Class 9

The Planet of the Apes is a science-fiction film, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, starring Charlton Heston. Like Fight Club, it’s an adaptation of a novel of the same name. This movie was followed by four sequels.

In this dystopian world, apes have evolved into creatures with human-like intelligence and speech while humans are like animals, returned to the Stone Age.

So we can say that this movie offers a kind of reflection on Darwin’s theory of evolution where he stated that human beings descend from monkeys. Here, there’s been an inversion of this statement. Apes are more evolved than humans on this planet. It’s a sort of “What could have been if…”.

In the past years, two reboots of this series were produced, first Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and then Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). These are in fact prequels, which offer an explanation for the existence of a planet where apes have become more human than mankind.

We follow Cesar, played by Andy Serkis in motion capture, the first “evolved ape”, and how he developed human instincts and feelings, how he learns to speak and act like a human. He was adopted by a scientist, who kept him because he could help with his father’s Alzheimer. We can see how humans react to his existence, and sometimes he seems more human than humans themselves.

But these movies also offers an explanation for the extinction of mankind : a decease carried by the apes that would kill all humans, and would explain their later domination of the planet which is therefore not only due to their ability to evolve.

I think that what’s great with these movies is that they allow us to see that by developing humanity, apes also takes its flaws like jealousy, envy, hatred… So being human is not necessarily a good thing, it can corrupts you.