2 Apes 2 Planets: On Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

The recent Planet of the Apes films can be defined by two questions: one internal to the films themselves, to their own universe, albeit with allegorical dimensions, and the other external, to their status as commodities in the culture industry. The first question is what is the nature of the conflict between humans and apes? Is it a natural conflict, a conflict between two species for domination, or is it a political conflict, a conflict between different ways of living. The second question is will audiences watch and identify with apes, with CGI characters, rather than humans played by human actors.

Kingdom of the Planet Apes pushes the second question the furthest while continuing to offer a muddled response to the first question. With respect to the second question it is possible to see each film as moving from human to animal. The first, Rise begins as a story of a scientist trying find a cure for Alzheimers only to eventually become the story of Caesar, the ape leader; the second film, Dawn was as much a story of a human community trying to restore civilization after the plague as it was as an emergent ape society; it is only in the third movie, War that we get a full shift to the apes, with a human colonel emerging only as an antagonist and enemy that we only see in the final act. Each of the previous films had a cast to at least draw in an audience who might not see a movie of CGI apes, with James Franco (unfortunately) playing the scientist in the first film, Gary Oldman and Kerri Russell playing the human survivors in the second, and Woody Harrelson chewing up scenery as the colonel in the third. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes does have a surprise human star showing up in the third act, but what is striking is how much of the film is about the apes themselves. It is nearly halfway through the film before the first human actor says a line. The shift from human protagonists to apes is now complete. It remains to be seen if audiences with embrace this pop posthumanism, shifting their attention to apes as the central characters. In some sense with CGI the forces of production have gotten ahead of existing social relations: it is possible to make a film with dynamic apes, lizards, and robots, but for the most part screenwriters, even AI assisted ones, insist on giving us stories of the people who care for an contain apes and giant lizards. 

After a brief scene following the death of Caesar the film begins several generations later in a world apparently entirely dominated by apes. We first meet Noa and his friends, a group of apes belonging to what will be called the eagle clan. They are engaged in an important ritual, stealing eggs of the eagles that they will bond with and use to hunt.  The use of the term clan here will be significant, in that this first group of apes are presented as more or less in a tribal society, as noble savages. I recent read The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanous Geroulanos. One of the striking things about the book is that he reveals how old and persistent the three stage history of humanity is--the one that divides human history into savages, barbarians, and civilization. As Geroulanis writes, 

"One triad was already in wide circulation when Napoleon was exiled: savage, barbarian, and civilized. It was less a three stage theory than a group of two duets. The first duet contrasted the civilized to the rest. Civilized Europeans had stepped up from the rest of the world, and so perhaps had some Asian societies. The second duet, savage versus barbarian, allowed interpreters to compare the rest. Those cultures deemed more advanced than abject savages would be categorized as barbaric. This approached seethed with racism: the French biologist Georges Cuvier insisted, all the way to his death in 1832, on identifying savage with "Negro or Ethiopian," barbarian ("stationary") with "yellow or Mongolian," and civilized ("progressive") with "white or Caucasian."

A different triad emerged in the 1830s in Nordic prehistoric archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, worked as a curator at the Copenhagen Museum. In the 1810s, he began to organize ancient tools, pottery, and weapons by their basic material: stone, bronze, and iron. Once he published his approach, it became common to divid early human history between Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age...

...A third notable triad emerged in the 1820s out of Henri de Saint-Simon's ideology of industrialization. The idea was that civilization moved from a theological stage through a metaphysical to finally a positive (meaning scientific) stage. The old worldview had been mere conjuncture. Astronomy, then physiology, then even psychology had slowly grounded knowledge in observation, and the theology of the past had collapsed. This triad worked well with the other two: the three schemes of three told the same story of progress from a theological, savage antiquity of stones through metaphysical, bronze or barbarian times and toward a civilized, positive age of iron."

This long history is in some sense one of reification in which a theory, a way of explaining or making sense of the world, is eventually treated as fact. That is why one sees it appearing again and again, with different savages, barbarians and different ideas of civilization. As the passage above indicates, it had both its materialist and idealist variation, the first focused on tools and technology, the second on concepts and cosmology. It has even been updated into third, second, and first worlds in the twentieth century. Thus it is not surprising we find this same schema in the ape films as well.

Noa are savages. These are apes who have mastered fire and the domestication of other animals, but the latter is lived almost as much as symbiotic relation as it is domestication. Their rituals and clothes, the feathers they wear, suggests a religious worship of the eagles as well. Noa and his clan are eventually besieged by the barbarians, a group of apes, including gorillas, who are both searching for humans, and, as we learn later, looking for more workers for their grand imperial project. The barbarian stage is represented in this film by the ability of the apes to dominate and control other apes. The Bronze age is skipped more or less, and we go straight to the iron age of electrified cattle prods. Such a technological leap is made possible by the post-apocalyptic setting. It is not a matter of discovering bronze or iron, but of rediscovering the technologies that humanity used to control animals (and humans) in the past. These apes are ruled by Proximus Caesar, an ape who continues the title, but not necessarily the legacy of the original Caesar.  This domination is in service of Caesar's grand plan, an attempt to crack through a giant silo constructed in the last days of humanity.  A container storing all of the technology of civilization. This silo contains all of the technology necessary to solidify Proximus Caesar's rule over the apes, it has guns and tanks. 

