Ape vs. Man

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This summer’s non-superhero blockbusters are by and large a paean to anthropomorphism. Though if your options are talking robots, talking turtles, or apes eager to read a trade paperback of Charles Burns’s Black Hole, you’d do well to go with the comic book-loving apes and never look back. It isn’t “Battlestar Galactica,” but with humanity mostly destroyed and attempting to rebuild a home on what is, for all intents and purposes, a “foreign” planet, this franchise could be the space opera stand-in of your J. J. Abrams-weary dreams.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens with soundbites of distressing global news broadcasts. An animated map charts the worldwide spread of Simian Flu, an airborne pathogen created by scientists to enhance ape intelligence that accidentally wiped out mankind. Individuals have a 1 in 500 chance of survival though containment seems unlikely. This initial sequence is similar to that of Dawn’s blockbuster neighbor to the north Edge of Tomorrow, and serves to bring viewers who may have skipped 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes up to speed with our imminent extinction.

Ten years have passed since we last saw Caesar (Andy Serkis) claim Muir Woods as the home of enlightened apekind. The first shot set in the present is an extreme close up of his eyes, minutes before a hunt, that could have been plucked from the cutting room floor of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Adult apes track and chase live game as a group, relying on each other for protection from predators, while young apes remain at the homestead, learning the alphabet and the first law of ape robotics: ape not kill ape.

As for the humans, Dawn would have you believe the only people in San Francisco who survived the outbreak were genetically immune Tea Party supporters and Jason Clarke’s family (Keri Russell and Kodi Smit-McPhee). This film, like its predecessor, does not hide its disdain for the intolerant sectors of mankind. We made this bed, it says. And dammit, we’re going to lie with our uncharged iPads in it.

Frequently, Dawn’s humans are portrayed as frightened, gun-wielding children willing to slay the unfamiliar without a second thought. Gary Oldman plays Dreyfus, a man who read the words wrong and concluded with great responsibility came great need for sustainable power at any cost. He is the de facto leader of the human colony, whose crowded marketplace and heavily clotheslined sky make it appear like a live-action rendering of Agrabah.

Unfortunately, the colony is almost out of fuel. Malcolm, played by Jason Clarke, is therefore tasked with restoring a small dam located on ape territory. The goal is to generate enough hydroelectric power to maintain some semblance of human civilization. What follows is a zig-zag progression/regression of trust between humans and apes. While Malcolm and Caesar gradually develop a healthy rapport, individual members on either side grow increasingly distrustful of one another.

Unknown to the apes, Dreyfus has granted Malcolm a mere three days in which to fix the dam under the threat of launching an all-out military offensive should he fail to return. During that time, the film is often free of speech, with the majority of apes depending on sign language to communicate.

Among the many fascinating aspects of ape culture is the organic nature of its sonic reality. Theirs is a technologically devoid society. The apes have grunting and chest beating; we have strategically placed CDs by The Band. They have the slap of ape palm against tree branch; we have the rumble of automobiles and the clack of gunfire. It all seems so natural to them, existence. When a human member of the dam repair party confesses what he finds terrifying about the apes — that they don’t need power, they don’t need heat, that these advantages make them superior to man — the effect is more than a little disquieting. Dawn forces viewers to grapple with the uneasy anachronism of accepting superiority in the creature from which they evolved.

Some critics have compared the film’s quest toward peace to conflicts in the Middle East. Cited is the struggle between people who have lost everything and are desperate to hold on to what sliver remains and apes who have gained everything and are loath to lose it. However, this parallel would suggest $170 million was spent on a film in which humanity is Hamas, fitted with its own suicide bomber, demanding a right of return. Or ISIS staking claim to the Mosul Dam. While this train of thought leads to endlessly entertaining possibilities, it’s clear the humans are far from the heroes of this film– they are barely the humans; desperation has left so little intact.

To that end, while Dawn is eager to establish Caeser and Malcolm as peace-driven leaders of their factions, it develops its antagonists with equal fervor. Koba, a laboratory ape subjected to experimentation, cannot see past his former abusers and longs to destroy all humans. Both Koba and Dreyfus are easy enough to understand: If you can take something using violence — planetary dominance, in this case — why waste time figuring out whether now is the right moment to do so?

Their differences contribute as much to the deterioration of ape-human relations as their similarities. Human interaction frequently takes place via intimate one-on-one exchanges. Delicate, isolated scenes involving Malcolm and Dreyfus, Malcolm and his wife, Malcolm and his son. Conversely, virtually all ape conversations are carried out before the entire group. This communal forum serves as setting to one of the most haunting ape-to-ape encounters in the film. When Caesar informs his clan that the humans will finish their work on the dam and then leave, Koba, confounded, points to one scar on his body after the other saying the words, “Human. Work. Human. Work.”

