Critics reviews

It has an evident basis in a very European style of satirical comedy, one that revels in perversions of social practices and expectations. . . . Serling and Wilson’s revisions and Schaffner’s visualisations didn’t just make the tale more cinematic and popular, however, but also repositioned it in a more distinctly American tradition.

The zoom out from the now tiny humans to the full panorama is a bit clunky: blame the limits imposed on camera movement by glass paintings. But the final image has undeniable grandeur, and the calm susurration of the ocean perfectly complements the blank, eyeless gaze of the inert [Statue of Liberty]... She's an inverse Ozymandias, all upper storeys instead of trunkless legs, but her significance is identical to the remains immortalised by Shelley: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

It's a madhouse! screams Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes," after suffering unending abuse at the hands of talking primates who treat him as a threat to their order. Almost fifty years after its release, it still works because it, too, is a madhouse: up is down; black is white; ape on top, man in the dirt—or in jail. This film is a classic, by which I mean, so fundamentally compelling that once you immerse yourself in it, you tend to accept its blatantly of-the-moment aspects.

This contemporary of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a ripping reversal, from up among the stars humankind comes crashing down into a new Stone Age... Striding through the circle of oppressor and oppressed is Heston's splendidly wounded hubris, the last twentieth-century man in burlap rags yet raging still at the new organ grinders. Herzog is not far off with Fata Morgana, the punchline is a Rauschenberg effect evoked by Gibson in Apocalypto.