Of all the blockbuster film series that dominated the 2010s, perhaps the one that was the most interesting was 20th Century Fox’s rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise -and already it seems kind of forgotten by a lot of the general public, which is a damn shame.
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It began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a loose remake of 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, helmed by British filmmaker Rupert Wyatt. It was the origin story essentially, telling of how an experimental cure for Alzheimer’s Disease accelerated the intelligence of a chimp subject called Caesar, and how he after experiencing both the kindness and cruelty of humans, brought it to a broader collective of apes, all leading to an uprising in San Francisco. On its’ own it was a decent if overly plotted film, and ending as it did with the apes making a home in the forest and an advanced variant of the drug spreading across the globe as a deadly virus, it seemed to set the stage pretty well for the timeline of the 1968 original. But it was followed up with a sequel in 2014 directed by Matt Reeves called Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which explored the early days of this new world through a flourishing ape society in the Californian forest coming into conflict with the human survivors of the recent plague. And it was much better than the first, grappling with more compelling themes and centering the apes as opposed to the humans. In 2017 Reeves completed the trilogy with War for the Planet of the Apes, a last confrontation between the apes and a dying human race, with a personal vendetta for Caesar at the heart of it all. This film was the best of the bunch, weaving together great storytelling depth and an emotionally engaging character journey that resolved in a wholly satisfying way. Through each installment, the series advanced the technology of motion capture performance, the visual effects by the end being absolutely phenomenal; and the movies gave Andy Serkis his first truly exceptional role since Gollum, more than any other proving his immense talent and versatility as an actor, even under all that digital make-up.
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It’s also a series about white supremacy. This is not a new observation. Scholarship about the Apes franchise has been pointing this out almost as far back as the original movie. It’s always been about race and revolution, and with that of course come problematic connotations. Much has been said about the discomforting equating of the Apes with black people for instance given the history of that horrendously racist dichotomy, no matter how well-intentioned the rest of the allegory is. I’m not going to touch on that aspect here, it’s been dissected by many more knowledgeable than I and we don’t need another white guy weighing in. And I think the white supremacy inherent to this franchise and to these three films especially is still relevant without tying the apes metaphorically to any one marginalized group targeted by the white supremacy inherent to our society. White supremacist systems and ideology aren’t only harmful to people of colour after all.
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The question of supremacy is vital to Planet of the Apes’ identity. The signature idea of the original story was that of supremacy turned on its head: what if these creatures, our closest genetic relative, that we have subjugated and experimented on over centuries were instead the dominant species of the planet, and WE were the animals they would abuse and take advantage of? What if apes had evolved and we hadn’t? It’s a classic, pulpy hook, born of those same speculative role-reversal musings that birthed stories of Amazon planets or robot parables. And like those, it was a fantasy that spoke to real world inequities, and perhaps unconsciously on the authors’ part, the socio-cultural biases that informed their choices. I’m sure Pierre Boulle, who wrote the novel that became Planet of the Apes, didn’t consider that aforementioned problematic racial coding, and possibly wouldn’t have cared if he did. Likewise, the greater dimensions of his notions on supremacy were likely not interrogated until the book was published. What does supremacy even mean?
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In Planet of the Apes, it’s almost strictly Darwinian. It is strength and intelligence that denotes superiority. Not only does Planet of the Apes suggest these are the core tenets of an evolved race, but that the oppression of “less evolved” races are necessary for a society founded on that very evolution. The Apes have cultivated a successful civilization through equal parts scientific advancement, religious dogmatism, and military might, all off of the backs of the mute, comparatively unintelligent and primitive humans. Survival of the fittest, pure Darwinism –and that very fascistic form of it too. The movie however (perhaps the book too, but I’ve never read it), is conscious of this, and challenges it. Taylor (Charlton Heston) being an aberration to what Ape society expects of humans, forces the Apes, or at least some of them, to critically examine their strict theocratic culture and their treatment of humans. And it’s met with hostility, the Apes’ entire worldview being inextricably linked with their perceived genetic, intellectual dominance. Ape supremacy is their foundation. The mirroring is not subtle.
