The hero of the film, George Taylor, is an astronaut who lands on a world run by intelligent chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas. Humans are mute and animalistic. In one of the most iconic moments in 1960s film, Taylor discovers the Statue of Liberty half buried on the beach.
Taylor realizes that he has been on earth all along. Humanity had nuked itself into oblivion and the apes had taken over. Taylor was, of course, played by former NRA president Charlton Heston.
The company that produced Planet of the Apes was 20th Century Fox. The film reportedly saved Fox from bankruptcy, so they decided to cash in with a sequel. But they had a difficult time making a go of it. Heston wanted nothing to do with it. They had serious problems coming up with a script. The budget was cut to the bone.
Different iterations were named The Planet of Men, The Dark Side of the Earth, and Planet of the Apes Revisited. In the end they called it Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
In the film another astronaut (played by James Franciscus) follows Heston. He discovers a race of mutated humans with mental powers who live in the abandoned subway system of New York. These mutants worship a planet-killing nuclear bomb etched with the ominous initials "ΑΩ".
The apes and the mutants go to war, and in the end Heston got his wish. He put his character out of his misery by pressing a trigger, detonating the bomb, and destroying the planet.
Though not the Planet of the Apes franchise. Three more Apes movies were produced in the 70s, there was a live action TV series, an animated TV series, a 2001 remake directed by Tim Burton and another reboot that has spawned three films since 2011, making Andy Serkis a tidy sum of money.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes was an allegory on the folly of war (Vietnam was in full swing in 1970 when it came out). It was also a bad, depressing, didactic flick.
But it was on the money with its portrayal of mutants worshiping the instruments of death. The film was filled with Christian imagery: monks in habits, a creepy chorus accompanied by an eerie organ, inverted crucifixes and the Alpha-Omega.
Lest you think that worshiping a nuclear missile is over the top, consider that most Christians worship the instrument of Christ's death, the crucifix. Some sects, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, consider the crucifix a graven image and claim that its use is idolatry. At its core, Christianity is a death cult, obsessed with death and resurrection, engaging to this day in ritual vampirism and cannibalism.
It is ironic that some 20 years after the release of Beneath the Planet of the Apes Charlton Heston came to be the president of the NRA, the leader of another cult that worships the instruments of death. After destroying weapon idolaters in the movie, he became the Moses of his own cult of gun worshipers.
The problem with worshiping these instruments of death is the ever-present temptation to use them for their true purpose. Someone always wants to pull the trigger to end their own misery and take as many others with them as they can, just like Heston's character in the movie.
These days Heston has many followers: in Parkland, in Santa Fe, in Sutherland Springs, in Newtown -- in far too many places to remember any more.
And we already know how this movie ends.
No comments:
Post a Comment