Brilliant cinematography by Leon Shamroy, deft direction by the underrated Franklin J. Shaffner, and, yes, an inspired percussive score by Jerry Goldsmith.

By the way, though it fits so neatly with our general understanding of Rod Serling, he didn’t come up with the twist ending. The meat-and-potatoes of the script, including the twist (which Pierre Boulle hated), came from Michael Wilson (though it remains debatable as to who originated the notion of Taylor finding the Statue of Liberty – both Serling and producer Arthur P. Jacobs claimed they thought of it). Serling added some of the more obvious and rather forced dialogue when he was hired to “clean up” Wilson’s script. (The opening sequence of the film is also interesting in this respect, as it seems to be anticipated by a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone titled “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.” In it four astronauts believe they have crashed onto a desert planet and kill each other for their small water reserves. The surviving astronaut then stumbles over a dune to be confronted by a highway and sign for Las Vegas. It’s worth noting that this was a story by Madelon Champion, not Serling.)

As for other films that effectively use a natural landscape, I never stop being impressed by the Vermont setting of Hitchcock’s woefully under-appreciated “The Trouble With Harry.”

Agree completely about the importance of Planet of the Apes‘s music; it was an early one from the great Jerry Goldsmith, who went on to compose some of my favorite film scores, including Capricorn One, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Innerspace, and (much later) The Mummy.

The point about authored vs. unauthored settings is interesting. On one hand, yes, Crystal Skull‘s blended CG/practical environments are like those of the prequels in their plastic unconvincingness (though Crystal Skull bothered me less, because I chose to interpret it as intentional pulp — unlike the recent Star Wars films, which seemed like earnest but spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to awe). On the other hand, the issue never seems to come up in regard to the most authored cinematic environments out there: the diegeses of things like WALL-E and Kung-Fu Panda. Such CG settings have precedents in predigital animation, of course, but something about the 3D-ness and cartographic consistency of the Pixar and DreamWorks spaces brings them much closer to the kinds of passing-for-live-action digital backlot work that has fans in an uproar. Yet no one points at WALL-E‘s world and cries “fake!” (except offended conservatives, and they’re talking about ideology, not environmental realism).

So I dunno: where do we draw the lines? How do we taxonomize these hybrid spaces? And at what point does framing give way to creating?

This also makes me think a bit of the ongoing fan reactions to Crystal Skull, which echo your thinking about location in Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars, lots of complaints about the loss of that sense of presence and tangibility to digital representations.

I think one way to think about that sensation is that the real settings seem to have the capacity to surprise or awe the audience without feeling “authored”. This is, as with photography, a misleading sensation–pull the camera back on the Tunisian settings of Episode 4 like Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen’s farmstead and they look rather differently, obviously. But there’s still some difference between framing and creating.

So you liked Burton’s Apes, eh? I’ll have to take a second look. I think I’ve enshrined the 1968 film and its sequel chain to the degree that no remake could measure up, but that doesn’t mean my mind is *completely* closed …

Re: landscapes in SF film, I’ve always wanted to write about the environments in the first Star Wars trilogy (Eps 4-6) versus the digital-backlot equivalents in Eps 1-3. I’m leery of replaying yet another round of the practical-vs-digital debate, but I can’t shake the sense of reality that the environments of Tunisia, Norway, the Pacific Northwest, etc. lent those films — in contrast to the blah CG spaces of Naboo and Coruscant. (True, there were artificial-natural settings in Eps 4-6 — Dagobah, for example — and Lucas used Tunisia again for Tatooine in the prequels. But still.)

Re: St. Elsewhere, you’ll just have to watch for yourself! It’s a great series, one of my favorites from the 80s.

Mike, so glad you brought up Sir Graves Ghastly and The Ghoul. These horror-movie hosts have been coming up in conversations lately with synchronistic consistency. Someone needs to do a project! And I do remember your comic on Beneath‘s underground Church of the Apocalypse — it’s one of the things that reinvigorated my interest in the Apes films.

Re: growing up in SE MI in the 70s and watching genre movies on TV — I’m feeling lazier than usual today, so I’m going to paste something I wrote on another site on the occasion of the death of Sir Graves Ghastly last April:

Good ol’ Sir Graves! I almost never watched the movies he showed, but I’d sometimes watch the opening gags he’d do. I wonder what “the Ghoul” is up to these days?

You never know what you have ’til it’s gone. Back in the day, there used to a lot more movies on broadcast TV. I remember Bill Kennedy showing those old film noir classics around 1pm on WKBD channel 50 (“the Kaiser”), and the afternoon movies on channel 7. At the time, though, I didn’t appreciate old movies. I almost never watched Bill K. and only watched the channel 7 movies during “Monster Week”, when they showed Godzilla movies, and “Planet of the Apes” week. By the time I acquired a taste for those old movies, those movie shows had been replaced by Oprah and her ilk. Now a person has to get cable or find a decent video store to see those movies.

This is a franchise I admit that I’m not very familiar with — but I hope to become more so in the near future; although I know all of the sequels were distinctly different animals (no pun intended) than the first film. I haven’t watched the original “Apes” since I was a kid on television, and even then I’m not sure I saw the whole thing; but I recently picked up the DVD box set of all the films for a very good price, so I look forward to digging into them later this year. Late last year I caught a bit of one of the later entries with Ricardo Montalban (“Conquest” ?) on BBC; it does stick in my memory, even though I had it on in the background and was only half-paying attention…

I really like your idea about the landscape; on immediate recognition I can think of Ang Lee’s Hulk, the concluding bits of Star Trek V, and yes, Burton’s Apes redux as some of the only contemporary mainstream Hollywood films in my memory that feature such landscapes similarly, if not quite as meaningfully photographed (Word is J.J. Abrams has filmed some grand stuff out in the deserts of California for the new “Trek” film, in some of the same locations that Trek has used previously to represent Vulcan, I think). I kind of miss the great landscape shooting that we don’t seem to see so often anymore — with much of the Hollywood product shot in Vancouver or (studios in) Australia, I’m getting a little sick of seeing the same old Vancouver forests and pseudo-cityscape sets.

[Can you tell me how you capture film stills, by the way?]

I’m not ashamed to admit that I really enjoy all of the “Ape” elements of Burton’s “re-imagining” — particularly Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter (and Heston’s cameo – really interesting in its irony!). I really responded to their through-the-makeup performances (yes, in a good way); and if fact, I would argue that the “Ape” performances in Burton’s film are equally as interesting as any of those in the original film series. And Danny Elfman’s score I feel is one of his most unique and interesting. But yes, all the rest, including all the human elements, are pretty much rubbish; definitely one of Burton’s most soulless movies.

Did “St. Elsewhere” really end in a snowglobe??