This is one of those weird quasi-classic movies that nobody thinks is especially good, but that’s influential and widely known. I’d never bothered watching it, but I’d like to watch the modern Rise of the Planet of the Apes trilogy and figured I ought to at least see the original movie for context.

So I’m going to assume you know the big twist of this movie, because of course you do. You probably saw it referenced on The Simpsons, in one of two separate episodes (or maybe that’s just me). So the thing about the twist is that it seems hard to believe anyone could ever have been surprised, because like… the planet they land on is obviously and blatantly Earth. Those are famous Southwestern desert landscapes, those are Earth plants, etc. At one point they’re literally in a cornfield! It’s tbh implausible that Heston affects to believe throughout the whole movie that he’s on a mysterious alien planet, when he has to realize that this is Earth.

But on reflection, I think this is about the state of the movie-making art. Because if you were making a movie where astronauts go to an alien planet today, of course you’d use CG to make it actually look alien. Avatar wasn’t just filmed in the Amazon as a stand-in for an alien jungle planet. Interstellar didn’t just go to remote locations to film its alien worlds. (I mean, they did, but then they CGed them to make them look more convincingly alien.) So my modern expectation is that of course alien planets will look alien.

But back in the day, you couldn’t do that, so audiences would need to accept the handwave. Sure, it looks like Earth, but they’re filming in a remote desert area, so therefore it’s supposed to be an alien desert. Sure, those look like Earth trees, but we’re supposed to ignore that and pretend.

Which means that the big twist at the end was doing a thing I hate: Relying on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, and then throwing it back in their face — haha, you never suspected this was Earth even though all the clues were there, did you? The filmmakers are asking you to pretend not to notice something in service of telling this story, and then they’re reneging on that tacit agreement and acting like you were an idiot who’s too dumb to have noticed the thing. That’d really annoy me, if I were watching the movie back then. But of course, I’m watching it now, and I came fully pre-spoiled, so whatever.

Another way the movie is of its time is in its social attitudes. Like, the Black guy and the woman dying first is almost parodic, but even more parodic is that — even though the female astronaut is just as much a scientist as the rest of the crew — they have some dialogue about how they were all looking forward to banging her, and that her role was to be “the new Eve.” Like, did she know this? Did she actually sign up for a mission where her role was to have sex with all the men and be constantly pregnant with their babies? Or was this going to be a big surprise reveal for her? (There are also some more benign cultural artifacts, like one of the younger apes having a generational warfare moment and talking about how you can’t trust anyone over thirty. Okay, boomer.)

Anyway, as advertised it’s not a very good movie — Heston characteristically overacts (to the point that Homer’s parody of the last scene in “Deep Space Homer” is honestly just him straightforwardly imitating Heston and not doing any parody at all); the female human lead has no reason to exist in this movie; the premise is obvious and a bit silly; and at no point does a musical break out, even when Dr. Zaius is introduced. All in all, it’s a good reminder of how abysmally bad some science fiction movies used to be. Still, I’m glad I finally did see it, for cultural literacy reasons if nothing else, and it was easy enough to watch.