As I watched this, I found myself thinking, what a pity this wasn't made by Stanley Kubrick (or even Stanley Kramer). It might have been yet another one of their masterpieces. The basic story is not bad, decently-enough constructed for what it is, with touching ironies, fitting dramatic segues, and touches of symbolism in the right places, and yet you get the feeling something is missing, and emotionally it doesn't quite come to together for the impact it could have and should have had. The whole time I watched it I couldn't escape imagining what it would have been like to read this story in novel-form, where I could just picture how much more emotional impact that could have had then what I was seeing. What could have been evocative like Orwell's *1984* or Bradbury's *Fahrenheit* 451 fell well short of any such mark.
Trying to figure out the cause, I came up with two things to begin with: Cinematography and casting. Recently I ran across some film professional (probably reviewing the original 1962 version of ON THE BEACH) lamenting the demise of black & white photography and how that development essentially ruined certain kinds of films, and this movie would be one of them. There are certain Twilight-Zonish contradictory juxtapositions here that just don't work with the same power that black & white could have brought to bear. Even without black & white cinematography, a washed-out color or some other surrealistic technique was needed to create the bleak mood needed to achieve the impact you would expect this story to be looking for, and it simply is not there, and so too neither is the appropriate emotional impact. Instead, it is filmed in a way essential hum-drum for an early 1970's action picture.
And that leads me to the casting. Charleton Heston was not the best actor for this kind of story, as it should have been told. He was not just miscast, but fundamentally miscast. What the story behind this movie needed was an everyman-hero actor, not an action hero de jure with the strongest melodramatic instincts in the movie business. Similarly, although Edward G. Robinson is one of my favorite "Golden Age" actors, and it was great to see him at work again, he came off as about as ethnically New York Jewish as Sam Elliot, and not only did not even attempt the dialect needed for some of his lines to work properly, but he repeatedly proved himself unable even to properly pronounce "l'chaim". Without this kind of texturing this movie cannot but fall short of any kind of greatness, however much potential its story had.
Moreover, the sex and violence were poorly employed in this movie, distracting rather than enhancing of the point of the story. This is not to say that sex and violence had no place in this story; those themes certainly could be employed to enhance the main theme, but here not just any violence but the sex in particular came across as more gratuitous than anything else, just a sop to the masses for low-grade entertainment in place of something that enhances the sense of the degradation of human life that is fundamentally the basic theme of this movie.
The result is that this movie does not pay off as it could have and should have because (not unlike any number of other movies that don't pay off when they should have) it is schizophrenic; it can't make up its mind what it is, and so it winds up being a jack of all trades and master of none. It comes off as trying to combine a heavy theme of the degradation of not only the planet, but the human race in general, the cheapening of human life to the level of garbage, with a much shallower action-movie thrill-ride, and in the end accomplishes neither goal completely. Therefore, despite an otherwise heroic try, I can only give it my normal idea of a 6-star IMDb rating: not incompetent but not a must-see effort either.
Trying to figure out the cause, I came up with two things to begin with: Cinematography and casting. Recently I ran across some film professional (probably reviewing the original 1962 version of ON THE BEACH) lamenting the demise of black & white photography and how that development essentially ruined certain kinds of films, and this movie would be one of them. There are certain Twilight-Zonish contradictory juxtapositions here that just don't work with the same power that black & white could have brought to bear. Even without black & white cinematography, a washed-out color or some other surrealistic technique was needed to create the bleak mood needed to achieve the impact you would expect this story to be looking for, and it simply is not there, and so too neither is the appropriate emotional impact. Instead, it is filmed in a way essential hum-drum for an early 1970's action picture.
And that leads me to the casting. Charleton Heston was not the best actor for this kind of story, as it should have been told. He was not just miscast, but fundamentally miscast. What the story behind this movie needed was an everyman-hero actor, not an action hero de jure with the strongest melodramatic instincts in the movie business. Similarly, although Edward G. Robinson is one of my favorite "Golden Age" actors, and it was great to see him at work again, he came off as about as ethnically New York Jewish as Sam Elliot, and not only did not even attempt the dialect needed for some of his lines to work properly, but he repeatedly proved himself unable even to properly pronounce "l'chaim". Without this kind of texturing this movie cannot but fall short of any kind of greatness, however much potential its story had.
Moreover, the sex and violence were poorly employed in this movie, distracting rather than enhancing of the point of the story. This is not to say that sex and violence had no place in this story; those themes certainly could be employed to enhance the main theme, but here not just any violence but the sex in particular came across as more gratuitous than anything else, just a sop to the masses for low-grade entertainment in place of something that enhances the sense of the degradation of human life that is fundamentally the basic theme of this movie.
The result is that this movie does not pay off as it could have and should have because (not unlike any number of other movies that don't pay off when they should have) it is schizophrenic; it can't make up its mind what it is, and so it winds up being a jack of all trades and master of none. It comes off as trying to combine a heavy theme of the degradation of not only the planet, but the human race in general, the cheapening of human life to the level of garbage, with a much shallower action-movie thrill-ride, and in the end accomplishes neither goal completely. Therefore, despite an otherwise heroic try, I can only give it my normal idea of a 6-star IMDb rating: not incompetent but not a must-see effort either.