Film Monkey Caesar

[Egisto Chancellor]

But after seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an artful mix of sci-fi speculation and cinematic technology, it struck me that these sorts of monkey movies will always be with us. Few film genres so wildly reveal how mankind has gotten the dominion thing wrong.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes unveils how this came to be. Born in a lab where a controlled virus gave him uncommon intelligence, a chimpanzee named Caesar is raised as a human child by a well-meaning scientist (Franco). As an adult, however, Caesar is taken away to a primate pound of sorts, where regular abuse begins to foster resentment, hatred and eventually the seeds of revolution.

And we know it, as these films - flickers of our deep guilt and fear - readily attest. The monkeys might as well take over, Rise of the Planet of the Apes suggests. Perhaps they would do a better job.

Josh Larsen is editor of Think Christian. He also writes about movies at LarsenOnFilm and is the co-host of Filmspotting. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Letterboxd. / Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.

The third instalment of the new Planet of the Apes reboot series, we even get a bit of monkey quotient going in this film. There are no climbing monkeys with tails, but this film is chock full of ape characters. Of all named characters in the film, only three are human. The rest are gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. Perfect.

This film was born out of the 1963 novel by Pierre Boule, La Plante des Singes, which detailed the adventures of a group of astronauts who land on a foreign planet where the roles of man and monkey have been switched.

The films deals with this idea, too, with humans suggesting to be regressing back into earlier pre-civilisation versions of themselves and the great apes rising up and taking their place on the planet as the dominant species.

Special mention must be made to Steve Zahn in his role as Bad Ape, who shows up out of nowhere wearing a hoodie to be comic relief. Even a total monkey movie is best served with a side of monkey comic relief. And one point he holds binoculars up to his face the wrong way round and his reaction is hilarious.

It's such a nice feeling to be surprised by movies. That's why I keep my cynicism buried underneath a giant pile of ridiculous and unwarranted optimism; that way every bad movie is a mild disappointment and every good one is delightful. But what usually ends up being a real rarity is when almost an entire franchise is not only decent, but a high water mark for Hollywood blockbuster storytelling in general.

Over the last two weeks I did a complete deep dive into the "Planet of the Apes" franchise, watching every single one of the 10 (!) theatrical releases going all the way back to the 1968 original and finishing with last week's new "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes." Has anyone other than me dared to watch the entire series to glean deeper meaning from what's widely considered a ridiculous sci-fi series about talking monkeys? Absolutely, they have! Did they do as good a job as I will? Probably! But here we go anyway.

Honestly, the only thing that keeps the original "Planet of the Apes" from being a perfect film is the performance of Charlton Heston as an astronaut who ends up on a planet full of talking apes who've become the dominant species and treat humans as pets. Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall give genuinely touching and subtle performances as the apes Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius, to the point where when Heston appears, madly gesticulating and desperate to appear hyper-masculine, the film almost falls off the rails. Luckily, the pacing and direction are so much fun that the movie doesn't really rely on him.

Next is 1970's "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," which most people hated but I am subjectively positive is one of the high points of the series. Heston didn't want to be very involved, so Paul Franciscus shows up as a new stranded astronaut who has a really similar adventure to Heston in the first one, except this one has a sect of psychic mutants who live in the subway tunnels beneath a destroyed New York and worship an undetonated nuclear bomb. This movie is genuinely insane and unpredictable. It might not be good, but I love it and its Vietnam-era nihilism about the fate of humanity.

Even stranger is 1971's "Escape From the Planet of the Apes," which sends talking apes Cornelius and Zira to the West Coast of the U.S. in 1973 and plays (at least in the first half) like a fish-out-of-water comedy. But when the American government finds out that apes end up taking over the world in the future and that Zira is pregnant, they quickly decide to not allow her to have the child. The performances of McDowell and Hunter, the not-so-veiled allegory to the just-filed Roe v. Wade and the genuinely bleak but humanist look at bureaucratic evil makes this an unforgettable piece of speculative fiction.

