Of the five original "Apes" films, 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' is probably the one I've seen the least of. It has some semi iconic moments I suppose, clustered around the underground ruins of New York City inhabited by mutant humans, an interesting enough wrinkle from where things left off in the first film. The thing that hurts this movie the most is the relative lack of Heston, the star of the first feature had to be talked into a limited appearance in this one, he was loath to do sequels.
This necessitated the introduction of a new lead, James Franciscus playing Brent, another stranded astronaut from Taylor's time. Not only is Franciscus's character extremely like Heston's character, basically interchangeable, he looks a lot like the better known actor as well. If only Heston had committed fully to coming back I think we would have ended up with a better movie, and perhaps avoided the writely corner they left this unexpectedly resilient franchise in by blowing up the Earth, but that gets us to the next film. This one gets **1/2
No comments:
Post a Comment