The greatness — yes, greatness — of the Planet of the Apes

Rather more predictable was the public response to the story, which was carried by most major outlets, including Nature and New Scientist and The Washington Post. As a species we’ve often reacted to the perceived threat of our own usurpation — whether by animals, aliens or artificial intelligences — with incredulity edged in nervous laughter, so while one cohort jokingly lamented this potential evolutionary leap toward humanity’s obsolescence, another jokingly celebrated this potential evolutionary leap toward humanity’s obsolescence. Others, however, responded with quips about how it was all probably nothing more than a well-timed marketing ploy for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” (now playing at a multiplex near you), which doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, given what a convincing alternate reality the recent Apes movies have generated. Has there been a more consistently entertaining, provocative and emotive franchise in the last 15 years than the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy? To quote the shiver-inducing moment when rebel chimp Caesar utters his first word: “No.”

Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is the fourth installment in the Apes reboot — reportedly the beginning of a new trilogy — and the 10th Apes film overall, if we count the five originals plus the much-mocked 2001 Tim Burton version. Taken as a sporadic continuum, starting with those damn dirty apes who wouldn’t take their stinking paws off Charlton Heston in 1968, the series is certainly the most comprehensive ongoing cinematic exploration of the relationship between mankind and our nearest animal kin. But though it’s the best, boldest and overall bizarrest interrogation of human-hominid blurring, it is far from the first. Almost as long as the movies have been around, we’ve woven filmed fictions out of the idea of our great-ape brethren testing the evolutionary barrier that separates us from them, as though somehow hoping to see, in their imperfect mirror, a true reflection of our own imperfect natures. You could say that almost as long as there have been cameras, we’ve been chimping.

As far back as 1913, French cinema pioneer Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset made “Balaoo,” a silent horror/sci-fi short, based on the book of the same name by Gaston Leroux, that details a Dr. Moreau-style scientist who creates a human-ape hybrid that falls in love with the scientist’s comely (all-human) daughter. Curiously, “Balaoo” and its two American remakes, 1927’s “The Wizard” (which has been lost) and 1942’s “Dr. Renault’s Secret” (which can be found on YouTube), were based on a book by a Frenchman, as was Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 “Planet of the Apes,” which was an adaptation of the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle. The later film culminates in an all-time iconic twist ending (actually not in the book, invented instead by co-screenwriter and “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling) involving the Statue of Liberty, a monument that, like both the earliest and best-known movies about human-ape symbiosis — and indeed like the cinematograph itself, if we really want to get into it — were all, in a strangely specific quirk of transatlantic fate, imported from France.

But Jackson’s Kong didn’t just try on a less sexist and less racist version of the story for size. It also was the first to move away from man-in-suit and animatronic effects, and use motion-capture tech that enabled not just more impressive stunts and shot-making but also a greater range of anthropomorphic expressivity in the animal’s face. And this has been the method used ever since, making mo-cap legends out of not just Andy Serkis, who played Kong after playing Gollum in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and would go on to give a so-far unparalleled mo-cap performance as the brilliant and beleaguered ape leader Caesar in the Apes reboot trilogy. Terry Notary and Toby Kebbell, after also playing key chimp roles in the reboots, together portrayed Kong in Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s “Kong: Skull Island,” which launched the big guy into the Legendary Pictures Monsterverse, which he now shares with frenemy Godzilla and other titans, meaning he no longer has to die for love at the end of each appearance. Which, good for him, but his new incarnation as merely one of a panoply of differently superpowered beasties does rather lessen his value as an allegorical stand-in for man’s bestial nature, or as a gigantic furred metaphor for the animal innocence we humans lost along with our tails.

Notary, however, has continued to appear in ape form even outside the reboots, most notably playing Gordy, the sitcom chimp who goes on a desperately creepy, gory rampage at the beginning of Jordan Peele’s superb 2022 sci-fi “Nope,” as well as appearing in human form — albeit apelike — as the performance artist whose disruption of a black-tie gala forms the most memorable scene in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning “The Square.” “Nope” satirizes humanity’s insatiable and dubiously ethical hunger for entertainment spectacle by making Gordy a kind of avatar for the rage of voiceless, erased and exploited industry workers reduced to servitude, as well as a stand-in for humanity’s hubristic belief in its dominion over the natural world. “The Square” shows how the artist’s primitivist behavior discomfits an initially tickled audience of tuxedoed sophisticates once it is clear he is not simply aping about for their pleasantly scandalized amusement.