The next three films are pretty rough, but each has its positives. 1972's "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" is set in 1983 when the U.S. has become a police state where all apes are imprisoned and used for slave labor. The main character is Caeser (played by Roddy McDowell), the son of Cornelius and Zira, who leads an uprising to free the apes. While the concluding revolt takes way too long, the deeply angry script focused on American racism is far ahead of its time.

The worst of the 10 films is easily Tim Burton's 2001 reboot "Planet of the Apes." Mark Wahlberg is terrible and miscast, the plot is genuinely nonsensical and it has nothing to say about modern society that the previous five films didn't cover better. The only thing that makes the film worth watching is the incredible prosthetic ape makeup by the great Rick Baker.

It took 10 years, but the franchise returned with 2011's "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," featuring groundbreaking motion capture work by Andy Serkis and more empathy toward the plight of laboratory animals. Watching Serkis' ape Caeser lead the apes to freedom is rousing and very exciting, making "Rise" a flawed, but strong opening for an entirely new "Apes" timeline.

The next one, 2014's "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is quite possibly the first masterpiece in the franchise with visionary director Matt Reeves telling a gut-churningly intense fable about the inhumanity of man, placing "Dawn" firmly in the same conversation with other classic second films like "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Two Towers." In a just world, Serkis would have been nominated for an Oscar here for his performances as Caesar.

In 2017's "War for the Planet of the Apes," Caesar's quest to protect his people comes to an end with one of the most intense and well-made sci-fi films of the 2010s. In my review back then I compared the film to "The Great Escape" and "Apocalypse Now" and I stand behind that completely.

And now finally we have "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes," set 300 years after the events of the last film and setting up which will most definitely be another multiple film storyline. Long story short: it's fantastic. Character driven and leisurely, the film sets up a future where humans are borderline feral and non-verbal. So much of "Kingdom" are these lovely scenes of apes just sitting around and talking about life and what it means to live a meaningful life.

Yes, these are big sci-fi movies with explosions and lots of action set-pieces, but they're also thoughtful looks at what it means to be human and how our lives are controlled by a mercurial balance of judgement and empathy. What did I learn from watching these 10 movies? That some of the best writing in films comes when we get to see what possible futures look like based upon our behavior as a species. And that I like psychic mutants that live in the subway.

If you don't want to watch the other nine movies in the series, "Kingdom" is a great place to start as it begins an entirely new narrative arc that we'll probably get another three to five movies exploring. That might sound exhausting, but I'm for one looking forward to meeting our eventual ape overlords.

Anguirus actually plays a large part in this movie. He was last seen falling into a crevice during Megalon, and we like to think that at the beginning of this movie he's just emerging to find himself in Antarctica.

...and then leave the ceremony. Masahiko is just visiting his brother on the island, so he takes off to go exploring while Keisuke goes back to work. While he's exploring in a cave, he finds a glowing, buzzing piece of metal. Dude! That has got to be radioactive, don't just go picking it up with your bare hands.

Keisuke says that he works at a marina, but he is apparently also overseeing a construction site, and he's called in to look at an underground temple that the workers have unearthed. An archeologist named Saeko Kaneshiro (played by Reiko Tajima) manages to get past the hordes of reporters that are swarming the cave entrance and helps with translating the runes on the walls and identifying the Sisha statue found there. She clarifies the prophecy from the priestess, talking about a black mountain appearing in the sky, two red suns, and then a monster appearing to destroy the world and two monsters arising to stop him.

Keisuke agrees to let Saeko take the statue back to mainland Japan to bring to a professor that is an expert in this particular era. On the plane ride home, they see black smoke in the sky that looks like a mountain, starting off the prophesy. When they arrive, it turns out that Keisuke has been keeping it a secret that the professor Saeko wanted to see is actually his uncle, which she correctly identifies as kind of a dick move.

Both of the above professors are Toho mainstays. The archeologist, Professor Wagura, is played by Hiroshi Koizumi has been with us since Godzilla Raids Again and the physicist, Professor Miyajima, is played by Akihiko Hirata, who's been with us since the very first Godzilla film. Both usually play scientists. More recent movies have been light on the smug certainty of Toho scientists, so it's good to have them back.

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