When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver wrote the script for Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) trying to revive a universe that Tim Burton had left in a catatonic state with his 2001 remake, they found a promising key: the deus ex machina that unleashed The evolutionary leap of a species that claimed its status as a first-degree relative of human beings was an experimental drug against Alzheimer’s that improved brain synapses and memory functioning. Caesar thus acquires his rival intelligence skills through the exercise of memory and the use of language, two complex mechanisms that contribute to the birth of a species that rivals the human in strategy and problem solving, but also in management. of grievance (resentment) and expectations (fear). And therefore, as we saw in the sequels they wrote – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) – a species driven into violent conflict. The trilogy by Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves thus composed a vehicle for the theses of the essayist David Rieff in Against Memory, by linking the memory of the grievance with the wars to come. Perhaps that is the reason why both those sequels and this Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) are an essay on the social, political and religious evolution of human proto-societies: the weight of chiefdoms, the power exercised from the strength and cunning of war to the weight of myths, in this case, the missing Caesar, father of the simian civilization. That of the apes is therefore the story of a civilization built with the purpose of avoiding the errors of human civilization and that is dragged again and again to repeat them. The ape kingdom is therefore an Israel condemned to repeat every sin committed by its enemies.

The original Planet of the Apes (1968), by Franklin J. Schaffner, was such a success in its day that Fox immediately decided to turn it into a series. To a large extent, there were two factors that explain the commotion caused by the film released in the middle of the space race, in the midst of political revolts and shortly before man’s arrival on the moon, and neither of them were in Pierre Boulle’s literary original. : the masks used to turn the actors into apes, designed by John Chambers – and whose power is the measure that today’s digital masks are a carbon copy of those latex prostheses –, and the outcome of the original film, recognized as one of the most impressive in the history of cinema. That recumbent Statue of Liberty – which turns the Planet of the Apes into a prophecy and not an adventure – is a discovery of cinema, since Boulle developed the fantasy of it on a planet of the star Betelgeuse.

To this day, it is still debated whose idea it was to close the film with that circularity in which Colonel George Taylor (Charlton Heston) returns to the starting point. Producer Arthur Jacobs takes credit for the idea, while co-writer Rod Sterling, although he preferred the ending of the book, thinks he remembers that the idea was his. Sterling had worked on the series On the Edge, so he was well trained in unexpected outcomes.

The first sequel to that hit, Return to the Planet of the Apes (1970), by Ted Post, extended the original story from its end to an even more incontestable and heartbreaking outcome, the definitive destruction of the planet, so that the three films that What followed were orchestrated as sequels: the apes Zira and Cornelius travel to the 20th century, like a Terminator, with the sole purpose of avoiding that disastrous apocalypse. Of course, the arc of which the very presence of the two time travelers is a catalyst pushes the story towards the already known ending, because the undercurrent of the ape stories is none other than the indomitable power with which the fight Against what is feared it makes us pounce on it and is the ultimate reason it happens. That is the ultimate vertigo of history, so present in the West of these times: that the only way to escape the vertigo with which the abyss summons us is to rush into it.