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Warning from the Lawgiver's scrolls. |
Clever Simians Outwit Hapless Heston TIME February 23, 1968
Planet of the Apes"The monkey," said Henry Ward Beecher, "is an organized sarcasm upon the human race." The sarcasm is seldom allowed to speak for itself in this film about a space odyssey that goes awry and crash-lands three astronauts on an unknown planet. The novel by Pierre Boulle about the conflict of man and monkey was a clever, abrasive piece of science friction. But on the screen, the story has been reduced from Swiftian satire to self-parody. The script is cluttered with man-monkey analogies, as crude as "Human see, human do", "I never met an ape I didn't like," and "he was a gorilla to remember." The best thing about the film is the masks and costumes. The makeup boys came up with the most beastly metamorphoses since Lon Chaney moonlighted as the Wolf Man.
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