Different though they are, both of these titles to some extent use their simian elements to skewer caste, class pretension and the abuse of the powerless by elites corrupted by their power — all themes that also found expression, often with an almost heroic lack of subtlety, in the Planet of the Apes series. Especially in the four sequels to the original film, which, with the religious aspects of “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970), the themes of celebrity and the complacency of wealth toward its underclasses in “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (1971), and the overt racial allegories, slave auctions and civil unrest storylines of “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” (1972) and “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (1973), provide surprisingly trenchant social commentary for a quartet of decreasingly budgeted early-’70s B-movies featuring a bunch of extras in voice-muffling ape masks.

But then, the original Planet of the Apes series was a unicorn in many ways: a franchise before franchises were a thing, and a volley of summer blockbusters (all but the first film premiered in May or June) that ended the year before “Jaws” invented the concept of the summer blockbuster. It even spawned its own TV spinoff, which made an unlikely star of Roddy McDowall (who played three different chimp characters over the course of the movies and the show) and exposed a generation of younger viewers to its erratic, ambivalent, anti-authoritarian mythology.

And though part of an ongoing tradition, these films built something new: Riffing on but substantially changing Boulle’s storyline, “Planet of the Apes” (1968) reverses the gender polarity of “King Kong,” so here it’s a less destructive attraction that runs like a kinky little current between Kim Hunter’s chimp scientist Kira and Heston’s blustering human astronaut-Adonis, George Taylor. And Taylor is also given a human female mate to disavow any overt involvement in icky interspecies hanky-panky, beyond a single chaste kiss. Not to suggest it’s altogether progressive: Hot human girlfriend Nova (Linda Harrison) is scantily clad, subservient and mute — in other words, the perfect 20th-century woman prior to second-wave feminism coming along and spoiling the fun. Though, to be fair, things hadn’t gotten much better by 2001 when in Burton’s narratively and erotically befuddled relaunch attempt, Mark Wahlberg’s permanently dazed time-traveling doofus gets a farewell peck from primitive woman/supermodel Estella Warren but a more lingering smooch from Helena Bonham Carter’s chimp, radical Ari. Thus is formed a love triangle only slightly less convincing than Ari’s hairdo, which looks to be a vaguely simian take on “the Rachel.”

The comparison between Wahlberg’s confused loaf of Wonder Bread and Heston’s slab of beefcake served with a side of ham does Burton’s film few favors. But it’s also fascinating to look at Heston’s performance in its own right, mainly because of how much he commits to this risky, schlocky premise and to a character whose deep unlikability he entirely embraces. Heston’s portrayal of Taylor communicates a pretty radical ambivalence toward the strapping, rude-health vision of American exceptionalism (especially as contrasted with the effete, intellectual chimp scientists) that the actor appears to embody. In her contemporary review, Pauline Kael wrote: “The picture is an enormous, many-layered black joke on the hero and the audience, and part of the joke is the use of Charlton Heston as the hero. Physically, Heston, with his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, is a godlike hero; built for strength, he’s an archetype of what makes Americans win. He doesn’t play a nice guy; he’s harsh and hostile, self-centered and hot-tempered. … He is the perfect American Adam to work off some American guilt feelings or self-hatred on.”

Made years before Heston’s rightward political lurch would see the former Democrat launch conservative action committees and serve five terms as president of the National Rifle Association — and doesn’t his delivery of “from my cold, dead hands” sound like something Taylor might have yelled at a vanquished gorilla foe? — his Apes role nonetheless anticipates that shift in ideology. George Taylor, after all, is the dying man whose last act, at the end of “Beneath,” is to blow up Earth with a nuclear device, which can be read as the ultimate fascistic fantasy of the kind of egomaniac who cannot countenance a single being to continue living once he is dead, and locates the ultimate assertion of humanity’s dominance over the planet in its total, irrevocable destruction. Pretty rich for a guy given to castigating his “maniac” ancestors and damning them all to hell for doing almost exactly that.

