If you, like I, think deeply about movies like 1968's Planet of the Apes, you have been richly rewarded with some satirical insights about American culture. If you, like I, also just happen to like the quasi-experimental filmmaking techniques, cheesy effects, limp dialogue, gloomy fortune telling, and chic, form-fitting costumes of '60s and '70s science-fiction movies like Planet of the Apes, you, too, have been richly rewarded. Planet of the Apes is like that. It's got something for everyone.

Scripted by Michael Wilson and Twilight Zone maven Rod Serling, who based their screenplay on a book by The Bridge on the River Kwai scribbler Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes begins as George Taylor (Charlton Heston), skipper of a space capsule traveling near the speed of light to a ripe-for-colonization planet in the Orion constellation, records his thoughts before going into suspended animation. A jaded sort, Colonel Taylor smokes a cigar (that's gotta be against some kinda rule in a spaceship; Taylor's such a rebel) and says, "I leave the twentieth century with no regrets." (You see, though only 18 months will pass for Taylor and his crew--two men and a woman--thousands of years will go by back home.)

When their capsule crash-lands in a lake, the men of Taylor's crew awaken to find that their sole female counterpart has passed away en route, leaving them with no hope of ever procreating. They swim ashore and set about trying to find food and water in a desert wasteland that looks a lot like New Mexico. Taylor gets in some more good digs about what a sorry, egocentric lot humans are. He laughs at the patriotic hubris of an underling who plants a miniature U.S. flag and relishes telling him, "Time's wiped out everything you ever knew. It's all dust!"

Eventually, Taylor and his compadres stumble across a society of mute protohumans being lorded over by ape rulers. The talking apes, who have fashioned a pre-industrial society that's just discovered science, operates on a loose caste system with orangutans at the top, chimps in the middle, and martial-spirited gorillas as soldiers at the bottom. The "human hunting" sequence is one of the best, creepiest sci-fi moments ever put to film--capped off with a nice shot of humans dangling upside down by the ankles like deer and a trio of gorillas posing for a photograph with a pile of their "kill." Sorry, bug-eyed monster fans, but '50s sci-fi was never this inventive.

Unable to speak due to a bullet in the throat (courtesy the gorillas), Taylor is caught and studied by Dr. Zira (Hunter), a veterinarian doing experimental brain surgery on human subjects. When Taylor gets his voice back, Zira and her archaeologist fiancé Cornelius (McDowall) get quite a shock: a human that can talk. And he says unkind things, to boot, like, "Get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"

Taylor's speechifying is bad news for ape society, which is having trouble reconciling its religious beliefs with new scientific theories. Though the apes' "sacred scrolls" warn them to beware "the beast: man," who will make war "even on his own brother," Cornelius leads a group of radicals who believe apes may have evolved from men--making the grotesque primitives their distant cousins. Taylor's talking/thinking bit threatens to prove the rebels right and shake up the foundation of simian society.

A trial is ordered in which science, religion, Taylor's existence, and evolution are all put to the test by a trio of "learned" orangutans--who end up with heads in hands in a goofy "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" sight gag. The screenwriters have a lot of fun with this trial scene, using the apes' society to satirize the uneasy coexistence of religion and science in our own. The apes have even found their own way to deal with this problem head on by making head ape Dr. Zaius both the top egghead and "keeper of the faith," pretty much a really lousy job.

The apes ultimately decide to maintain the status quo: castration and dissection for Taylor, a gag order for anyone who knows of his existence. This cover-up aspect may explain Oliver Stone's interest in remaking the film, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Taylor. Really. But I digress.

Fortunately for us less-hairy primates who have paid good money to rent the flick, Taylor escapes with a foxy, mute, mentally-challenged babe he's nicknamed Nova (Linda Harrison), who nonetheless looks positively Playboy bunnyish in strategically positioned animal skins (in a remake, this role would still require many goofy facial expressions but no dialogue, so it should therefore go to Jenny McCarthy).

On his way off to what he hopes will be a hassle-free, apeless life in what the apes call "the forbidden zone," Taylor stops long enough to shave, kiss Zira (who says, in a nice race joke, "You're all so damned ugly!") and help Cornelius reveal that an advanced human society once existed on this planet. Dr. Zaius is not amused.

Zaius and his ilk get the last grunt, however, when Taylor, who has begun to think of humans as not that bad in comparison to his new monkey acquaintances, discovers a secret that proves that he was right about humans in the first place: we are freaking stupid! Shattered, Taylor is left a shell of his former self.

If the genre films of the '50s were about the Communist threat, Planet of the Apes has several things on its satirical mind, too, but its subtext is less political, more introspective. It could be said that Planet of the Apes was inspired by many late '60s social trends: the loss of religious faith, of course, but also the questioning of man's superiority to nature and the fear of humanity's increasing irrelevance in the computer age.