Planet of the Apes

Stephen Nottingham

(Director: Tim Burton, 2001)

Pierre Boulle's satire Planet of the Apes (1963) explored themes relating to racial intolerance, oppression, and animal experimentation within a story of alternative evolution, in which apes enslave humans. Franklin J. Schaffner successfully filmed the story in 1967, in a manner that resonated with the times, particularly regarding the civil rights movement. There followed four sequels and a TV series, with diminishing returns. In Tim Burton's literal-minded adaptation, the emphasis is on inter-species interaction, although slavery is still present as a theme. Much has happened in terms of animal rights, primate research, and the conservation of diminishing ape populations, in recent years. However, this film has little contemporary resonance and has nothing new to say about human-ape, or indeed human-human, relationships.

Planet of the Apes (2001) opens in the near-future year of 2029. The space-station Oberon with its crew of humans, and laboratory chimpanzees, is hit by an electro-magnetic storm. Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) takes out a one-man exploration pod, after his favourite chimp (Pericles) has gone missing in a similar pod during the storm. He travels forward in time and lands on a planet where humans are a primitive underclass ruled over by apes. He is captured, along with a group of native humans, and taken to a slave-trading orang utan, Limbo (Paul Giamatti). A chimpanzee family, at the insistence of their human rights activist daughter Ari (Helen Bonham Carter), buys Leo as a domestic slave. Ari's father Sandar (David Warner) is a liberal senator on the ape's council and as such is in conflict with the aggressive chimpanzee General Thade (Tim Roth), who is intent on total repression of the human population. Leo escapes from the ape city with a group of native humans, Ari and a warrior gorilla deserter. Thade with an army, led by the gorilla commander Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), track them down through the wilderness.

In addition to human actors in ape costume, real chimps are used in this movie. This is a problematic, because of the aesthetic contrast and for the fact that chimps are used at all. Real apes had previously only appeared in the last few shots of the third of the original film series (Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1971). The ape costumes in the new film are convincing and the actors incorporate ape movements into their repertoire (more so than in previous adaptations), but the apes of the future resemble the humans, particularly of their world, far more than the real-life chimps. This works against the premise of the film. Beyond this, there are ethical questions raised by the use of performing animals for entertainment, and this applies to circuses, adverts and motion pictures. A number of pressure groups now exist that campaign against such demeaning treatment of apes. In the UK, at least, performing chimps also carry unfortunate connotations with tea parties and tacky advertisements for said beverage. The movie must be read in the light of the questionable decision to use real chimpanzees in this way at the start of the twenty-first century, particularly in a movie in which their inferiority to humans is so defiantly assumed.

In Planet of the Apes, chimp "actors" play specially-trained animals that are sent out in explorer pods from the U.S. Air Force spaceship in times of danger, instead of human astronauts. In reality, the U.S. military acquired 65 baby chimpanzees from Africa in the 1950s and did experiments on them at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico as part of the space program. The chimps were used in experiments to examine the physiological effects of space flight on the primate (monkey, ape and human) body, including studies involving weightlessness, sleep deprivation and high-velocity impacts. Three of the chimps were trained specifically for actual space travel. In 1961, Ham was rocketed beyond the Earth's atmosphere (three months prior to Alan B. Shepard becoming the first U.S. astronaut to travel in space), while Enos orbited the Earth (months before John Glenn's historic orbital flight). Both these chimps have since died, but Minnie, who underwent similar training, is still alive at 40. The remaining Holloman chimps and their descendants have recently been at the centre of a major custody battle, now that they have retired from the Air Force. Animal rights activists and primatologists wanted the chimps to be allowed to live peacefully in a retirement colony for the rest of their lives, but scientists from the Coulston Foundation of Alamogordo, New Mexico wanted to continue using them for biomedical research. The Coulston Foundation, who have used the chimps for research since the 1970s, has been accused by animal rights groups of abusing the chimps. They have been charged with 24 violations of the Federal Animal Welfare Act for failing to properly care for them. In November 1999, the Coulston Foundation was awarded ownership of the chimps.