Noa, Mae, Raka

Where does this leave the third term, civilization? In some sense we get it twice. First, as Noa begins his quest to find his clan and liberate them from the barbarians, we meet Raka an orangutan. Raka has maintained knowledge of the past world rather than its weapons. Reading books. Raka continues the teachings of Caesar, the idea of apes living together, of ape not killing ape, a philosophy which also extends to peaceful coexistence with humans. The logic of the Apes films continues to be one splits into two. Two ape civilizations and two human civilizations in Dawn, with Caesar and Koba representing two futures for the apes, and the two human civilizations being represented by Malcolm (Jason Clarke) who wants to coexist with the apes and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) who wants to exterminate the brutes. In the third film, War the division was between the apes the sided with Caesar and those that sided with the humans. Now this division continues into the legacy of Caesar himself. Proximus Caesar continues the idea of Caesars power, bringing the slogan "apes together strong" back to the fascist roots suggested by image of sticks bundled together in the first film. Raka continues the philosophy of Caesar, even invoking the strange origin story of an ape raised by humans, as an ape who wanted to live with humans. The film seems to suggest that civilization begins not with symbols, "the symbols have meaning" as Raka explains a book to Noa, but when those symbols become  contested and interpreted differently.

Noa and Raka are soon joined by a human they refer to as Nova. Raka calls all humans "Nova" a nod to the second film and to the original film in the series. It is eventually revealed that Nova is not like the other humans, who live as feral beasts, she can speak and her name is actually Mae. Spoiler Alert: Mae is not an astronaut who crashed landed on this planet as some on the internet have speculated. I must admit that i thought that such an idea would be interesting, especially now that we have spent so much time with apes it would make sense to flip the original story. Tell it not from the perspective of the astronaut who is shocked to find out that it "was Earth all along," but from the apes who would be shocked to learn that humans can talk. The Planet of the Apes films keep remaking and reinventing the earlier prequels and sequels, borrowing elements from Conquest, Battle, and even Beneath, but never quite approaching the original plot of Planet. Mae is part of a group of humans who have survived not only the first round of the simian flu, the genetically created disease that wiped out most of humanity, but its second mutation as well, the disease that has left most of humanity as mute beasts. Noa, Raka, and Mae join up and travel to find Proximis Caesar's Rome by the ocean, a community dedicated to his task of breaching the silo. They travel together but it is not clear if they have the same goals. Noa wants to liberate his clan, but it is unclear what Mae wants with the sile. 

This brings us to the second question, that of the conflict between ape and humanity. The film shows us that the apes are divided politically as much as they are unified biologically. The apes of Proximus' kingdom and Noa's clan live differently, believe differently, and think differently, even the two followers of Caesar, Raka and Proximus, are sharply divided.  Raka interprets Caesar's message to be one of unity and harmony, "Ape Shall Not Kill Ape," while Proximus interprets as one of power, "Apes Together Strong." We also get a division within humanity, Proximus has his own captive human, Trevathan (William H. Macy), who reads books and collects knowledge for his king. Like the gorillas in War he has aligned himself with what he sees as the dominant species, with his best chance for survival. The war is over and the apes have won. Trevathan has picked the winning side, and in doing so gets a comfortable place to live, running water, and food. Mae's allegiance with Noa and Raka, we eventually learn, is only temporary and opportunistic, she is part of a community of humans that still is trying to restore their dominance on Earth. That is her real reason for traveling to the silo. Humans and apes are both divided, but differently. The apes are divided between two different social structures, the small tribe of the eagle clan and the kingdom of Proximus, while the humans are divided in terms of how they understand their best chances for survival. 

 If apes and humans can be divided amongst themselves, split between those that live with nature and those that dominate other apes, then their interspecies conflict would suggest that any conflict they would have with humanity would be political as well. Whether or not apes and humans could co-exist would then be a political question, a question of political structure and not natural destiny. The films can never quite commit to this, and return again and again to the idea that conflict between ape and human is a species conflict determined by nature. The tagline of Rise, "Evolution becomes Revolution" already situated all of the films in the place where biological conflict became political conflict.  Kingdom in some sense reverses this, Proximus states at one point that the weapons and technology in the silo will help him take the next step in evolution, by that he really means solidify his kingdom and the apes domination of the planet. The presence of humans, humans with the capacity for speech, for deception and coordination, means that the apes' dominance is still not certain, could still be contested. 

As much as one could fault the films for vacillating between two ideas of conflict, of war--one which presents it as artificial, a product of our social relations, and the other that presents it as natural, part of the very existence of our species--it is worth noting, as Geroulanos argues in his book, that the very same vacillation around the question of war, as natural or artificial, defines much of the history of speculation on the concept. One divides into two is not just for apes. It is worth noting, that in the first film, the original Planet of the Apes, Taylor (Charlton Heston) wonders if humanity still wages war "on his fellow man," and searches for something better out there, some life beyond war and conflict. It is not clear if this is a search for a different species, for some creature not defined by conflict, or a different social order, some utopia. 

The film suggests that the conflict between humans and apes will continue into future films, but it is unclear if that will be presented as a natural conflict between species or an artificial conflict between different political systems, and if so, will humans and apes continue to be divided, as one divides into two, into different political systems. Will the apes victory be an evolution, the replacement of humans by a dominant species, stronger and just as intelligent, or a revolution, the rise of a new kingdom? Only the eventual sequel will tell.