shaft sr’s nephew john shaft is just as smooth talking and smooth striding as his uncle, walking down the middle of the wrong side of busy roads and cold cocking insolent young honkeys. but todays scene isnt about shaft himself, but a small time drug dealer in harlem named peoples. there isnt anything particularly interesting about peoples. hes an archetypical latin american who wears egyptian wool and likes to stab people with his wooden handled icepick. but when shaft kills his younger brother in a shoot out, a different side of him comes out. the side he would play up but that we hadnt seen till now. the side that would do anything for his peoples, especially his family. in a fury of emotion he begins walking towards shaft, brandishing his pick screaming “you might as well kill me too”. a look falls over shafts face. maybe one that has seen this before. one that is sick of the killing. maybe a look that says hes sorry, or that he understands.
brent, like taylor, is a survivor. after travelling through the same break in space time, he crash lands on post-apocalyptic earth of the year 3978 where man is all but extinct and the planet is ruled by intelligent apes. they are losing numbers to a supernatural force preventing them from encroaching in to the forbidden zone, an area where monuments from the past still rise from the ashes of society as we knew it. brent escapes imprisonment by the apes and enters the forbidden zone to look for taylor, and finds a race of humans living underground. they are physically mutated, presumably from radiation poisoning, and have evolved a telekinetic ability that has prevented the apes from marching on their territory. however, as the apes grow wise and close in, the humans threaten a second doomsday on the planet with an atomic bomb they worship at the altar like jesus on the cross. all hope to prevent annihilation are moot. the apes enter the encampment. brent is killed in a flurry of machine gun fire. taylor, who is revealed to be alive and held captive by the mutants, is mortally-wounded. with his dying breath he actives the bomb, and the film ends.
on the list of great movie sequels beside star trek and the godfather, beneath the planet of the apes is unfairly treated. every couple of years a new planet of the apes movie comes out in an attempt to revitalize the franchise and the original sequels, from beneath to battle, are forgotten in this stream of endless reboots and sequels. those who have seen beneath as it rests within the timeline of the original series can agree though that it expands on the mythology of the original in a slick, fast-paced (ninety lean minutes) package. and the abrupt, nihilistic ending (courtesy of charlton heston, apparently to make sure his appearance in further sequels was never going to happen) is the definition of awesome. everyone dies horribly, especially brent in the third-to-last shot of the film (literally). the planet is effectively destroyed. fade to black. end credits. there was nowhere left to go from there but back in time.
theory of a daskeman 