9/23/2023 0 Comments 2001 a space odysseyHe starts out as a misanthrope, waxing philosophical in astronaut voice-over about man making war on his brother and keeping his neighbor's children starving. Taylor is a very different character from the kind Heston was known for. According to Gore Vidal, who had a hand in the film's screenplay, the crew of Ben-Hur (which I wrote about recently) nicknamed Heston "the big cornpone." He was never more hammy than he was as Moses. By today's naturalistic standards, his style of acting - the air of considerable pomp he brought to some of those performances - almost seems like overacting. Prior to 1968, Heston had starred in a string of religious films, including but not limited to The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, where he played John the Baptist. The choice of Charlton Heston was an interesting one for the role of Taylor, the main character in the original Planet of the Apes. The focus on apes in these movies belies a very human story, as if returning the audience to its evolutionary roots, holding up a mirror to our more primitive selves and reminding us that as far as we may have come as an ostensibly civilized species, we still have a long way to go. Like so many other good science fiction stories, the original Planet of the Apes and its numerous sequels and prequels - even the absolutely bonkers Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with its singing, nuclear-warhead-worshipping underground mutants - merely serve to reflect the real world back at us in a phantasmagorical way. The talking-apes society is actually a brilliant high concept, however, one that has consistently managed to frame compelling allegories for the human race, even as the Apes series has shifted from outstanding practical effects, make-up and costume design, to motion-capture-driven CGI. Divorced from itself as a proven intellectual property in Hollywood, a society of talking apes may seem like a silly premise (though with the specter of swine flu and avian influenza, or bird flu, looming large in the 2000s, the "simian flu" portrayed in the reboot trilogy came off as frighteningly realistic).
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