Furious, and without any qualms, Caesar orders the stranger shot dead.

Realising the consequences, Caesar orders an ape evacuation of the city to the human-built bunkers underground, with any remaining space to be allocated to only the most useful humans. Lisa is forced to choose between her two human maids, Mary and Anna. The humans listen to the public broadcasts as the chosen few are summoned to the underground entrance at Caesar Avenue & Armando Street - Clement (Clem), a veterinarian now known as a doctor to the apes, Bradford (Brad), a carpenter, Melinda (Lindy), the teacher, Alexander (Lex), a psychiatrist, etc. Lisa looks away as Anna is given entry but Mary is turned away. Lex ruefully says goodbye to his room-mate Frank, a radio technician, but Frank suddenly strangles Lex and takes his identity disc, desperate to survive. The humans left behind form a mob and begin looting the empty city, some breaking into a bank vault in search of money.

Nimrod's two aides are pilots who fly their worn old plane with its nuclear missile towards the city, their mission is probably one-way judging by the state of their plane and the amount of fuel they carried. They drop the bomb not knowing if they will be able to clear the explosion. A silent but blinding explosion of light levels the city and everything in its path as a mushroom cloud stretches into the sky.

Some months later, radiation scarred humans scavenge the remains of the city for food. They find their way into the bunkers the apes had fled to, now abandoned (these, we are told, are the ancestors of the mutants from Beneath..). An elderly religious school supervisor, 'Mother Agnes', leads a group of bedraggled children on a trek to search for a sanctuary. A child called Matilda finds a blade of grass, and they take hope. They meet the survivors who had been in the bank vault, led by Jud. They all head north to find other humans, but all are captured by a gorilla patrol, except for a man called Danny who hides in a nearby cave. There he meets Frank/Lex conspiring with a scarred mutant about the situation among the apes leaders. Caesar trusts 'Lex', not knowing he is an imposter and is plotting against him.

Nearby, a new Ape City is being built by human slaves, the arena from Beneath.. is being hewn from the rock, and a newly-agricultural society has developed around it. They have found the need to be self-sufficient. Lisa gives birth to Caesar's child (she was already newly-pregnant at the time of the bombing), who they name 'Cornelius Armando'. Sensing an opertunity, 'Lex' switches the labels on the doctor's medicines, and when doctor injects the weakened Lisa, shortly after giving birth, with the wrong medicine, she dies. In the confusion, 'Lex' grabs the baby and runs away. Aldo orders his cavalry to find 'Lex'; his police to arrest the doctor; and his infantry to herd all the other humans into their compound. Lex takes the baby to the mutant's cave ("Mutantville"), radios Nimrod and is told that Nimrod's forces are heading south in their makeshift convoy to meet them and finish the war against the apes.

In the bunkers under Modern City, a mutated couple look after the baby chimp, treating it like their own deceased child. Furious with rage and grief, Caesar proposes cutting out the tongues of all humans to end their conspiring - to the horror of Pan, the reluctant agreement of Zeno, and the enthusiasm of Aldo. Zeno studies anatomical charts with a young, personable female orangutan called Zaia ("possibly an ancestress of Dr Zaius"). They discuss humane ways of making humans mute, but decide lobotomising the humans would remove their usefulness; surgically severing the vocal chords would be of more value. Outside, the cavalry commander reports back to Aldo and Caesar that they have failed to find 'Lex' or the baby, and called off the search because of a huge, moving dust cloud to the north. MacDonald, the doctor, and Aldo, in that order, realise there might be more significance to the moving cloud.

Having delivered the baby chimp to it's new guardians in Modern City, 'Lex' visits the armoury where Danny, a gunsmith by trade, is now supervising the creation of missiles and weapons by a workforce of horribly mutated humans. The two remark on the fact that they are the only 'humans' in the city.

