Griff's Movie Review

TIME OF THE APES 

If you squished Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes together, took out any allegories, style, meaning, thought, decent production values, class actors, originality and satire, you’d have Time of the Apes, a cheapjack rip-off that’s so lazy it only changes one word of the title of the movie it’s scabbing from. Originally a seriously low-rent Japanese TV series, it’s been cobbled together to make this laughable slice of hollow SF shite that at least gets a few laughs in the early stages but soon becomes seriously boring. 

To be fair to the damn thing, once the set up is out of the way it doesn’t follow the Planet of the Apes film too closely but does lob in way too much from Pierre Boulle’s book and The Terminator, then sends the plot into a black hole of anti-logic. The movie starts when annoying kids Johnny and Caroline go off to visit their uncle’s lab. A tremor shakes the family house and their mum tells them, ‘Don’t go – it’s too dangerous!’ ‘I don’t care,’ says Johnny, ‘come on Caroline!’ So of course their parents wave them off with a cheery ‘Enjoy yourselves! Be careful both of you!’ Social services would have a field day with these two. At the lab, Johnny and Caroline are shown their uncle’s cryogenics experiments by the friendly Dr. Catherine and dive into the capsules when an earthquake rocks the building. 

Bish bash bosh, the trio wake up years later – when apes rule the Earth! What an amazing concept! Teaming up with Godo, the only human they can find in the area, our heroes try to escape the ape forces and find a way home. Does the ape society have anything to say about society, religion, science or humanity? Nope, they’re just monkeys. The technological advances of the apes – they have cities, cars and so on – reeks of Boulle’s novel but is due less to his inspiration than the fact that there wasn't enough money in the Time of the Apes piggy bank to realise a proper ape civilisation. The ape make-up isn’t as bad as it might have been considering the budget, but the mouths don’t move at all and any close-ups reveal how shoddy the work really is. The quake effects are surprisingly good though – obviously miniature, but relatively impressive when you see the rest of the movie. 

Okay, so a teeny budget pretty much precludes high production values. But it doesn’t excuse some of the laziest writing in the universe, courtesy of Japan’s Devlin and Emmerich, scripter Keiiche Abe and writers of the so-called ‘original story’ Kouji Tonaka, Aritsome Toyoda and Sakyo Komatsu. Here we go with the dumb events that happen in this movie: When the gang have to escape from a cell from which there is no escape, Johnny just happens to have a screwdriver with him to undo the air vent. The good guys don’t get shot because... they just don’t, there’s no particular reason, they just never get hit. They can wander in and out of any military installation just by singing to themselves and looking innocent, and a scarf over Godo’s head is enough to disguise himself as an ape. Most of the enormous plot holes I almost fell into along the way can probably be put down to the heavy editing required to bodge the series together into this feature length shittle... 

But even so, the ending – spoilers ahead – takes the movie into realms of stupidity unseen outside Independence Day. We assume the ape civilisation is the future of Earth. We’re told how humans became so lazy and reliant on apes to do their work for them that the simians took over (which is a direct steal from Boulle’s book). Godo and his pals then come across Ucom - a giant supercomputer that became self aware, decided that humans needed to be obliterated and waged war against its creators (not at all a rip-off of Terminator), which tells them that they’ve come about a thousand years forward in time. Then when Johnny and co. are sent further into the future, they end up back where they started - it turns out that they were actually in the past all along! That could – could – be a good twist, except it’s not. Especially since there are only four humans alive in this time – Johnny, Godo, Caroline and Catherine - and all of them are sent elsewhere by Ucom. Exactly how does the human race carry on from this point? 

The story makes virtually no sense. Check out this amazing slice of credibility-free technobabble that pops up once everyone gets back to their own time: ‘I understand now... it’s all very clear! Instead of your progressing into the future you reversed into the past. But there was another factor – the extremely low temperature which caused the time scale to warp and therefore the deep freeze capsule acted as a time converter.’ Got that? A high-tech fridge, if cold enough, can send you back in time. ‘It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?’ witters Catherine. I mean... what? And the addition of a flying saucer that leads the gang to Ucom is utterly pointless and so Japanese sci-fi. So, I expected this to be shite, I expected it to be cheap and cheerful (it’s actually quite enjoyable at first. Well, in a point-and-laugh sort of way) and I expected it to be unoriginal. I didn’t expect it to be so stark raving bloody stupid though. Time of the Apes is a cack-handed curiosity.