Sure, you could say that Charlton Heston overacts, but how ELSE exactly is an actor supposed to deliver lines such as “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” or “You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!” or the classic “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”?
Heston is great here. He’s not subtle, but neither is the movie. Heston is a bare-chested pulp fiction magazine cover man’s man while the story is all basic science fiction themes delivered with exclamation points. Evolution. Apocalypse aftermath. Criticism of humanity’s warmongering ways. Space travelers marooned in a strange place and a strange time (due to cosmic time dilation). There’s even a little animal rights parable in there if you want it because in Ape World, simians rule and humans are the animals, captured, caged, whipped, gelded, hunted, killed and stuffed.
It’s also entertaining, tense and tightly made by Franklin Schaffner who was two years away from a Best Director Oscar for Patton. The opening first half-hour in which our astronauts, low on food and water, crash land on a desert beach and then explore the land looking for signs of life while they hash out their personal differences is great stuff that draws you in. These guys aren’t afraid. They’re all about learning and moving forward and are willing to die in the process. If something weird happens, these guys aren’t going to run away and hide. They’re going to walk right toward it.
What stands out fifty years later about this movie is how ballsy it is. It’s a big-budget Hollywood production that puts most of its cast behind prosthetic monkey make-up. Audiences in 1968 were either going to be so caught up in the story that they accept this or they were going to laugh their asses off. The risk paid off and this was a hit.
To make sure that they didn’t have a laughingstock on their hands, 20th Century Fox hired one of the top make-up guys in the world, John Chambers, who got his start working for the US government making prosthetic parts for wounded World War II veterans. Movies and TV began hiring him in the 1950s (trivia: Chambers made Spock’s ears for Star Trek) and then he later went back to work for the government in the 1970s crafting disguises for CIA agents and he eventually helped stage the famous “Canadian Caper” (as dramatized in the movie Argo) in which a fake movie production was used as cover for the rescue of six US diplomats in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis of ’79 to ’81.