This fifth and final entry in the initial theatrical "Apes" series is the weakest of the bunch. It seems as if it was limited by budgetary considerations. After "Conquest" set up the rise of the simians, this story is rather small in its scale, focusing on one ape / human community, the woodsy "Ape City", that doesn't seem to have that many residents. The apes and the people peaceably co-exist, but trouble is on the horizon. First, ape leader Caesar (the always great Roddy McDowall) decides on an expedition to the "Forbidden City" to seek out audio and video of his long deceased parents, incurring the wrath of humans suffering radiation sickness. Second, a fanatical, aggressive gorilla general, Aldo (Claude Akins), is just itching to start something.Even at its worst, this series was never completely without interest, and this entry does have some good dialogue and moments. It also has some pretty decent action sequences towards the end, with lots of gunfire (but virtually no gore) and lots of explosions. Unfortunately, story author Paul Dehn and screenwriters John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington just couldn't come up with a tale that was particularly compelling. Still, director J. Lee Thompson, who'd also directed "Conquest", keeps things watchable and reasonably entertaining. The main value lies in the performances of old pros like McDowall and Akins. They're ably supported by Lew Ayres, Paul Williams, Natalie Trundy (who was in four of the "Apes" films), Severn Darden (as the crazed villain, Governor Kolp), Austin Stoker (who plays the brother of the Hari Rhodes character in "Conquest"), France Nuyen, and Paul Stevens. A young John Landis has an acting role as one of the apes; the great actor-filmmaker John Huston appears in wraparound segments as the wise old Lawgiver.Watchable for its duration, but it has to rate as something of a disappointment.Available in both a theatrical version and an extended version which runs about 10 minutes longer.Followed by a TV series.Six out of 10.

The last in the original Planet of the Apes film series and easily the worst and least interesting of the lot. Surprisingly, they still managed to draw in much of the same actors, including Roddy McDowall as Caesar, the original smart ape in this timeline.This movie suffers largely from the same problems as its immediate predecessor, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. It tries to bridge the time gap between the third and the original film, explaining how the events and the world of the original film could have come to be, but it does so wanting to use the characters from the two previous films, which forces the timeline to be too compressed, thus not allowing it to make any sense. Things have happened unrealistically fast, destroying the illusion and making you question the whole thing.But, whereas the fourth film at least had some good characters and a grand ending, this one is just boring. Caesar is barely in it, the villains are boring iterations of characters we've already seen in the previous films and even the battle scenes lack the intensity and scope of the ones before them.Watching the series, you can also really see how the budgets kept getting smaller and smaller with each subsequent film. So you can only imagine how this, the last one, looks. Like so often happens with long-running series, this one ends as well, not in triumph but with a whimper.

The Planet of the Apes film franchise closes down with a whimper as budget restrictions, general screenplay lethargy and contempt of familiarity swamps the production. Plot finds the apes and humans trying to live in harmony, but find their efforts stymied by a tribe of mutant humans living in the nuked underworld and a power-hungry gorilla general.What follows is a film that sees various simian and human species throw exposition at each other in the vain belief it's literately smart. When the action comes it's half hearted and perpetrated by the least amount of actors possible. The make-up is shoddy, the fun element gone, while the acting is very uneven across the board. There's enough value in the various characterisations to at least keep fans of the series interested, and the photography belies the cheapness evident elsewhere, but really it's a sad closure to what had been a smartly entertaining franchise. 4/10

Fifth and last Apes film is set after a nuclear war has decimated the human population, and left them subservient to the surviving apes, who are building their own civilization, and can't decide whether humans will be allowed to live or not, especially after a determined group of militant humans decide to wage war, rather than serve...Unlike the previous two films, this one is less reliant on implausible and contrived plot devices, which is a welcome change; trouble is, it is also less effective dramatically, bordering on the mundane.The extended version on the new DVD is an improvement, since it restores key scenes involving the radiation scarred humans that is quite interesting, but film still feels perfunctory, and inconclusive.