Once Koba discovers Dreyfus’s plan to exterminate the apes he organizes a raid of the human colony. His vehemence is a thing of wonder, culminating in a 360-degree tank turret POV worthy of prestige season. All expected action tropes are present and accounted for in Dawn’s 130 minutes. The storming of a stronghold. A beautifully filmed stealth mission in a collapsing house. A final battle in a compromised structure. Primary characters falling to their deaths. There’s even the chance, 20 years later, to once more hear Gary Oldman yell the word “EVERYONE,” though this time into a megaphone. What makes Dawn different from its blockbuster ilk is the ability to craft a wide range of emotional effects due to its moral ambiguity. Director Matt Reeves, a man committed to the z-axis of his visuals, consistently steers the audience away from the binary of cheering for man or ape. This is Caeser’s film. It ends as it started: on an extreme close up of the ape’s eyes. We do as he says, and for now that is follow.

 

What is the Ape to Man?

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s alter ego, Zarathustra, answers: “A laughing-stock, a thing of shame.”

Chernin Entertainment and 20th Century Fox answer: “About $170 million.” That’s the budget for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, almost double the price tag of its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which grossed $176M in 2011.

Or I should say its most immediate predecessor. The original Planet of the Apes was released in 1968 (with a quaint budget under $6M and gross of $26M). It was based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel La Planète des singes, but that’s not where the evolutionary ladder begins either.

Rise ends with mad scientist James Franco’s creation, a genetically altered super-ape, escaping to the wilds of the Redwood forest to father his own race. That’s how Victor Frankenstein’s creature wanted to end his origin story too. Either way, the creature is humanity’s first “arch-enemy,” the term he uses when Victor refuses to manufacture him a mate. The no-longer-mad doctor fears “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”

Mary Shelley’s evolved imagination was pure fantasy in 1817, but Darwin made the terror real for Victorians. H. G. Wells named humanity’s predator the “Coming Beast,” describing “some now humble creature” that “Nature is, in unsuspected obscurity, equipping . . . with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance, or destruction, to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away.”
 

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That fullness of time arrives regularly in Hollywood. If not apes, then zombies, aliens or androids are always propagating and making humanity’s condition precarious and terror filled. Some scientists take that last threat, the robopocalypse, seriously.

Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk worries about the evolutionary threat of artificial intelligence: “we risk yielding control over the planet to intelligences that are simply indifferent to us . . . just ask gorillas how it feels to compete for resources with the most intelligent species—the reason they are going extinct is not (on the whole) because humans are actively hostile towards them, but because we control the environment in ways that are detrimental to their continuing survival.”

That’s also the plot of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The super-virus that decimated the human population between films is one of those unintended consequences popular in mad scientist plots. Mira Sorvino accidentally breeds an army of six-foot cockroaches after ending a cockroach-spread epidemic in Mimic. Emma Thompson cures cancer in I Am Legend, and next thing vampires rule Manhattan. James Franco’s genetic tampering would have turned everyone into super-geniuses. Or at least everyone who could afford his corporation’s new designer drug. If they’d had a chance to market it, the sequel would have been called Rise of the Planet of the Ubermensch.

No new breed ever cares about its predecessor. “And just the same shall man be to the Superman,” continues Zarathustra, “a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.” And yet Superman and his species of superheroes were born to battle such Coming Beasts. The Fantastic Four kept a subterranean world of monsters from rising up in their first issue. Atlanteans would have swept humanity away if the Human Torch hadn’t doused Namor’s Golden Age attacks. Blade is still staunching the destructive appetites of our vampire competitors. Every comic book is a survival of the fittest, ending with a superman at the top of the food chain.

But screenwriters Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver include no super-saviors in Dawn. The hero type is usually a literal or metaphorical cross-breed who absorbs the threat of the racial other and reverses it to save humanity. Thus cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger thwarts Skynet, and the Man of Steel thwarts General Zod’s Kryptonian invasion. Dawn would need an ape-man like Tarzan, but instead it’s the super-ape Caesar who was raised by humans and saves his people from us.

Which is a pretty compelling reversal of the formula. The supervillain is Koba, an ape so scared (literally and metaphorically) by humans that his hatred turns him into one. By the end, Caesar says he’s no longer an ape. He’s been completely absorbed by human hatred.

But there’s one flaw in the film’s evolutionary theory. It could have been titled Dawn of the Planet of the Patriarchy. I understand that actual ape culture is male-dominated, but these are scifi apes. They can talk and drive tanks. Surely there’s room for females somewhere in the hierarchy. The lone female ape character, Caesar’s jewelry-wearing wife, lies around giving birth and needing antibiotics. But would every female uber-ape accept the role of stay-at-home mom while the males go off to war?

The human cast is worse. Keri Russell, the lone female Home sapiens character, spends the movie saying things like, “I should come along in case someone gets hurt and needs a nurse!” She also prepares and serves food for her male campers. I was a part-time stay-at-home dad for years and still do a share of cooking and Band-Aid applying for my campers. But if faced with an ape-ocalypse, my wife and I would divvy up the guns too.

No intelligent species can ignore the skill sets of half its population. Not if the species wants to survive. And the humans in Dawn won’t. If you missed the first movie, there was a brief mention of a space mission to Mars. Those astronauts are scheduled to return (minus Charlton Heston) in July 2016, and I think we all know what Darwin is plotting for them.
 

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