'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'

Somewhere George Orwell is saying, "I told you so."

In order to foment revolution in the hearts and minds of an oppressed species, you need a few simple ingredients. First, take a group of creatures that have been systematically abused, oppressed, tortured, and anthropomorphized to within an inch of their hairy little lives, add a dash of shared communal identity and a pound of rage, and what you get is a banked fire leaping into wild life.

It worked in fine fashion in Orwell's classic analogy, Animal Farm. Extend Orwell's conceit and what you get is Animal Planet or, in other words, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Apes is one of the better political films I've seen lately, and its arrival in theatre is oddly timely, given current events.

In reaction to Spanish fascism, Orwell characterized the society in which he found himself as rife with "ceaseless arrests, censored newspapers, prowling hordes of armed police." Sound familiar?

One needs only take a glimpse at current events to know that civilization is wallpaper thin, and easily torn off the wall. With riots sprouting like wild fires around the world, it's hard not to feel like we have gone ape on many different levels. But before I go too much further in conflating current events with a fictional film, let me be blunt. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a rather goofy movie, but in amongst all the monkey business, there is something genuine. I don't think people react strongly to a film if there isn't something, however nebulous and muted, at its core. Muted is the operative word here, since so much of the film's drama rests upon a failure of communication. But before we get ahead of ourselves, how did we get here in the first place?

Remarkable drama

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a scientist by the name of Will Rodman (played by James Franco, he of multiple doctorates) manages to smudge the distinction between humans and apes into extinction. The fact that he does so with the best of intentions adds a tragic edge to the proceedings. Will's father Charles, played with lunatic weirdness by John Lithgow, is suffering from dementia and his son, being a clever little monkey, sets about creating a cure. When he tests a new drug for Alzheimer's on chimpanzees, Will discovers that the serum has the unexpected benefit of radically increasing primate intelligence.

The consequence is that demented dad ends up a clever monkey when injected with the drug. He also gets a real clever monkey by the name of Caesar. The orphaned infant of the lab's most promising female subject, Caesar is the sole survivor of Will's grand scientific experiment. When Caesar's mother is killed while defending her baby, the entire lab is shut down, and Will takes the baby chimp home in order to spare the little guy's life. In so doing, he sets in motion a chain of events that will destroy humanity. Eventually...

But before this little bundle of joy, christened after a Roman emperor, grows up to take over the world, he's pretty darn adorable. As Caesar evolves from cuddly imp into rambunctious youngster into pissed off teenager, the film gallops along, possessed of a chimp-like energy. Whatever the film's shortcomings, there is wild glee in movement that keeps things swinging along.

As Caesar's body grows, his intellectual abilities also develop exponentially. It seems his mother's artificially boosted intelligence has been passed, along with her green eyes, to her son. Soon enough, this smart ape comes to understand that he is not fit for the human society. After a bloody incident with a neighbour, Caesar is packed off to primate prison, where his real education begins.

Prejudice, cruelty, and finally, betrayal are the things he comes to understand about humanity. But it is the knowledge about the nature of power that finally brings about Caesar's rebirth as a genuine radical. Becoming a child of the revolution requires you to cut off all former loyalties; your only true family is your comrades in the conflict. This is the agonizing conclusion that Caesar comes to. The parade of pain, regret, and ultimately resolution, honed to adamantine hardness that flows across his face, makes for remarkable drama. There is genuine emotion here, and the fact that it takes place in a CGI-animated ape has some degree of poetry to it.

The moment when the film catches fire is not the one you expect. Certainly, things blow up, such as helicopters and cars, but it is the singular and often surprisingly quiet moments of self-determination that strike home. The birth of a new sense of identity and purpose is a great and glorious thing, and it comes with its own implicit drama. When the apes rise up, it's hard not to root for them.

Murderous hearts, mammalian brains

Maybe deep in our murderous human hearts, we think we've had our turn, it's time for us to go. What species shall inherit the earth? Rise of the Planet of the Pekinese, or an armed revolution of the house cats (although I suppose they already kind of rule anyway) just isn't quite the same thing. The natural inheritors are our closest cousins. People feel especially guilty about apes, probably because the genetic differences between human and ape are so negligible. The fact that we subjected them to medical experiments, circus acts and Michael Jackson is ground for a serious reprisal. We had it coming, and now our time has come.

Here is where we must come back to the real world for a moment.

A friend said not so long ago about the Vancouver riot, that even the people who clucked and fretted were probably jealous. "We all want to riot," he said. I agree with him. Simian rage is a baseline in every human brain, constrained only by a thin wash of socialization. Right beneath polite society is a mammalian brain, with all its howling appetites. If you take a walk around Granville Street on a weekend evening, you could be forgiven for thinking you had walked into a live action version of The Planet of the Apes; the primate posturing from both men and women makes you want to rub your eyes hard to make certain that we haven't taken an evolutionary step backwards. It's a thin line between us and them. Or maybe there's not really any line at all. We're all primates together, and one group insisting that by virtue of its brain power, skin colour, or amount of money, that it is superior, will eventually cause an inversion, like a mass of deep heavy water flipping over the thin layer of warmth at the top.

The ability to galvanize a mass of creatures yearning to be free requires a leader to first give voice to an ideology. Oratory is one of the fundamental skills that every revolutionary leader needs, from Robespierre to Castro to Martin Luther King. In order to lead the people, or non-people, first you must fire them up with words that sing and roar. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the drama rests upon the acquisition of speech as the greatest weapon of power. The power to say "No!" is the film's ultimate moment. Some of the astute commentary that I have read about the current rioting in London states essentially this very thing, that it is a means of finally being heard.

Of course, when you cast your mind forward and think about society in the original The Planet of the Apes film, it might give you pause. As Charlton Heston discovered, the place wasn't that great. It was an intensely hierarchal caste system in which knowledge and scientific thought was subjected to the political tenor of times. It's tempting to think that society is a giant merry-go-round; you start in one place, and if you ride the painted ponies long enough, you end up exactly where you began. Every movement that topples the old rotten world, riddled and brittle with corruption, in order to bring about a new world order, eventually has its bright and shiny revolution tarnished. And the painted ponies, or maybe that should be monkeys, spin round and round.