5) Planet Of The Apes (1968)
What can be said about Planet of the Apes that hasn’t been said already?
It’s the ultimate trend-setter along with 2001: A Space Odyssey in the sci-fi genre. Check.
It was quite literally a quantum leap forward in make-up and prosthetic design. Check.
The Tim Burton version disappointed nearly every single person who saw it. Check.
It would seem foolish then to miss out the iconic picture from our list of absolute must-see time travel films. Starring the ever-reliable Charlton Heston as the stranded astronaut stuck in a world ruled by apes, the film has long been a staple, not only in filmic history, but popular culture as well. From the ‘take your stinking hands off me’ scene, to the genuinely shocking (at the time anyway) finale, everything about this film screams classic cinema – perfect cinema.
Even when you look beyond the incredible ape prosthetics and masks, Planet of the Apes is a movie that is as tense as a strained rope and a linchpin in the direction cinema has hurtled down over the last fifty years. Regrettably, the series declined following the original, culminating in the forgettable Mark Wahlberg remake, but in recent times, the Rupert Wyatt reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the upcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes have given us hope in talking primates once again.