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That’s probably mostly thanks to the residue left by the films’ original screenwriter and Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling (his script was notably rewritten by Michael Wilson to re-align it with a smaller budget), who more than the likes of director Franklin J. Schaeffner, and certainly Heston, was aware of the pervasiveness of white supremacy in American society, especially as he was writing in the late 1960s. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the driving ideas of white supremacy, rooted in social Darwinism are the same concepts repurposed for this horrifying planet of the apes. The famous twist makes that line from us (as in white people) to them even more direct. But it is still rather simple in its metaphor. As much as can be expanded on for analysis, there’s not a lot of nuance. And it is still, at least aesthetically, a very different world from our own. Some of the sequels made the themes and parallels more immediate through closer chronological proximity to our own era, particularly Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. But I think none strike as intricately as the Apes movies of the 2010s.
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The age of the gritty reboot has not yielded a lot in the way of genuinely meaningful re-examinations of pop culture staples, but the revived Planet of the Apes series is one of the rare exceptions. Setting this prequel narrative against the backdrop of twenty-first century late stage capitalism and concerning apes as the animals we know them now rather than the humanoid hybrids of previous movies makes a great difference in how we perceive these stories and their ideologies. The films become less speculative and more material.
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"The metaphorical demise it suggests is not that of real human beings, but rather the suddenly inevitable downfall of financial capitalisms’ global network of systemic exploitation and oppression"1 notes Dan Hassler-Forest in a 2017 article published in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the politics of the reboot Planet of the Apes series. He sees the films as reflective and condemnatory of the fatal instability of worldwide economic systems, and as essential modern texts on revolution and the various nuances inherent in it. These are both true, and four years after the last installment, it’s even clearer how much the forces of remnant colonialist thought and underlying white supremacy, in the form as we now know it on the other end of the Trump presidency, inform so much of the action and integrity of this trilogy of movies.
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Let’s consider Rise to start with and that films’ root in a frontier pursuing a supposed scientific good. The inciting incident of the film, and of the whole trilogy, is an experimental dementia vaccine being tested on apes. And you can discuss the hubris of this, developing drugs without fully comprehending their magnitude and playing god (the company’s name is literally Gen-Sys), a la Jurassic Park. But also like Jurassic Park, it’s notable how heavily corporate America and Big Pharma factors into everything. James Franco may have personal and noble investment in the outcome of his work, but he’s employed by a business that is profit driven and will cut corners or fast-track progress every time if they see fit. Respect for the science isn’t there –that is secondary next to how it can be exploited. And exploitation is not reserved to the public. Indeed, the success of the product is dependent on the success of the animal testing. The film right away forces us to identify with the apes, opening on Caesars’ mother Bright Eyes being captured by company poachers –and in making this choice it guides us into seeing more clearly how inhumanely they are being treated in the name of American industry.
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Everything about Gen-Sys has this current of white capitalism baked into it, but the film isn’t without its’ more obvious allusions to white supremacy. If it wanted to be subtle it wouldn’t have cast Tom Felton as yet another poster boy for Nazi youth. Dodge, as the kids’ name is, the sadistic caretaker at the primate sanctuary, is a very recognizable avatar of white supremacy on an individual level -asserting dominance however he can over creatures of a variety of species powerless to his whims. He’s got notable insecurities belied by his demonstrations of heterosexual machismo, showing off his abuse of apes to young women he brings to the shelter for example; and is clearly frustrated by his own subservience to his father (Brian Cox). His defeat and death is the major turning point for the ape revolution, and symbolically shows the worth of defiance. Thankfully the metaphor is not constrained just to the singular actors of white supremacy like Dodge: Gen-Sys is overrun with apes before too long, towering over and then dismantling the very order that enslaved them.
