Army of the Apes (1974)

directed by Kiyosumi Fukasawa, Atsushi Okunaka, Shunichiro Kazuki, Sogoro Tsuchiya

Japan

667 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've never reviewed a full tokusatsu series before (not from lack of affection, just from lack of being able to say anything coherent about 25-50 episodes' worth of stuff in a single post) but something about Army of the Apes is making me need to talk about it. Forgive me if I don't reference specific episode numbers or titles; the reason for this is because currently, the series is only available with subtitles as an 11-hour-long YouTube video, and I lost track of what episode I was on.

So it's pretty obvious that this is a Planet of the Apes type of thing. I'm being very deliberate in not referring to it as a ripoff, because the intent was to have the series be a wholly original work. After a broadcast of Planet of the Apes reached very high viewership ratings in Japan, combined with the boom in disaster movies (Submersion of Japan, Prophecies of Nostradamus, etc) that was happening at the same time, Tsuburaya decided to get in on the action with their own series. In classic "me" fashion, this is the only of the Apes media I've ever seen, so I can't comment on similarities to other material.

At the beginning of the series, Izumi, a scientist/teacher working on research into time travel, and her two students, Jiro and Yurika, are forced by imminent natural disasters to enter experimental time-travel capsules as a last resort. They're thrown several thousand years into the future, and emerge into a world ruled by intelligent apes - you know the deal, I'm not going to go into it too much. Along the way, they meet the only other Homo sapiens still alive in that time, Godo, and an ape boy, Pepe, tags along with them all as well. The middle of the series lags a little bit when the characters all get separated from each other, and the story flip-flops between Izumi and Yurika and Godo, Jiro, and Pepe, all having their own problems and all trying to reunite. One point against the show is that oftentimes it doesn't feel like it knows how to handle its own cast.

But - and this is a rare thing for a toku series - the whole cast is very likable. I got a real kick out of Tetsuya Ushio (Godo) because he's so incongruous to the series. This is pretty much a straightforward, long-form sci-fi drama, nobody transforms or has superpowers or anything, but there's still this guy going Sonny Chiba on a room full of apes every other episode. Looking up Ushio's previous credits and finding out he played Hyoman made complete sense. Watching him fight, it's obscenely obvious he was a henshin hero at some point in his career. Izumi is a good character, too; she's saddled with two young children who are not family, and they're all in a strange, disorienting timeline, but she manages to keep their spirits up and protect them from bearing the full weight of their situation alone.

On the ape side of things, we've got some serious drama. There's a divide between gorillas (the ruling class/political elite) and chimpanzees (the proles, as it were). The two major players here are Bipu, the cabinet minister (I had to look up who plays him because he's absolutely enormous, and it turns out it's the big guy from Latitude Zero, Wataru Omae), and Geba, the chief of police. Of the two, Geba is the most entertaining to watch, having all the energy of a yappy dog who's been given too much power. The two of them also have opposite opinions on the humans, who are widely reviled by the apes: Bipu wants to keep them alive, although he's still somewhat ambivalent towards them, and Geba hates them with a fury. The humans are hunted down wherever they go, especially after Bipu seemingly dies. Political ape intrigue is also constantly running in the background, and eventually it builds up to a full-scale assassination plot that unfortunately goes nowhere at all.

I can't really explain why I like this series so much, and it might be that I'm attributing stuff to it that isn't really there. I've personally always been attracted to stories where there's only a handful of humans left in the world. In the first half of the series, there's a lot of moments where the crew seems to still have hope that there are other humans out there, but those hopes are dashed over and over until eventually they just focus on trying to survive. The sense of loss is so palpable, even in a low-budget series like this. There's a brief arc involving a robot that I really loved because it drives this feeling home. The gang finds a robot named Chip who was built by an enclave of now-long-dead human scientists when things started to get really bad. When the last human left the bunker and never returned, they told Chip essentially to hold the fort, and it had been doing that ever since, for potentially upwards of a thousand years. Just waiting for its programmers, who would never come back.

It's kind of frustrating that there were so many instances like that during the series where a longer story could have been told, but was glossed over in favor of returning to the ongoing fight against the apes. It's a short series, but I think if there had been more episodes that focused on the individual characters (maybe some backstory on Godo living in the mountains alone after his family died), the show would have felt a little fuller. But it's got great practical effects! The ape masks are quite impressive (and hell to wear, as per usual) and between suit acting and voice acting, the series really gets its mileage out of everything.

Also, I didn't know where else to put this in the review, so I'm just going to leave it here at the end: according to Japanese Wikipedia, Tetsuya Ushio apparently had an exorcism done on him at some point during filming.