13 Planet Of The Apes Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

4. Battle For The Planet Of The Apes Was A Kids Film

The final episode in the original cycle, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), was disappointingly lacklustre. Chiefly serving as a bridge between the earlier and later films, it lost much of its impetus when a subplot about the first 'nuclear pope' (distant ancestor of Mendez XXVI from Beneath) was excised, as was Paul Dehn's original climax, where an increasingly pacifistic Caesar was killed by a warlike ape council. Instead, the rewritten script was turned into an anodyne children's film, only interesting for a scene where Caesar finds videotape of his parents warning about the planet's later destruction, and a cameo by legendary director John Huston as the orang-utan Lawgiver referred to in the first two films. As an emblem of how the rebooted films have revitalised a seemingly arcane concept, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) turns the pedestrian ape-human war of Battle into a looming CGI apocalypse. In 1973, the $1.8m budget had necessitated close-ups and quick cuts to give the illusion of a sizeable mutant army in the brief, anti-climactic battle scene. Other parallels include Gary Oldman as Dreyfus, leader of the San Francisco epidemic survivors, who echoes the old Caesar's adversary, ex-police chief Kolp; Caesar's basic tenet of "Ape shall never kill ape" is put to the test against Koba the bonobo, as it was against General Aldo in the earlier film - and audience identification with a CGI monkey is evoked by video footage of Caesar's early life with his trainer.