Threatened that an untrained Zaia would cause unneccesary pain and injury to her patients, the doctor prepares to demonstrate the vocal chord procedure on a human volunteer - MacDonald. Meanwhile, the coffin that Brad has built for Lisa has secretly been fitted with a transmitter. As Caesar says goodbye to Lisa by the graveside, alone, 'her' voice whispers to him and tells him to let the humans go free for the sake of their son's safety. He runs to the surgery and order a halt just in time to save MacDonald. But Aldo and Zeno believe Caesar has lost his mind and become unreliable. Aldo draws his gun to shoot him, but MacDonald jumps into the path of the bullet, dying. A second shot from Aldo kills Caesar.

Almost immediately, Nimrod's army invades the settlement. His first missiles destroy the human compound - deliberately, because they are 'collaborators'. The few human survivors, including the group of children, flee to the nearby mutant cave, while Aldo leads the defense in a great battle somewhere between Modern City and Ape City. From the cave mouth, Danny launches a missile device at the ape army which does not explode, but his mutant colleague tells the apes that the nerve gas within will make them all sterile. The apes withdraw, fearful of the consequences for the future. Nimrod greets the mutant leader in the cave and tells him that his real name is General Mendez (a footnote says "we met Mendez XXVII in Apes II"). The mutant reveals that in truth the missile was empty.

Back at the Ape City, Zeno and Aldo announce that they will hereafter be joint rulers and that the area infected by the missile will be a 'Forbidden Zone' for the sake of the survival of the ape races. Zeno also begins a series of anti-human proclaimations, the basis of the 'Sacred Scrolls' (it is revealed that Zeno will become 'The Lawgiver' from Planet..). The human and mutant survivors remain in the cave system and make it their home. Out of the cave mouth, Matilda and the other children release baby Cornelius to fend for himself in the wilderness.

[edit] Epic of the Planet of the Apes

Dehn's script didn't satisfy his employers, and as with Pierre Boulle and Rod Serling before him, Dehn was sidelined in favour of new writers John William Corrington & Joyce Hooper Corrington. Their first draft story outline, dated 4 September 1972, and titled Epic of the Planet of the Apes, was basically the story we are now familiar with as the finished movie, although some of the outline notes give interesting background information that doesn't appear elsewhere, including the setting of the main part of the film in the year 2000 and a fairly clear-cut statement about the series divergent continuity.

The prologue and epilogue of the movie are set in 2670 A.D. The Lawgiver is now benevolent towards humans (as opposed to the anti-human fanatic suggested in Planet.. and Beneath..) - "this difference is due to alterations of that historical track which we have seen worked out in previous films...these changes in ape history are due primarily to the influence of Caesar on apes and humans".

Flashback to 1991: Caesar leads an exodus of apes and humans from 'Modern City' in the aftermath of his successful rebellion. Ape uprisings and general world tensions have led to nuclear devestation which Caesar's band narrowly escapes.

Forward to 2000 A.D. (according to this script): The rural Ape City contrasts with melted and devestated Modern City, which glows with radioactivity at night. Tunnels and the 'Command Post' from Conquest.. survive largely intact underground. Caesar and Lisa have a six-year-old son called Cornelius (or 'Conny'). Breck still controls the former city, assisted by Mendez, an electronics expert and his communications officer, and Alma, who has primitive psionic powers (towards the end of the film she senses when Breck has died), black hair streaked with white ("towards albinism of 'Beneath'"), and is Breck's secretary.

At the conclusion of this outline, Caesar is killed by a fatal shot from Aldo; the Lawgiver of Caesar's future resembles Virgil (his descendent?); and while he gives his lesson, an ape and a human child fight, goaded on by their respective species, in stark contrast to the Lawgiver's message of peace.

"The main premise of 'Epic' is that Caesar, discovering the tapes ...determines that the course of history must be changed such that when Taylor arrives two millenia later he will find peace and justice instead of the slavery and brutality of 'Planet' which led directly to the atomic destruction of the world by the doomsday bomb.... The perspective given us by the prologue-epilogue frame indicates that Caesar has some success since an integrated ape-human society is awaiting the coming of Taylor, but the question of the planet's ultimate destiny is left open."

