Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

The second installment arrives with its budget halved and its star visibly reluctant. Charlton Heston agreed to return only on the condition that Taylor die and his fee go to charity, then shot his scenes in eight days. The result is a franchise doing arithmetic, padding a rescue mission with a new astronaut and a subterranean civilization that worships a cobalt bomb. The production is handsome in a repurposed way. The mutant council chamber was a redress of sets built for a Barbra Streisand musical, which tells us something about Hollywood bookkeeping and nothing about the atom.

The social ledger here is nearly blank, and the few entries are accidents of era more than intent. Don Pedro Colley sits on the mutant council, credited in the promotional materials as Negro, a casting note that reads as period insensitivity instead of representation. Zira remains a capable chimpanzee scientist and Nova a resourceful mute, yet both function as stock ensemble furniture. The ape-human war is a species allegory dressed in Cold War hardware, and General Ursus rallies his gorillas for food and territory without a syllable of class grievance. Telepathy is villainy in this picture, never identity. The mutants remove their masks to reveal scarring and vascular ruin, staged for revulsion. That is the precise inverse of any lesson about accepting bodies as they are.

Director Ted Post objected to the script for making no point, then supplied one of his own: the loss of a planet is the loss of all hope. The film obliges with a doom-laden anti-nuclear sermon, delivered through spectacle and a hymn to the Bomb Almighty instead of argument. Gene Siskel called the decision to give the series a moral a gross error. He may have been right, and he may have been describing the entire enterprise. The apocalypse here is atomic, not climatic. The final detonation settles every question the film raises by declining to leave anyone alive to discuss them.