“Ape Management… is in the hands of the apes.”

Chad’s rating: Apparently, the filmmakers never read Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Chad’s review: It’s hard to believe, but in the 1970s franchise movies were a rarity. That is, until 1977, when Star Wars began its world domination, did studios finally catch the multi-picture bug. But before then, we pretty much only had James Bond cranking out picture after picture on a rigid two-year schedule. And honestly, I wish we would get back to a time when the original, pure cinema experience is the rule and the sequel, remake, and reboot are the exception. But I digress.

The other pre-Star Wars franchise was the Planet of the Apes, which was a huge gamble for 20th Century Fox that paid off in spades. Where the Bond franchise had its standard formula of gadgets, girls, and over-the-top stunts, the Ape pictures were all over the place stylistically. It’s a bizarre collection of films with no roadmap, lurching from entry to entry with a razor-thin continuity. While the series would continue the social commentary that made the original iconic, the sequels were undercut by significantly reduced budgets. Fox was seriously cash-strapped during the 1970s, and they looked at the POA franchise as a series to be done cheaply and quickly.

Despite these limitations, Beneath the Planet of the Apes was a solid follow-up that featured one of the bleakest endings in a sci-fi film. The third entry, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, had a much lighter tone, focusing on the beloved chimpanzee couple Cornelius and Zira as they travel back in time to 1973, where they’re now the outcasts in a mirror-warped society.

By this time, the franchise was a roaring success, and you have to admire the filmmakers for never settling on a formula and taking big swings. And the fourth film would be its most ambitious yet, going in a very dark direction yet wrapped up in one of the series’ most ludicrous plots.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes picks up twenty years after the events of Escape, where Zira cleverly switched out her intelligent chimpanzee baby with that of a regular circus ape, thus ensuring his survival. The orphaned ape, now renamed Caesar, has been raised in secret by the kindly circus owner Armando and has grown into a curious simian eager to explore the outside world.

But in this alternate-set 1991 film, the world has transformed into a dystopian fascist state under a constant state of martial law. A pandemic plague wiped out all cats and dogs, so humans adopted chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans as their new pets and companions. But in the intervening years, the simians have grown more humanoid, so humanity now uses these quickly-evolved apes as slaves/servants.

When Armando takes Caesar into the city for the first time, he’s not only horrified by the primitive nature of his fellow chimpanzees but by how cruelly their human masters treat them. When the militaristic police crackdown on a group of unruly gorillas, Caesar yells, “You human bastards!” To cover for him, Armando says that he spoke the words, and the police take him into custody, leaving the young simian to hide among the enslaved ape population, struggling to hide his intelligence and speaking ability.

After Caesar witnesses the brutal murder of Armando — the police toss him off a skyscraper — the once-idealistic ape embraces his inner Che Guevara. Using his skills and intellect, he organizes his fellow simians enslaved at “ape management” to break free from their bondage. Soon the ape revolution spills out into the streets as they topple the local fascist government, where Caeser warns his former human masters that the “Planet of the Apes” has arrived.

Much like the previous ape films, there are many ridiculous plot elements that you must buy into, such as accepting that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans will evolve into a more humanoid form in 20 years. The extinction of dogs and cats, along with forcing humans to adopt apes as their preferred pets, is borderline comical. Also, this frightening authoritarian world is never fleshed out as most of the action occurs inside the “Ape Management” compound and the city square. This brave new world feels small and contained, no doubt due to the movie’s cheap budget.

But if you can get past the weak world-building, there’s some great stuff here. This is the most visually interesting picture in the series, where the cold brutalism of concrete skyscrapers contrasts the curving desolate dunes of the previous entries. Director J. Lee Thompson, who is best known for helming the original 1962 Cape Fear, films these city sequences from low angles, partly to hide the modern-day surroundings. The end result is an atmosphere of dread. It effectively portrays a future version of humanity that has turned hard and cruel as they embrace fascism.

We’re also treated to the talents of Ricardo Montalban and Roddy McDowall returning to the franchise. As Armando, Montalban is always a welcome presence playing the only sympathetic human in the film. While he’s reduced to spouting thankless exposition, Armando’s death later in the movie is the film’s sole shocking moment that kickstarts Caesar’s turn against humanity.

And McDowall trades in the Cornelius role to play his son, Caesar, giving this new character an edgier and harder tone than his father. Even when he’s covered in ape prosthetics, McDowall’s eyes do the heavy lifting, as you can see him understanding the human conversations as he struggles to act more primitive. McDowall remains the series’ guiding light, and this is his best performance in the POA franchise.

And this is the most politically charged Ape film, even if the slave/revolution theme is so overt that it sometimes lands with a thud. There isn’t much subtlety when these servant apes are yanked by chains and belittled by their human masters. But the movie does move into bold territory when the apes turn to violence in the film’s climax, as much of the imagery evokes the civil rights protests of the 1960s. And Caesar’s victorious monologue that closes out the picture is a tug-of-war between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It’s surprising that the picture touches on that dynamic, even if it never fully explores those extremes.

Sadly, the cheap budget is really apparent with this entry. Anytime you watch a classic, pre-CGI film, you have to appreciate the visual effects in the context of the era. But for Conquest, the low-grade ape suits and makeup yanked me out of the picture. The Caesar prosthetics for McDowall remain exceptional and detailed, making him stand out from the more primitive chimpanzees. But the film loses me when he starts interacting with the other apes, who are clearly actors in suits with pullover masks.

I want to give a special shout-out to Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Dehn, who took over the scripting duties of the series with the second film. While his plotting leaves much to be desired, he writes sharp, intelligent dialogue that would make Aaron Sorkin proud. Not only does he give Caesar that edgy and bittersweet final monologue, but his villains also get some juicy bits as well. Dehn had a tall order of balancing the camp of the franchise while keeping the social commentary that started in the first Planet of the Apes while writing around the budgetary limitations.

If any of these plot elements sound familiar, much of the Caesar story arc was used in the excellent 2011 remake Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That film had the benefit of pairing Andy Serkis and ground-breaking motion capture technology to create a much more complex and fully realized Caesar. This leaves Conquest of the Planet of the Apes a fascinating curiosity, although it has a dystopian tone that warns we are just a single catastrophe away from fascism. It’s probably the best classic Apes film next to the original, even as it tosses continuity out the window to bring out that upside-down world Charlton Heston encountered.