It’s this species treachery, by which successive filmmaking teams have given the apes, for all their flaws, the higher moral ground, that makes Planet of the Apes such a weirdly intriguing proposition. Picking up and running with that premise and organizing it around the epic life of rebel chimp leader Caesar (Serkis), the reboot trilogy starts with Rupert Wyatt’s terrific “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011) and continues with Matt Reeves’s even better “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014) and “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017), and remains starkly relevant now. In a time when many of us have lost faith in our human leaders, Caesar is great leadership personified: dignified, honorable, compassionate when he can be and ferocious when he must be. And while he is wise, he also listens to counsel, particularly that of his chief adviser, Maurice (Karin Konoval) — orangutans both here and in the originals appear to be the scholars, philosophers, historians and doctors of the ape world, which makes the real-world Rakus’s medicinal mastery all the more canon.

But although “Rise,” “Dawn” and “War” gave the Apes-verse a major overhaul, they did not jettison all ties to the original movies. Indeed, one of the near-unique things about the new franchise is how well it sits alongside the earlier incarnations (which is especially noticeable when you embark on the folly of a nonuple-bill marathon of all the films to date). Names, loosely attached to concepts, recur, echoing though the timeline: Serkis’s Caesar has a son called Cornelius; McDowall’s Cornelius fathers a child he calls Caesar. Nova, meaning new, is Taylor’s mute girlfriend in 1968, but she’s a mute orphaned child in 2017 — both characters embodying different kinds of hope for humankind.

And there are more direct callbacks. The very last, strangely ambivalent shot in “Battle,” the original series’s finale, is of a statue of Caesar crying while an ape elder tells his story to a mixed audience of human and ape children. And the last scene of “War,” the concluding episode of the reboot, has Caesar, mortally wounded but his mission complete, look out over the idyllic new lands to which he’s led his people and their human child-ally, letting a single tear fall as he dies. These shifting resonances give us the impression of a vast, shared history that can only ever be retold imperfectly, the same way that myths and sagas come down to us through oral traditions and translations, through mishearings and reinterpretations, so that the same distant facts take on different, distorted forms, from which nonetheless a few stubborn details refuse to be entirely dislodged.

It’s a tough act to follow for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” absent Serkis and Reeves and the simian characters we’ve learned to love. Directed by Ball, previously best known for the competent yet drab dystopias of YA franchise the Maze Runner, and set 300 years after the end of “War,” when humanity has devolved into a Hobbesian state of nature and apes appear to have become enslavers, it once again flicks the switch on the human-ape power dynamic. And while there’s still plenty of topical mileage to be extorted, the hyper-polarized landscape is different now even from that of 2017, and less easily receptive to such bluntly America-critical scenes as those in “War,” when the amped-up human militias cheer on the whipping and torturing of their starving simian slaves, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays over loudspeakers. So just remember, when someone inevitably whines, after “Kingdom,” that the Apes franchise has become “woke”: From Heston’s ornery he-man blowing up the world out of pique, through the activism and civil rights analogies of the sequels and the anti-militarism of the reboots, it was ever thus.

Whatever its eventual reception, in “Kingdom” we’ll have one further chance to investigate just why the idea of the intelligent ape continues to exert such a pull on the human imagination, and why we return to the concept again and again, like Rakus endlessly chewing the analgesic of mass entertainment into a manageable pulp and applying it like a poultice to the wounds of a broken culture. Because we don’t see ourselves in the tamed, pet-like hominids that populate many a comedy or a family movie, in Tarzan’s Cheetah, or in Dunston, or Clyde or Mighty Joe Young. But we do read representations of our best and worst selves into “The Jungle Book’s” King Louie, into Caesar and Koba and Kong, into Gordy extending a bloodstained fist bump in “Nope” and into the “2001: A Space Odyssey” leader, whose tossed bone is transformed by a single cut from the first murder weapon into a spaceship hanging serenely in orbit.

All those apes are like us, because whether mute or communicative, whether highly self-aware or barely dawning in consciousness, all those apes want, and in wanting, they hint at what we want, too, or at what we once wanted, back before we got too tangled up in being human and forgot. And maybe there’s even a little more to this endless proliferation than that. “You want to make me like man. Why? To make me happy? No! To make you big doctor,” hybrid beast Noel (J. Carrol Naish) says to Dr. Renault (George Zucco) in “Dr. Renault’s Secret.” And while perhaps it is that straightforward, and we are simply megalomaniacs, it could also be that deep down, we’re just tired of being the only ones of our kind. Perhaps, as a species, we’re lonely.