The U.S. Air Force and NASA stopped using chimps for space-related experiments in the 1970s. It is unclear why they should have been re-instated into the space program in Planet of the Apes. This is one factor that makes the film feel firmly rooted in the past, as if it were an historical film of the original book, content to resonate more with the 1960s than with the present day. The retro design of the rockets and the general look of the film support this contention. The apes are stereotypes that should have been pensioned off years ago. The warlike gorillas, for instance, bear no relation to the reality of mountain gorillas now familiar from many documentary films. If it was not for the laughable device of seeing a time display running forwards (fast), we might think we were going back in time because values from the past, not the present or future, pervade this film.

The exception within Burton's generally nostalgic vision is the way a program of genetic modification is alluded to for the chimps, in an attempt to make the scenario seem more contemporary. In reality, a rhesus monkey called ANDi became the world's first transgenic primate in 2001. He was genetically modified as a foetus, with a gene from a jellyfish that should have made him appear luminescent green. Although the novel gene resides in his genome, it failed to turn him green or make him glow in the dark (many other organisms, such as fish and rabbits have been made to glow in this manner using this common marker gene). In Planet of the Apes, the genetically modified chimps are treated a bit like young children in kindergarten, being taught elaborate games. From this, we might assume that the chimps have been modified with "genes for intelligence" (human ones?), which raise their "intelligence" making them better suited to be "astro chimps". The notion that genes alone can be added to enhance complex behavioural traits is itself becoming outdated. That the apes are modified by humans to become more like human has repercussions for the plot but, like all the good ideas thrown into the mix in this movie, it is ultimately not sufficiently developed to be very interesting.

Planet of the Apes in a number of other respects resembles an historical movie. In the original book, it is Ulysse who encounters the monkey world. The new film also takes on the form of an Odyssean saga, with a hero who is a stranger far from home in a strange yet oddly familiar world. The chimp's names and spacecraft symbols are also Greek. However, this film soon steers a course toward ancient Rome. The exchanges between General Thade and Sandar echo those between Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton in Spartacus. The slave-trader Limbo fulfils the Peter Ustinov role, while the actionman Leo might as well be fed to the lions as any other pack of animals. However, he learns a few gladiatorial tricks and emerges unscathed. In that Gladiator (2000) closely resembles Spartacus, it also has much in common with Planet of the Apes.

Romans kept slaves and so do the apes. The film can therefore shy away from the fact that slavery is also a more recent form of human interaction. At times, Planet of the Apes cannot decide whether animal rights or human rights are the "issue". The film has no real committment to either, however, and becomes confused as it loads on the subtexts. When striving for a human rights subtext, the film becomes problematic. Although we learn that slavery is bad, the film ultimately opts for ape-human segregation and no miscegenation. Leo and Ari know they can never live together and this is never really challenged. The need to make the film acceptable to the moral majority sinks any attempt to unite these "races". The caste system amongst the apes also looks suspect, with the pale chimps (Thade, Ari) cast as intellectuals, the dark gorillas (Attar) cast as warriors, and the orang utans (Limbo) cast as cunning traders.

At the heart of the film, therefore, is a love story that cannot be consummated. The love story is between Leo and the chimp Ari, and not between the astronaut and the tribal valley girl Daena (Estella Warren). A much more interesting film is trying to get out here, but it is not developed because this is a major studio picture. The inter-species romance is nipped in the bud. Ari is destined to sacrifice everything for the man she loves and be left in the lurch. It is really her story. As the romance cannot be played out, the humans, including the dim-witted Leo, are marginalized, while the more interesting interactions between the apes are foregrounded. Bonham Carter's Ari and Tim Roth's impressively over-the-top Thade dominate the film.

Bonham Carter's performance is fascinating, as she seemingly alternates between ape and human behavioural characteristics at whim, and through her the film's potentially most interesting theme, of how species treat each other, is developed. The writer of the key animal activist text Animal Liberation (1975), Peter Singer, has argued that since many animals have a mental life comparable to that of human infants (or the mentally retarded or senile), we should only experiment on animals if we are willing to do such experiments on humans of the same mental age; to do any differently constitutes speciesism. To illustrate this idea of equality, a world can be imagined where apes treat us like we currently treat them. Ari is the animal rights activist contemplating Leo in this scenario. However, equating the suffering of animals with humans is highly controversial and is far from the mainstream view. Most people would agree that there have been good rational reasons over the past hundred years or so for using animals in biomedical research, for example, to develop vaccines. Curiously, the film avoids the vivisection scenes of the original story and films, and while ape scientists are mentioned there are none in evidence. The film does not come close to really engaging with the issue.

