I know Adam is all excited about the upcoming Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a prequel which explains how the apes came to power, but I think this is a bad idea that ruins what’s so great about the original movie and its themes. Plus Adam is an idiot, so therefore anything he likes is automatically deemed stupid.
At the end of the original movie, astronaut George Taylor stumbles upon the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and realizes that he was on Earth all along, and the apes are in control now. Now tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole point of that twist to show how humans wiped themselves off the face of the planet (mostly) and apes evolved to take their place? Isn’t the whole point of the movie to make us more aware of the consequences of our actions? That we blew up the Statue of Liberty and turned the Earth into a wasteland through (what I can only assume) nuclear war.
This idea is made even more poignant when you remember that in an earlier scene the ape Cornelius reads from the sacred scrolls:
“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.”
See? We kill ourselves through war and greed and lust for power. Now Rise of the Planet of the Apes is trying to tell us that we made apes super-smart and they overthrow us. So what was a lesson in humanity has turned into Deep Blue Sea with apes. The fault is no longer with humanity, but instead a few scientists who made a really bad decision. Where is the lesson in that? Fear science? Is that the lesson we should be taking out of this?
I will reserve further judgement until I see the movie itself, but the trailers seem to make the plot very clear. We didn’t doom ourselves through war, a few scientists doomed us all through science.
