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For the future of our planet

Somebody rated very highly of this 1968 Charlton Heston starred movie called 'Planet of the Apes'. I remember running home to watch the TV series of its spin-off in RRF on Wednesdays. Of course, it clashed with the Tamil movie segment over TV2 and Sgt. Urko and his team had to be sacrificed on alternate weeks.(Tamil movies were screened on alternate Wednesdays; Hindi on the other; Amma would monopolize the TV then!)
This 1968 movie is slow moving by our present standards with more talking and less action and lack of firebrand. It takes swipe at many of human's daily actions and basically tells us to safeguard our planet for the future generations. Apes are the cultured ones here and men primitive - mute, dirty and incapable of thinking. There are zoo animals!
It is set in 2000 years in the future when Heston and his crew members crash land on a planet (we later discover that it is indeed planet Earth). They are apprehended by apes. Heston is unable to communicate as his neck is damaged and is treated like a man prisoner is supposed to be. Man is inferior and uncultured. He tries to prove his origin but  is ridiculed. His only remaining crew is lobectomised and is unable to speak. Two apes (man behavioural psychologists) defend him in their court filled with farce taking swipes at Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the Good Book itself!.
After many 'action' scenes, Heston rides into the sunset with a vocally challenged female companion after arguing with the apes' high priest that indeed man were more superior to his captors. At the end of the movie, Heston finds the partial statue of Statue of Liberty lying on the beach. He realizes that what the elder apes were talking him all along was true - Man was indeed the lowest of the primates who would kill his brother for land and had single-handedly managed to destroy earth!
Interesting lines ridiculing man were...
  • A scene when Heston tries to speak unsuccessfully with his injured vocal cords and ape guard says, "What Man see and Man do!"
  • Man behavioural psychologist?
  • In a laughable tribunal, the three leaders sit initially as if mocking the proverb 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil'! The prosecutor quotes his scripture '...That God created apes in his own image...". There are many instances of word play ridiculing the law jargon. But do not ask why apes speak English!
  • When Heston was clean shaven, an ape and says he looks less intelligent without his facial hair!
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