Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, was released in April 1968 and became an unexpected commercial success with modest critical support. That success inspired four sequels, two television series, comic books, toys, video games, and other merchandise. Thus it inspired the almost organic evolution of producing and exploiting popular film in a new way: the cultural business model we now call the franchise. The Apes franchise advanced into the 21st century with a 2001 remake of the first film by Tim Burton, succeeded by a reboot trilogy that has benefited from advances in performance capture acting: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (directed by Rupert Wyatt, 2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (directed by Matt Reeves, 2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (directed by Matt Reeves, 2017). The source of the inaugural film is Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planéte des singes, a satire that tests the pretensions of Western (as human) civilization against the achievements of a futuristic society of intelligent apes. The motion picture reshapes Boulle’s scenario into an allegory for the sociopolitical concerns of 1960s America. Issues such as civil rights, racial conflict, cold war militarism, women’s roles, and the generation gap all have a place in its estranged diegesis. Planet of the Apes follows Taylor (Charlton Heston), an astronaut who lands on a planet that flips the order between human beings and sentient apes. He becomes a caged beast, denied the dignity of membership in a dominant species. Escaping captivity, he is shocked to find a half-buried Statue of Liberty. He is not on some distant planet but in the future of his own world. Written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, this fantastic adventure continues to engage cultural critics as a grim allegory of the inevitable wages of racial conflict. Its persistence in American culture seems due to the nation’s irresolution about race, white male identity, and national destiny. What began as a modest exercise in French colonial critique (Boulle) is now a global cinematic phenomenon that forecasts the end of human (as white, Western, and male) primacy and its displacement by either another mode of being or universal destruction.