[edit] Battle for the Planet of the Apes

At some point in late 1972 it seems the movie was briefly given the title Colonization of the Planet of the Apes, as noted on countless websites. Through further revisions and treatments between December 1972 and January 1973, the script changed little but a few more nuggets of information can be found in these revisions to the newly-renamed Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

'Ape City' is to the north of 'Modern City'. London, Rome, Athens, Rio, Moscow, Tokyo and Peking were all destroyed much the same as 'Modern City'. Caesar points out "the city was flattened. The bomb left nothing" to which MacDonald counters "...except (I suspect) the Archives section - indeed many sections of the underground city were designed to survive the impact of a ten megaton overblast." This suggests they haven't seen the city since before it was destroyed (unlike Dehn's treatment in which they hid in the bunkers beneath the city until it was safe to leave). The mutant Control Center is the former Ape Management Center used by City Governor Breck (note the term 'City Govenor' rather than State Governor). Kolp is assisted by Alma, his communications officer, and Mendez, his first lieutenant "who will one day be the first in the mutant dynasty that ends with Mendez XXVI in 'Beneath'" (this corrects the mistake in Dehn's treatment, above, which names that character 'Mendez XXVII'). Mendez says there has been 12 years of peace; Kolp and Alma have worked together for 11 years and 3 months - they kiss before Kolp departs on his invasion.

In a scene which didn't make it into the film but did appear in the Marvel Comics adaptation, MacDonald, the teacher and the doctor eat a bootleg rabbit in MacDonald's house, with a chair against the door and blankets on the window to hide the aroma - Caesar has forbidden humans from eating meat.

The scenes involving the Alpha-Omega Bomb survived the script revisions and were ultimately filmed, only to be excised in an attempt to give a more optimistic and open finale, before being restored for North American commercial releases in 2006.^[2]

[edit] Trivia

F-6 was the code designation for the corridor that Caesar, Virgil and MacDonald 'invaded' the dead city through. The Archives Section was near Breck's old Command Post. It's address, revealed in David Gerrold's novelisation, was an in-joke; located on 'Ackerman Street', with the correct vault numbered 4SJ, - long the signature of well-known SF & Horror authority Forrest J. Ackerman.^[3]

John Landis, the director of Animal Farm, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, etc., has a tiny part.

Mikko was the name of a young chimpanzee in Battle (?)^[4]

The San Simian Sentinal was the name of a promotional 4-page newspaper distributed free to first-run viewers of Battle.

[edit] Quotes

Lawgiver: In the beginning, God created beast and man, so that both might live in friendship and share dominion over a world at peace. But in the fullness of time, evil men betrayed God's trust and, in disobedience to His holy word, waged bloody wars...not only against their own kind, but against the apes, whom they reduced to slavery. Then God, in His wrath, sent the world a savior, miraculously born of two apes who had descended on Earth from Earth's own future. And man was afraid, for both parent apes possessed the power of speech. So both were brutally murdered. But the child ape survived and grew up to set his fellow creatures free from the yoke of human slavery. Yet, in the aftermath of his victory, the surface of the world was ravaged by the vilest war in human history. The great cities of the world split asunder and were flattened. And out of one such city, our savior led a remnant of those who survived in search of greener pastures, where ape and human might forver live in friendship, according to divine will. His name was Caesar, and this is his story in those far-off days.

Lawgiver: We still wait, my children. But as I look at apes and humans, living in friendship, in harmony and at peace, now some 600 years after Caesar's death, at least we wait with hope for the future.

[edit] Related Articles

[edit] External References

[edit] References

Planet of the Apes
Planet of the Apes	Beneath the Planet of the Apes	Escape from the Planet of the Apes	Conquest of the Planet of the Apes	Battle for the Planet of the Apes

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[0] Glossary to the Planet Of The Apes Jim Whitmore (1976)

[1] Hunter's Planet of the Apes Scripts Archive

[2] Glossary to the Planet Of The Apes Jim Whitmore (1976)

[3] Glossary to the Planet Of The Apes Jim Whitmore (1976)

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