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The stalemate nature of Dawn makes any notions of supremacy difficult. Its’ “both sides” approach to the central conflict results in it having the most sympathetic take on humanity of any of the films. The white supremacy systems of power are extinct or otherwise irrelevant to the film and so it’s mostly individuals still furthering this ideological process -primarily Kirk Acevedos’ and Gary Oldmans’ characters. Oldman in fact is by far the most sympathetic of any of this series’ “villains”, driven by survival more than outright disparagement of the apes. Yet in him and many others, that underlying superiority complex is still palpable. But the chief aggressive actor is the ape Koba (Toby Kebbell), whose abuse at the hands of humans fuels his hatred and bloodlust. He resorts to using the very weapons of white supremacy: hard-lined deceitful rhetoric to win over followers and stir up greater hate, and machine guns to stage his assault on the human compound. Caesar laments in the film that apes are just as fallible as humans, which is true, but he fails to consider how that fallibility was adapted. Koba merely lashed out with the violence that he learned, that he was conditioned with. So he spread it to the other apes, in effect transferring to them human anger, rashness, and bigotry. Caesar was right in the end, Koba was no ape -sadly, he was far too human. Where Dawn indeed falls short in its’ “post-ideological neoliberalism” as Hassler-Forrest identifies it, its’ easy notion that the fruits of a revolution would inevitably give way to its own corruption; it does offer the insightful comment on how white supremacy mutates and flourishes even in the absence of the institutions that propagate it. A passionate, persuasive mouthpiece and manufactured rage can do a lot -as we know too well.
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And the ramifications of that rage carry all the way through War -which is the most explicit of the three films as to its’ fascist overtones. From the opening scene, which zeroes in on a soldiers’ helmet reading “Bedtime for Bozo” -that combination of suggestive violence and comic bad taste so characteristic of the alt-right- it’s clear this movie was made in a world more attuned to the language of fascism and white supremacy than its’ two predecessors were. The imagery and iconography is all over the movie, so that but for one abandoned child called Nova, no human character escapes it. They’re all zealous followers of Woody Harrelson’s Colonel McCullough, a radical military leader hell-bent on the apes destruction -you can’t get much more overtly Nazi than that. The unfledgling and extremely militarized toxic masculinity is on display in each group address, and the Colonel standing before them has elements of skinhead coding to his precise baldness and body language. The human characters of this film are shot with allusions to Riefenstahl and eerily they evoke the eternal imagery of the white nationalists in Charlottesville or the Proud Boys in Washington. The attack on Caesars’ home at the beginning now even feels linked to the storming of the Capitol. And of course they are a mostly all-male, mostly all-white outfit.
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Matt Reeves intended this blunt allusion. He seems to be aware of that underlying fascism that has followed the series in its’ depiction of the human-ape relationship. And he knows that humanity, and particularly white humanity , when faced with a certain disadvantage, will respond with violence and even totalitarianism. The Colonel will go so far as ‘mercy killing’ his own children and his own men, he will enslave ape defectors, treat them as tools and bestow on them a demeaning intently dehumanizing moniker, and use the rest of the apes as chattel -at least for the time being. All that’s stopping him massacring the apes is their usefulness in preparing for an attack by the army he’s betrayed. And he has the power to do this because of the purpose he gives the men under his control. It is a fight for survival of the human race. The apes are the greatest threat to that survival as they grow more advanced and intelligent. Therefore, they must be eliminated. It plays on their fears and anxieties, provides an adequate scapegoat, and of course it all comes back to that need for dominance. “If we lose, it will be a planet of apes” the Colonel says, the big title drop framed as a threat that only this prestige remnant of humanity can meet. Because if humanity cannot dominate, it is useless. That is the Colonel’s ideology, right out of the white supremacist playbook of a “they” that is poised to replace a perfect “us”. Superiority is what matters most, the subtext of the original film made text. And hence why the humans must lose.
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But it must be acknowledged there is another factor in this fight, permeating all three films and interconnecting with these themes in ways we didn’t fully understand until recently. A critical side of the overarching plot of the trilogy is pandemic. It’s in the background the whole way through, far more responsible than the apes for humanity’s decline. And it reads especially hauntingly as we continue to live through our real pandemic, not so different from the one writers at Twentieth Century Fox considered science-fiction only a few years ago. That scene at the end of Rise, where an infected David Hewlett is revealed to be an international pilot carrying the virus with him to spread all over the world, it’s much scarier than the mere narrative foreshadowing it was ten years ago. Dawn identifies it as “the Simian Flu”, which is where the series again seems disturbingly prescient. Though the virus was manufactured in a lab by humans, it is here exclusively associated with apes, who it must be noted are entirely independent of humanity’s downfall across these movies. Perhaps we can see this as predictive of Trumps’ “China virus” rhetoric, but then the Spanish Flu, this one’s principal model, is equally misleading as that virus did not originate in Spain (it was first found in Kansas). Were writers Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Mark Bomback cognizant of the fact that pandemics always come with a people to blame it on?
