The Guardian's 1968 review of the original Planet of the Apes
Acouple of years ago Franklin Schaffner seemed to be one of the few new talents to come out of Hollywood. "A Woman of Summer", "The Best Man" and last year "The War Lord" left us with the feeling that here was a man who might go places, once he found himself. Good as those three films were, each was so different in style and subject matter that that one could not be sure just who Mr Schaffner, so to speak, was.
Now, with Planet of the Apes (Carlton) I think we can come to at least a provisional conclusion. Like many Hollywood directors - but unlike the very best - he is as good as his script. In this case he's got himself quite an ingenious one about an American astronaut who propelled some 2,000 years through space/time, arrives on an unknown (or is it?) planet to find that homo sapiens and the monkeys have changed places.
The chimpanzees, the gorillas, and the orang-utans are the lords of creation; men are the slaves: mute, reduced to animal level and treated as we now treat the apes.
A promising idea, and yet ultimately too cute: it is a one-to-one allegory, and this much of the film is spent exploring this not very rewarding vein. For example, the priests refuse to believe in the evolutionary theory that apes might just possibly have developed from man, and a nice young chimpanzee social worker's idea that our hero (Charlton Heston in his usual top form) might be a "missing link" is jeered as heresy.
Except for the few (perhaps too consciously) beautiful bits of photography, the interest of the film is precisely in the working out of the plot, so I dare not reveal any more. Schaffner handles it well, but he does not add to it very conspicuously. (The screenplay, by the way, is by Michael Wilson and rod Serling after the Pierre Boulle novel.)
It's a film to see, all right, and it does confirm Schaffner's talent. It is only that one can now see more clearly the limits of that talent, limits which are much narrower than I had hoped. This explains my sense of disappointment; on the other hand, why look a gift horse in the face, and this particular horse, if not a thoroughbred, is nevertheless something of a safe bet.