Damn Dirty Apes: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Patreon)

A draft for the first part of my Damn Dirty Apes series for Downtime, a retrospective of the Planet of the Apes reboot films with a focus on post-human philosophy and colonial politics. A revised version will appear on Downtime in January or February.

The Planet of the Apes reboot films offer one of the few coherent visions of post-humanity in blockbuster cinema. The last days of humanity are underway in them - the dramas comes not from the particulars of preventing the end of the human race (or late capitalist society, as is so often the case in blockbusters), a story which a majority of mainstream science fiction films are preoccupied by, but what happens to the world when humanity begins to collapse, how it reaches that point, what’s left behind, and who replaces us. As the first signs of climate catastrophe encroaches on the human race, particularly in the global south, a series of mainstream blockbusters that takes the apocalypse seriously and asks how the world continues without us is refreshingly prescient. 

Idiosyncratically, Planet of the Apes not only suggests that a replacement for the human race is viable, but posits that great apes will take our place. A left-field idea to say the least, the concept of intelligent apes enslaving primitive humans is explored tepidly by the original novel and classic 1968 film version, where it serves as an allegory for intelligent apes enslaving primitive humans. It serves as social commentary of the kind that asks “what if the opposite was true?”, e.g. not particularly incisive. The ‘68 film in particular discards the interesting ramifications of its premise in favor of a tedious series of captures and escapes. Ironically, the film’s iconic moment, Rod Serling’s classic twist in which Charlton Heston discovers a broken Statue of Liberty and realizes the planet of the apes is a future Earth, is also its biggest problem, in that it’s more interesting than anything else in the film. The film’s dreadful sequels confound the problem, serving bottom-of-the-barrel production values while pinning the apes’ origin down to a tautological time travel plot (albeit Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the film that sends chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius back in time, is far and away the best of the original series). The apes exist because they went back in time, and a violent human society will give way to a stratified theocracy of apes. The misanthropy on display in this series continually misses the point — rather than asking how a takeover of apes would shape the world, Planet of the Apes and its sequels get bogged down in the particulars of justifying their own existence. The cowardice with which they approach their premise is a pervasive problem, and to survive into the 21st century (past Tim Burton’s dreadful 2001 “reimagining”), Apes needed to rethink its approach.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is striking for its minimal resemblance to the previous Apes films. There’s the occasional reference to the original series, such as the shoehorned-in “take your stinking paw off me, you damn dirty ape” from Tom Felton (who is blatantly playing an unreconstructed Draco Malfoy), one or two character names previously born by a previous Apes character or actor, and the plot outline vaguely resembles Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (although it’s closer to Garfield than anything else), but on the whole, Rise uses a clean slate. Its connection to the previous films is in its taking the series’ premise to its roots and interrogating how a planet of the apes would happen. Rather than relying hard on the series’ mythos, it simply cops a broad outline of humanity’s downfall from previous works and fills in the details. The result is a reboot that is, for the most part, refreshingly free of nostalgia and poised towards the future, probing this goofy old franchise for new ideas about how the world moves in the dying days of humanity.

As part of its course-reset, Rise occurs on a small scale. The action never leaves San Francisco, and revolves around its high-tech scientific facilities, upper-middle-class suburbs, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Muir Woods. The setting of San Francisco immediately communicates several things about the nature of the movie: technology, unbridled privilege, cultural recognizability, and modernity. The origin of the apes is accordingly contemporary, as James Franco’s character develops the viral drug ALZ-112 to treat his father’s Alzheimers. The drug, while beneficial to his father, fails to cure his Alzheimers in the long-term, but has astonishing effects on the cognitive abilities of simian test subjects. One test subject, a chimpanzee named Caesar, played by Andy Serkis in a career-best performance, displays near-human capabilities, quickly progressing from an abnormally intelligent ape to almost-human as the film progresses. One of the savvier decisions in Rise is the juxtaposition of Caesar’s evolution with the Alzheimers of John Lithgow’s character. These are two different states of living: one which moves to a higher state of consciousness, and the other in which brain power and memory continually deteriorates until death. The parallels to the imminent apocalypse are obvious enough, but of equal importance is the direct correlation of human decay with apes gaining power. While Caesar and Charles have the tenderest relationship in the film, their existences are mutually exclusive. One cannot survive while the other lives. And in terms of scale, it just works. The first effects of the apocalypse come not only from within humanity itself, but they spawn in a domestic environment. The apocalypse isn’t one singular catalyst being triggered in one moment — it’s an ongoing process, a malaise of disaster in which the world becomes less inured to the status quo of banal catastrophe. 

Caesar’s transformation is accordingly incremental. Halfway through the film, he has performed a number of ordinary human tasks, not unlike normal chimpanzees. By the end of Rise, he’s spoken four words. This is a Hollywood movie with a protagonist who’s neither human nor verbal, for the most part. Caesar’s push towards humanity consists of him being pseudo-human (a different state than subhuman) without abandoning his apeness. The use of motion capture aids the film significantly too; the movements of the monkey actors are believable and recognizably real, but viewed through a haze of animality. In other words, while Rise is priming a replacement for humanity, it bills the apes as that: a replacement, rather than a brand new batch of humans.