The grouping of disparate species (chimpanzees, gorillas and orang utans) as generic "apes" is probably worth commenting on. These species have no natural interaction, and have unique interactions (particularly in the case of chimps) with humans. Gorillas are now considered as two separate species (Gorilla gorilla and Gorilla beringei), divided into five subspecies, living in a discontinuous range in nine central African countries. Orang utans exist only as relic populations in Borneo and Sumatra, in SE Asia, and have recently been reclassified as two species (Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelli). Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) live in around twenty countries in West and Central Africa, and are generally considered to comprise four subspecies. It is a shame that the highly-sexed bonobo (Pan paniscus), a separate chimp species, is not represented at all in Planet of the Apes. It might have spiced things up no end if Ari was a bonobo. Leo Davidson tells the apes of the future that on Earth, the great apes have been wiped out in the wild and survive only in zoos and scientific breeding programs, such as the genetic modification program on his spacecraft. By 2029 this could well come to pass. Today, only around 15,000 orang utans, and only about 325 mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), exist in the wild.

One thing the apes in the film do object to is being called "monkeys". This is an insult; much graver it seems than when humans call each other monkeys. Monkeys are just above humans on their family tree, we are told. However, this might just be another of this film's lame jokes, which tend to detract from any drama or coherence that is being generated. In any case, how do these apes know what monkeys are? No other species, apart from apes and humans, are seen on this world. If, as we must assume from the plot's creation myth, the apes all evolved from a small group of chimps, and we see no other ancestral species, then are we to believe that gorillas and orang utans come from chimps? Even turning this on its head and putting humans on top, it is a misreading of evolution. No modern primate evolved from any another, because humans and ape species merely share a common ancestor.

The white male human assumes leadership and arrogantly states, "Let's teach these apes about evolution", but no-one will learn much about evolution from this film. Leo's interpretation of evolution as a predetermined progression in which Homo sapiens will always come out on top, every time the evolutionary scenario is re-run, is just not tenable. The latest scientific consensus is that the Earth really was a "planet of the apes", over eight million years ago, but that changed when a chance event led to a mass extinction. Forests became grasslands and most ape species of the time disappeared. A mutation led to bipedal development, allowing one species to walk upright and put its hands to full use. Brain size subsequently increased and modern man emerged from one branch of this lineage. Mankind is subject to the same evolutionary forces as every other creature on the planet, but mankind got lucky. If evolution was to be re-run, with different environmental and mutational chance events occurring, then the outcome would be far from predictable. But then Planet of the Apes is not alone in peddling evolutionary misinformation. Recent Hollywood cinema has been distinctly anti-evolution (e.g. Disney's Dinosaur, 2000), as a sop to the Christian fundamentalists and creationists of the American mid-west and bible belt who are important for those opening weekend ticket sales. It makes for dumb science fiction and the anti-science tone leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Technology in Planet of the Apes is in the hands of mankind, in the form of genetic engineering and guns. There is no doubt that technological might is right. The apes, though dominant, have not sequenced their genome or made their own firearms. Their superiority is therefore in doubt. National Rifle Association (NRA) strongman Charlton Heston (the stranded astronaut of the original film) turns up as Thade's dying father, lamenting mankind's weaponry. However, we know that this movie, like most Hollywood output, is in love with its guns and violence.

The screenwriters of Planet of the Apes (William Brayles Jr., Laurence Konner and Mark D. Rosenthal) take on some weighty themes, but during the narrative these clash with each other, rendering them incoherent. Some of the narrative confusion could well be explained in the inevitable sequel, for example, have apes on Earth also evolved rapidly due to genetic modification to usurp their betters? (Don't you just hate films that are not self-contained)? However, it is the lack of clarity at the core of this film and its inability to come to terms with either Boulle's parable or the issues it raises that is most disappointing. Ultimately, this film is an insult to the intelligence of both apes and humans alike.

© Copyright Stephen Nottingham, 2001.