Beneath the Planet of the Apes is a stranger and darker film than its predecessor, a sequel that takes the original's nihilistic undertow and drives it to a conclusion of genuine apocalyptic force. Ted Post's 1970 film is not the equal of Schaffner's original: its budget is considerably reduced, its new protagonist is a functional replacement rather than a character, and its middle section loses dramatic momentum in ways that the original never did. But its ending, in which Taylor destroys the Earth with a doomsday bomb, is the franchise's most audacious individual moment, and the picture earns it through a consistent escalation of the original's darkest implications.
At a Glance
Director: Ted Post
Runtime: 95 minutes
Starring: James Franciscus, Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison
Release: 1970
Critics Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, a flawed but genuinely strange sequel)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, darker and more uneven than the original but memorable for its nihilistic commitment)
Review Breakdown
Plot
Astronaut Brent arrives on the ape planet searching for Taylor and discovers, beneath the Forbidden Zone, a subterranean city inhabited by mutant humans who worship a nuclear bomb and possess powerful telepathic abilities. The screenplay by Paul Dehn introduces the mutants as the franchise's most genuinely unsettling antagonists, a civilisation that has built an entire religious culture around the instrument of its own potential destruction, and the picture uses them to extend the original's satirical argument about human self-destruction into explicitly theological territory. The ape military's invasion of the Forbidden Zone provides the action framework, and the convergence of the two storylines in the underground city gives the ending its apocalyptic logic.
Characters
James Franciscus's Brent is the most significant dramatic limitation, a protagonist who exists primarily to replicate Taylor's journey through the ape society without adding anything new to the franchise's character dynamics. Heston's Taylor returns for the final act and his presence immediately raises the dramatic stakes in ways that Franciscus's performance cannot match, which is less a criticism of Franciscus than an acknowledgement of how much the original's success depended on Heston's specific screen authority. Kim Hunter's Zira is given more to do here than in the original, and her scenes with Brent have a warmth and a wit that give the middle section its most effective dramatic passages. The most effective casting decision is the retention of Hunter and Evans from the original, whose established characters give the ape society sequences a continuity and a credibility that the new human protagonist cannot provide. Evans's Zaius is given a more active role here, leading the military invasion of the Forbidden Zone, and the character's combination of intelligence and ruthlessness is developed with enough consistency to make him the franchise's most complex recurring antagonist.
Tone
Post pitches the picture at a darker and more explicitly apocalyptic register than the original, a tonal choice that suits the franchise's escalating nihilism but that also removes the satirical precision that gave the original its intellectual distinctiveness. The mutant sequences have a genuinely unsettling quality, particularly the revelation of the mutants' true appearance beneath their holographic human faces, and the underground city's religious ceremonies have a surreal intensity that distinguishes them from anything in the original. The reduced budget is most visible in the ape sequences, where the crowd scenes lack the scale and the visual coherence of Schaffner's work.
Meaning / Themes
The most explicitly satirical individual sequence in the franchise is the mutants' worship of the Alpha-Omega bomb, which they call the Divine Bomb and the Holy Weapon, targeting the human capacity to construct religious justifications for weapons of mass destruction with a pointed directness. The picture's willingness to follow that satire to its logical conclusion, the actual detonation of the weapon and the destruction of the Earth, gives it a nihilistic integrity that no subsequent franchise entry has matched.
Direction
Post's direction is competent rather than distinctive, maintaining the franchise's visual register without adding anything new to it. The underground city sequences are the most visually inventive passages, and the mutant revelation is staged with enough dramatic timing to generate genuine shock. Leonard Rosenman's score replaces Goldsmith's original with a more conventional orchestral approach that suits the reduced ambitions without matching the original's compositional originality.
Cultural Reception
Beneath the Planet of the Apes received mixed reviews on its release but was a commercial success, grossing over $19 million worldwide and demonstrating the franchise's box office durability. It is now regarded as the original series' most extreme individual entry, a picture whose apocalyptic ending is consistently cited as one of the most audacious conclusions in franchise filmmaking history. Its willingness to destroy its own fictional world rather than compromise its satirical logic gives it a distinction that more polished sequels have not always achieved.
Who Should Watch
Franchise followers who want to understand the original series' escalating nihilism and anyone curious about how a sequel can be simultaneously less accomplished and more extreme than its predecessor. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not a great film, but its ending is one of the franchise's most genuinely audacious moments.
Final Verdict: A flawed but genuinely strange sequel whose reduced budget and functional protagonist are offset by an escalating nihilism that drives the franchise's satirical argument to its logical extreme. The mutant sequences are the franchise's most surreal individual passages, and the ending's apocalyptic commitment gives the picture a distinction that its dramatic limitations would not otherwise earn.
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