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Throughout this film and the next, as we see the fall of society articulated in terms still unlikely yet closer to home than when these movies were fresh, human characters mourn photos of loved ones lost to this virus -that feeling of loss and desperation conveyed with genuine heartbreak now that so many of us have been there or know someone who has. And then of course War went and introduced a variant, more contagious and costly than the one we knew before; the catalyst for even further antagonism and extremism against the apes arbitrarily dictated the cause of it.
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Designing the fall of humanity in this trilogy around a virus as an update of the original series’ evergreen nuclear war answer to the question of our doom wasn’t a wholly inventive idea. For some time now, disease has been a common successor to Cold War-era atomic Armageddon as far as our capacity for imagining our annihilation lies. But it’s a choice that has proven to be more immediately tangible and lasting now that we have firsthand experience of at least a taste of what these movies were highlighting; if not in terms of literal societal collapse than in the scope of divisiveness and paranoia and xenophobia that a global pandemic provokes -and that these movies illustrated with exceptional aptitude.
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Pandemics have a way of revealing our frailties, our priorities, and our prejudices. It’s no coincidence that the one we’re in has been the setting of at least one mass social movement, a few political terrorist movements, and renewed anxieties about a changing world. They force us to contend with those things we take for granted, and while some would recognize the sins of the powers we have erected, others would be reactionary and slip deeper into desperate ignorance to preserve the safety of their unquestioned worldview. This is the side that often wins out in pandemic fiction, as it’s so much easier a temptation to sink into. It’s common of apocalypse stories to take this dim view of human nature, the Apes movies are no exception, implying that before our end we will inevitably descend into fanatical hate -Captain Ahab stabbing at the whale until his final breath.
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But it’s important to note the Apes movies aren’t wholly pessimistic, as much as they may have every right to be. Humanity isn’t wiped out at the end of War; Nova still survives, and surely there are pockets out there that have as well even as they devolve in their mental faculties and ability to speak. The great inconsistency ultimately of the trilogy is that we don’t see the oppressed become the oppressors, as we know they will. For all his rage against humans, Caesar and his followers aren’t the kind to enslave them in recompense. And it would seem that despite the trilogy’s numerous nods to the original films in references and motifs, it would rather you forget that dynamic of the first movie, where the apes are unequivocally the bad guys. A wise choice given the shape the central metaphor has taken over the decades. It would be a narrative betrayal and intellectually disingenuous to perpetuate that pattern within the framework these movies have chosen. So we end on an ape utopia and one that implies even a future for humans, so long as they adapt and begin again free of their worst impulses.
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In so doing, the films subvert not only white supremacy, but that idea of supremacy itself. One of the notions of this whole series, arguably as far back as 1968 is that traditional supremacy is not set in stone, that humans can be replaced. But this trilogy goes a step further in rendering it fluid to the point of devaluing the concept entirely. These apes have no desire for dominance divorced from human perceptions of it. And human definitions mean nothing. By the end, they are not necessarily destined for the same mistakes. This trilogy and the original may as well exist in separate universes (you can make the argument they do); but as far as they are connected and thus convey a depressingly cyclical take on evolution and supremacy, at least these new movies break down and interrogate those definitions beyond the meaning and significance we assign them.
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Planet of the Apes has always been steeped in metaphor, and the recent trilogy didn’t have to hide as much of it in allegorical worlds, characters, or concepts -thus why though it may not be as timeless as the original, it is far more relevant in this day and age. And the application of its’ big themes and philosophies to their more exact and presently active cousins is useful. The white supremacy and social Darwinism apparent in these movies and their direct relationship to a pandemic is impossible to ignore in a time when such depictions so pertinently represent our uncomfortable reality. We’re in no danger of the fate laid out for us by Planet of the Apes, but its’ easy to see the source of our destruction in theirs.
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[1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/↩
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