One of Rise’s saving graces is its elision of the race allegory that pervades the series. The original films’ positioning of humans versus apes as a civil rights metaphor is problematic in many respects; for starters, it’s a cowardly way to address race. Years ago, N. K. Jemisin responded to a fan suggesting an elf species that served as a metaphor for black people with the obvious question of why fantasy authors don’t simply write black elves. Furthermore, a race reading of the apes creates a white supremacist fantasy in which white men are forced to look through the other side’s eyes as their own race gets overtaken by monkeys. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is the greatest offender in this regard, as it recreates Sixties’ race riots with gorilla protestors. Given the racist simian stereotypes commonly ascribed to black people, this tips the story into pernicious racism. Rise and its sequels can’t entirely avoid this reading - it’s baked into the franchise’s DNA, and the image of apes fighting San Francisco cops is inherently political, and we’ll have to talk about race and resistance at length when we discuss Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - but it helps that Rise takes its premise at face value and presents the apes’ conflict as primarily a battle of animal rights. The apes are exploited in laboratories, have their biological makeup fundamentally altered for the whims of humans, receive violent abuse from their captors, and are fundamentally treated as inferior beings. While ethnic minorities have been subjected to equivalent treatment for decades, the conflict is framed in terms of animal rights abuses. Even before the apes gain human intelligence, the film views their experience of life with utter horror. Once they gain ultra-sentience, they gain the ability to rebel. In the world of Rise, the device of humanity’s downfall is built into their daily exploitation of other beings. Consciousness means the ability to rebel. Once the apes can think, they can take back what’s theirs.

The effect of this is two-fold. On the one hand, it imbues the series with a refreshing openness to revolution, and makes the apes a fundamentally sympathetic force. At the same time, there’s a liberal myopia to it. None of the human characters are treated similarly to the apes - oppression is just something people do to animals. The human characters are immensely privileged middle-and-upper-class people. We never see how subaltern people are treated in this world, or get any suggestion of human misery. Only the apes suffer from exploitation and captivity. The two major POC characters - David Oyelowo as a villainous millionaire and Freida Pinto as Caesar’s veterinarian who bangs James Franco - are in the same bourgeois or petty bourgeois circumstances as all the other characters. This isn’t to say that all racial minorities in films must be exploited metaphors for racism - one of Conquest’s big problems is its use of its one major black character to disavow race riots. But given the film’s exclusion of human suffering in any other regard - and let’s face it, no matter how dedicated to apocalypticism we are, the eschaton won’t smite the rich first - its unwillingness to face the reality of intra-human violence is a gaping flaw.

Instead, Rise has a number of sequences dedicated to James Franco’s manpain, which emphasizes the film’s other major problem of Franco not being a very good dramatic actor. It’s not a series-crippling issue - one doesn’t get the sense that Franco’s character will return for a sequel, and the character as written is a basically functional protagonist - but no shot of James Franco looking moody holds a candle to Andy Serkis shouting “no!” before beating the shit out of Tom Felton. Perhaps more unforgiveable is Freida Pinto’s character and her incessant moralizing at Franco. Or rather, it’s not her moralizing that’s the problem, but what she takes issue with. Throughout the film, she chastises him for interfering with nature by experimenting on Caesar. This is a strange hill for her to die on - it’s a fundamentally empty moral critique on the part of the movie. If researchers stopped interfering with nature… well, the anti-GMO crowd will win and think about where that will take us. But moreso, there is a moral argument to be made against Franco here - despite positioning himself as a father figure to Caesar, Caesar is primarily a scientific test subject to him. There’s an exploitative bent to this dynamic, which the film partially realizes. The ending’s removal of Caesar from human society and de facto split with Franco makes it clear their existences are fundamentally incompatible while giving Caesar space to respect humans. But the film’s refusal to acknowledge Will’s actual crimes against nature is a real problem. Escape from the Planet of the Apes pulled this one off by acknowledging the humans might be afraid to fear Zira and Cornelius due to their history of dissecting humans. It doesn’t take this idea all the way, but the germ of a critique is there. Rise puts its faith in the wrong stock, opting for a particularly Hollywood brand of empty moralism over a more thoughtful discussion of animal rights.

And that is where Rise falls flat. While the apes and apocalypse story works on the whole, the human narrative is significantly less compelling. Arguably this is somewhat excusable in a film exploring the dynamics of human apocalypse, and it doesn’t make the film any less watchable, but the human characters are written less intelligently than the apes. The screenplay also suffers from an acute case of J. K. Rowling/James Cameron syndrome, where every character except the leads is a pathological asshole. David Oyelowo pursues only the unfettered accruement of capital, and Tom Felton’s only character trait is that he abuses monkeys for fun. It’s a lazy mode of storytelling, one that tells its audience, “see? You’re alright. It’s those blustering villains you gotta watch out for.” The villainous characterization of everyone who’s not Franco, Lithgow, and Pinto removes one more layer of moral dimension from the story, reducing the dynamics of exploitation to “nice people and horrible exploiters.”

And yet this doesn’t compromise the movie. It’s blinkered, but Rise still depicts the haphazard acceleration of careful processes for financial gains as the downfall of humanity. This is a properly stunning critique for a multi-million-dollar science fiction film to make in 2011, and is part of the reason why Rise of the Planet of the Apes still holds up. There’s also the fact that its idea of a sympathetic replacement to humanity is plausible and respectable, which is an astonishing position to see onscreen. As we continue our plummet into climate catastrophe, alternatives seem desirable. Maybe we can’t prevent our extinction, and perhaps we’re not the best suited to diagnose our species. But if we’re going to accept that we’ll be wiped out, there’s something fundamentally charming yet reassuring about being replaced by monkeys.