Anonymous Andy (Minus_The_Beer) If "Battle for the Planet of the Apes" looks and feels hamstrung by a lower-than-low budget, well, it's because it is. The fifth and final entry in the original "Apes" series, "Battle" has a lot of heart and ambition but has a distinct odor of a cash-in entry from a series that had been all but wrung dry. That's not to say that there's no joy to be found in the film, but it's certainly nothing worth going ape**** over, either.Immediately following the events of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," Ape and Man are living together in the forest under admittedly strained conditions. When head ape, Caesar (Roddy McDowall), enters the decimated city seeking answers about his past, he inadvertently sets off an all-out war with its mutated and jaded human population. Also, because this is a "Planet of the Apes" movie, there is bad behavior by the apes in black and purple, while the apes in green and black prove to be allies to the submissive human population.This is by far the silliest of all the "Apes" flicks (barring, of course, Tim Burton's dreadful 2001 re-do). The plot beats are all too familiar, while the rubber masks worn by the ape actors look cheaper and less convincing than ever. The climactic battle scene itself looks similarly dopey, with the mutant aggressors looking less like the sewer-dwellers from "Futurama" and more like rejects from the original "Mad Max" with poorly applied prosthetic warts and greasy hair. And the less said about the final frame, the better. Having said all that, there is a certain undeniable charm to the film, as with the previous four. If you've come this far in the series, you'd have to be bananas to stop here.

Blueghost the 1970s, when the "Ape" films were shown on TV every so often, and were popular for what they were. "Planet of the Apes" had a certain sheen to it. A kind of gloss that was science fiction of the mid to late 1960s up through the beginning of the 1980s. Star Wars had it, the first Ape film had it, Logan's Run had, the sci-fi illustrations on sci-fi novels at the time had it. There was a sense of wonderment, distance, a certain "beyond" quality to the best of the genre that this film seems begin to shed.Truth be told, in my personal opinion, I think people were getting tired of the Ape films because the sequels didn't dovetail like other sequels. We were watching epochs of Ape-Human conflict and civilization, as opposed to characters going through one story after another. Somewhat akin to my previous review of "Things to Come", where we see not one character, but the same actors playing the decedents of the parents or grandparents of the previous generation.So it is that the whole series, even though the individual films are interesting, as a whole, has a kind of Wagnerian quality to it that with each passing episode tears away at the gloss. So much that when the final chapter comes around we have a low budget film that does its best to stretch the money to try and deliver A-quality material. The result being that we get a kind of what used to be known as a "made for TV" movie, or "movie of the week" quality to the cinematography and overall production values.Even so the actors give it their best, and the art department also puts its best foot forward to add to the more upscale previous films in the series.The sets, the props, the costumes, the very number of bodies, are all scaled back. Fortunately we have a strong cast to buttress a film for a series that was headed for television in the form of a live action TV series and cartoon.All in all I'm glad I finally saw all of it after all these years. The first film in the series was shown irregularly, the second even less. The third and fourth films got the most airing, and this film would air every so often.Ultimately I think the ape films could have ended on a higher note, and a few dollars more injected into the budget could have realized some better films that might have drawn in larger audiences. But as it stands it's perhaps almost fitting that an interesting series petered out as the social upheavals it was commenting on were taking a rest or simmering down.I've liked the ape films for what they are, though I can't say I've been a huge fan of them. I always did want a better ending for Taylor and Nova, and this film seems to close the book on the entire saga in a low-budget kind of way, without dipping into confirmed B- movie territory. Still, if you must see one of the ape films, then I might recommend sticking with the first two, and avoiding the followups, including this one, unless you're inclined to view the entire saga.An interesting if marginally disappointing watch. Check it out if you're a fan.

Anssi Vartiainen The last in the original Planet of the Apes film series and easily the worst and least interesting of the lot. Surprisingly, they still managed to draw in much of the same actors, including Roddy McDowall as Caesar, the original smart ape in this timeline.This movie suffers largely from the same problems as its immediate predecessor, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. It tries to bridge the time gap between the third and the original film, explaining how the events and the world of the original film could have come to be, but it does so wanting to use the characters from the two previous films, which forces the timeline to be too compressed, thus not allowing it to make any sense. Things have happened unrealistically fast, destroying the illusion and making you question the whole thing.But, whereas the fourth film at least had some good characters and a grand ending, this one is just boring. Caesar is barely in it, the villains are boring iterations of characters we've already seen in the previous films and even the battle scenes lack the intensity and scope of the ones before them.Watching the series, you can also really see how the budgets kept getting smaller and smaller with each subsequent film. So you can only imagine how this, the last one, looks. Like so often happens with long-running series, this one ends as well, not in triumph but with a whimper.

utgard14 The fifth and final of the original Planet of the Apes series. In between the last film and this one, there's been a nuclear holocaust and the remaining humans are slaves of the apes. Caesar (Roddy McDowall) tries to rule in peace but gorilla General Aldo (Claude Akins) wants to eradicate all humans. While searching the ruins of a city for recordings of his parents, Caesar comes across mutant humans who attack the apes. This leads to inevitable conflict between Caesar and Aldo as to how best to deal with this new threat.The least of the Apes movies is still quite good. It has solid acting and a script with good ideas, although it crams in a little more than it should. This was such a good series and it is, I believe, under-appreciated. Yes the first movie is widely praised but the sequels are rarely given their due. They're all smart, entertaining movies that tell a very interesting saga.