As far as I know, this one usually gets a bad rap, but I've always liked it a lot (but then, it was only the second one I saw, right after "Conquest"). How can you NOT like Severn Darden as the leader of the mutants? (He really walks a line between being serious and funny, being mainly a comedy actor.) And France Nuyen (in probably a smaller part than she'd been used to), as his aide, who's a little like a secretary with a crush on the boss, only in this weird setting. And Austin Stoker (an actor I know from hardly anything else) as McDonald, Caesar's human friend, was very believable. And of course, it was probably the Ape movie with the most well-known actors in ape roles - Claude Akins, Lew Ayres, John Huston, Paul Williams. There's one thing I never completely thought about till the last time I saw it (only days ago) - practically the last moment of the story (apart from the crying statue) does something that almost "deflates" the "message" of these movies - after all the endless strife between the apes and humans in these stories, the last thing you see is the little ape jokingly pulling the hair of the little girl. So even in the sequels (not just the original, which does get credit for this), the writers didn't really take the whole thing TOO seriously.
Review of Battle for the Planet of the Apes
