PLANET OF THE APES(Charles E.J. Moulton) THE TALE OF A MISSING LINK
FROM INDIANA

An analytical review of the five films known as THE PLANET OF THE APES

By Charles E.J. Moulton



Science Fiction has many followers and we all identify how folks of all generations and eras flock to take note of dragons and spaceships, strange creatures ruling topsy-turvy worlds.
Let us be honest, today these fans can be categorized into three groups. There are those who dress up in the clothes of their idols, speak the language and collect the items. They attend the congregations and sing the songs. Then there are those who see everything as pure entertainment, popcorn-fun below all Shakespearian tradition. Between the two lies a group who would gladly consider themselves analytical. Their chief characteristic is looking at the real background of the piece and are thus probe into the story like a gold miner looking for a treasure.
Many films are there for distraction, but within that pursuit one can find a very solid message. A few films throw the message in your face with a bang and with some you have to look for the message with a magnifying glass.
The original five Planet of the Apes-Films (dating from 1968 to 1973) are works where the message sometimes is so evident that it hurts. The dialogue is so strikingly a parody of all things human that it is daunting. All things civilized and racist seem imbedded within it in litmus paper and it is a wonder that the movies are not discussed at sociological seminars.
Current civilization is taught that dressing up is for fun and certainly anyone who dresses up as a monkey is not to be taken all too seriously.
In one sentence: these people are wrong!

In the story, human astronauts from 1972 are frozen through deep space to arrive in the year 3955 on a planet ruled by monkeys. Only one survives, Taylor.
After torture and persecution he discovers that he is back home on Earth and the apes have simply taken over Earth after a nuclear catastrophe.
There are human survivors of this holocaust and they have worshipped the ultimate bomb for millennia. Taylor is witness to how the monkeys invade their underground city and ultimately destroy Earth by exploding the ultimate bomb.
Three apes escape in Taylor ship, arriving back in 1972 and find they are being treated the same way as Taylor was back home, only worse for it comes with intrigue. The one ape is pregnant and by fooling the police, she manages to rescue the baby, who grows up to start a revolt to found the Planet of the Apes.
The story is a vicious circle: A travels to B and creates havoc, which sets off a time warp that sends off A to B again. It is probably the most famous one in films. Had not Taylor decided to travel into the future, the apes would never have been able to travel to the past to found the future that Taylor discovered.

Ultimately, the proverbial dog chases his own tail until we sit there, blubbering and cooing like, well, a monkey in a tree.
But what does all this mean?
It means that Man (in reality and fiction) ultimately works against himself. He discovers something that he ultimately destroys. He won’t listen to truth because he is too caught up in his own desires and lack of honesty to admit that he has done things wrong.
To put this bluntly, he cannot let go of his own past mistakes. He regrets them so much that he lives not to better himself but to try to better his mistakes. If he could let them go, he would never have to fight the foes that arose from this action in the first place.
Some interesting dialogue from the film proves my point and how it is put across in a twisted manner. Take, for instance, the Gorilla General’s word in the second film. Centuries of slavery ring in his words:

“I am not saying that man is bad just because his skin is White. I am saying that the only good Human is a dead Human.”

It is protest in its purest form. You cannot critique humans on their own level like this (replace “Human” with “Negro” and “White” with “Black” and you’ll see what I mean). But you can put a human in a civilization of a different race and see how he reacts to this, thereby letting man point his own finger at himself.

The problem is that people don’t hear between the lines because the munching of the popcorn is too loud in their ears.

“Ignorance is Evil”

Doctor Zira says in the same film and mirrors the kangaroo trial that occurs in the previous film, where Colonel Taylor is held before a tribunal that only exists to hang the chimpanzees (who think he is a missing link) & the court (who won’t believe that he comes from Fort Wayne, Indiana). Neither side, however, is right. He is from humankind’s own past. The fact that the Gorilla-Army is blessed by priests in the movie & halted by pacifist chimps should be revealing to us humans. We have two parables here: the flower-power-generation who burnt their own draught cards & finally Nazi Germany, church blessing cannons.
So, the characters in the movie have the same problem as the human beings watching the story. They don’t listen. The characters in the movie are so caught up being mad at each other’s folly that they keep doing the same mistakes over and over. The people paying to see what they are doing, pay their popcorn and walk out just as oblivious to the countless divorces and badmouthing and intrigues that they are responsible for, not really interested in looking below the surface because they only do so in society-approved things of shiny surface and university approved dogma. But there are signs that try to help them, if they listened.
Shortly before the fourth film there was a racist riot in a city called Watts. Director J. Lee Thompson remodelled these riots, making the leader of the riots the Monkey Revolutionary whose parents were futuristic space travellers and thereby made him responsible for the proverbial dog we mentioned earlier chasing his tail in his own never ending vicious circle.
But we find a positive energy flowing from the remaining words of film 5:

“Life is like a highway. A driver in lane A might survive whilst a driver in lane B might not. By foreseeing his own future correctly he might plan his life better and change it.”

Accordingly, we see apes and humans sharing their lives at the end, giving us a possible hint that things maybe are not as bad as they look. The responsibility lies only in following your own good intuition.
It is up to you, dear reader of this article. Next time you go to a movie or a play, try to find messages within the storyline. Look closely, for you might find more than you think. Even if it is only the interesting analysis behind the bad acting.
Within everything … lies a message.



PLANET OF THE APES: Five Motion Pictures (20th Century Fox, ©1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973) Directors: Franklin J. Schaffner, Ted Post, Don Taylor, J.Lee Thompson; Actors: Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter, Charlton Heston, Maurice Evans, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Williams, Sal Mineo, John Huston; Based upon the book “Monkey Planet” by Pierre Boulle; Make-Up by John Chambers

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