Conquest is the least remembered Apes film, and the one that receives the least amount of TV screenings. There's the original, of course, followed by the one with the mutants, the one on present-day Earth and Battle, the rubbish one. To this end a subtler, low-key picture set in a future Earth 1990s doesn't seem as instantly memorable.
Yet in a period where disease has caused the widespread slaughter of farm livestock, Conquest has taken on a fresh relevancy. Escape details "dog bonfires" that purged the land, and Conquest takes up this strand.
It's superb science fiction. Making a virtue out of its low budget, Conquest is carved as a grimy, low-key thriller, minimal sets being used to their optimum advantage. Apes only have menial jobs in this time period painters, cleaners, shoeshines and face regular police brutality, often for just sitting on the wrong seat, or walking on the wrong patch of grass. The parallels are clear to see. Holding up a mirror to the Watts riots of 1965, it comments on the racial situation in a way that a Hollywood movie doing so directly would not have been allowed. This is exactly what science fiction is for, using its fantasy trappings to make political statement.
Items like the authenticator lean slightly towards pulp SF, though generally this is the most mature, bleak and realistically coded Apes film. Long has the myth that the sequels are worthless reigned, a rumour clearly untrue by the fact that the series lasted for five films. If all the sequels were terrible then they wouldn't have kept on getting made. I put this belief down largely to the awful concluding movie and the lacking TV series, because artistically and conceptually Conquest is arguably the greatest Apes film ever made.
Definitely the greatest of the sequels, any quibbles are minor ones. There's some clunky, yet necessary exposition from Ricardo Montalban in the first five minutes, and some of the speech making towards the climax is a little trite. "When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves", Caesar is told. Yet even with a studio-enforced overdub of McDowall's final lines to carve a more hopeful ending, this is still unsettling, powerful and unashamedly violent. It's often difficult to watch, which is praise, and one can only wonder how much more disturbing it would have been with the intact dialogue and the full riot unedited. Playing the embittered son of Cornelius, McDowall really comes into his own, with Hari Rhodes's Martin Luther-King persona acting as a counterpoint to Caesar's Malcolm X.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was set in 1991. In the real world, 1991 saw the police beating of Rodney King. Two decades had passed, yet little or nothing had changed.
Yet in a period where disease has caused the widespread slaughter of farm livestock, Conquest has taken on a fresh relevancy. Escape details "dog bonfires" that purged the land, and Conquest takes up this strand.
It's superb science fiction. Making a virtue out of its low budget, Conquest is carved as a grimy, low-key thriller, minimal sets being used to their optimum advantage. Apes only have menial jobs in this time period painters, cleaners, shoeshines and face regular police brutality, often for just sitting on the wrong seat, or walking on the wrong patch of grass. The parallels are clear to see. Holding up a mirror to the Watts riots of 1965, it comments on the racial situation in a way that a Hollywood movie doing so directly would not have been allowed. This is exactly what science fiction is for, using its fantasy trappings to make political statement.
Items like the authenticator lean slightly towards pulp SF, though generally this is the most mature, bleak and realistically coded Apes film. Long has the myth that the sequels are worthless reigned, a rumour clearly untrue by the fact that the series lasted for five films. If all the sequels were terrible then they wouldn't have kept on getting made. I put this belief down largely to the awful concluding movie and the lacking TV series, because artistically and conceptually Conquest is arguably the greatest Apes film ever made.
Definitely the greatest of the sequels, any quibbles are minor ones. There's some clunky, yet necessary exposition from Ricardo Montalban in the first five minutes, and some of the speech making towards the climax is a little trite. "When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves", Caesar is told. Yet even with a studio-enforced overdub of McDowall's final lines to carve a more hopeful ending, this is still unsettling, powerful and unashamedly violent. It's often difficult to watch, which is praise, and one can only wonder how much more disturbing it would have been with the intact dialogue and the full riot unedited. Playing the embittered son of Cornelius, McDowall really comes into his own, with Hari Rhodes's Martin Luther-King persona acting as a counterpoint to Caesar's Malcolm X.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was set in 1991. In the real world, 1991 saw the police beating of Rodney King. Two decades had passed, yet little or nothing had changed.