Time of the Apes (1986)

I was just watching the Japanese Planet of the Apes, titled Time of the Apes, it was dated 1986, but looked as if it had been made at least a decade earlier.  Which, as it turned out, it had.  Sort of.  Cast your mind back to the seventies - with the Planet of the Apes film franchise pretty much exhausted after a series of increasingly lacklustre and cheap-looking sequels, the next logical move to squeeze some more money out of the franchise was a TV series.  Which duly appeared in 1974 and was cancelled after fourteen episodes.  Which was hardly surprising, as it was hopelessly pedestrian and made little of its initial premise, with most of the scripts pretty much interchangeable, in plot terms, with dozens of other US TV shows of the era.  But this wasn't the only Planet of the Apes inspired TV series to air in 1974.  Over in Japan, Suru no Gundan ran for twenty six hour long episodes.  While not officially connected to the Planet of the Apes franchise, the series nonetheless followed that series' premise quite closely, despite seemingly being aimed at younger audiences, (two of the main characters are children).  Rather than have its human protagonists go into an ape-dominated future via a space flight through a time warp, it instead has them accidentally cryogenically frozen in a lab accident, with their cryo capsules buried in an earthquake which destroys the lab they are visiting.  If nothing else, it saved on the budget.  Once they get dug up and thawed out, they find themselves on the run from the talking apes that now rule the earth, picking up an ape ally and a future human rebel along the way.  

Fast forward to 1986 and several episodes of the series were re-edited into a ninety minute film, dubbed into English, released as Time of the Apes.  Despite the compression of twenty six hours of running time into an hour and a half feature, it follows the basic outline of the series' story arc, concluding with the three present-say humans returning to 1974.  Most of the main story from the US film and TV series turn up in the Japanese movie, even the return to the present from Escape From the Planet of the Apes, along with the idea that the apes first started becoming more human-like when trained by humans to carry out menial and dangerous tasks, (such as fighting wars), presented in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.  The only things missing are the mutants living in the buried ruins of the cities.  Instead, we have what we'd now call an AI revealed as the main antagonist to both apes and humans.  Created, like the apes, by humans to solve their problems, it eventually decided to replace the humans with the apes.  It spends the film sending out a flying saucer to protect the human party at various points, in order to ensure that they reach the underground complex where it is housed, in order that it can make them the offer of being sent to the far future (by being frozen again) or sent to another planet, so that they are no longer a disruption to the current ape world.  While the contemporary human is sent off world, the 1974 people are frozen, but wake up, not in the far future, but back in their own time.

Being cut down from a much longer TV series, it isn't surprising that the film's narrative doesn't always run smoothly, with sub-plots suddenly appearing, seemingly from nowhere, before vanishing just as abruptly.  In particular, the main military ape's vendetta against the future human isn't explained until the last fifteen minutes of the film, then gets resolved in a pretty perfunctory manner, with the ape admitting he was wrong, then just wandering off.  Unlike either the US films or TV series, Time of the Apes makes no real effort to present the viewer with a well developed portrayal of the ape culture, opting instead to portray it as pretty much like 1974, but with apes.  Apes who drive seventies models of cars and trucks and travel on steam hauled trains, (steam haulage still being used on parts of the Japanese rail network in 1974 - it wasn't all gleaming bullet trains away from the main lines and big cities).  The ape make ups, too, seem far less sophisticated than those of the actual Planet of the Apes series, consisting of stiff-faced masks which allow next to nothing in the way of expressiveness, let alone mobility.  It isn't exactly bad, but it isn't particularly good, either.  The plot degenerates into a series of captures and escapes, with all of the explanations crammed into a final few minutes of dialogue heavy expository scenes.  I can only assume that the TV series spread all of this out over its twenty sex episodes somewhat more evenly, not to mention fleshing out the whole background of the ape civilisation a little more fully.  In this condensed film format, however, it is a somewhat less than satisfactory viewing experience.