On Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Rise of the Planet of the Apes:
A Movie Review
by John David Ebert
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an entertaining, if not particularly inventive, prequel to the Planet of the Apes franchise. And when I say that the film is not inventive I mean that it unfolds in exactly the way the viewer anticipates that it will. Hence: a genetically engineered virus that is designed to reverse Alzeheimer’s is tested out on chimps but has the side effect of increasing their intelligence, whereas the virus is lethal to human beings. The apes go crazy, break out, take over civilization and the virus begins to spread throughout the human population. Just like the trailer shows us. No surprises. The writing is competent, but a little bland and not particularly imaginative.
In other words, about the best that we can expect from Hollywood today. Technical efficiency, yes; innovation, no. Hollywood, these days, is like the Japanese technology industry: capable of mass producing other people’s ideas with speed and efficiency, but not capable of coming up with anything original.
So you won’t regret spending your ten bucks on this film, but on the other hand, you’re not going to come out of the theater on a cognitive high that is the celluloid equivalent of sniffing nitrous oxide.
Now then: with the mechanics out of the way, we can proceed to analyze the myth of apes taking over the world. Just where does this myth come from and what does it mean?
The oldest version of it is apparently found in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana in which the demon-slaying hero Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, is aided in his task of rescuing his beloved Sita from captivity by a demon king when an army of talking monkeys led by Hanuman agrees to build a massive bridge across the sea from India to Sri Lanka in order for them to cross over into the fortress where Sita is held captive. In that myth, as William Irwin Thompson has remarked, the human evolutionary project was being stabilized by the mammalian brain against the astral infection of the soul by demonic beings threatening to hi-jack the human evolutionary experiment.
In the present scenario, though, the fear is not that apes might take over the world, because they already have. Earth itself is, indeed, a planet of the apes, for the human animal is nothing more than a fancy, exotic type of ape who has overrun the planet and taken control of it. We are the apes who have overrun the planet, disrupted its ecosystems, destabilized its biosphere and poisoned its rivers, lakes and streams. It is the funny monkey who has captured and surrounded the earth — Sita incarnate — with a cloud of greenhouse gases that are proceeding to melt its polar ice caps and submerge all its coastal cities. In about one hundred years, all the climate scientists are increasingly agreeing, our cities are going to be underwater. Western civilization, at that point, will be nothing more than a memory, its legacy a mere collection of haunted, submerged wrecks of steel and concrete and dust blown empty buildings.
So much, then, for the project of the funny monkey who detached itself from its forest biome and proceeded to transform the earth itself into its own ecosphere.
No, the premise of the film, it seems to me, is that it is the monkey within us that is now, more and more, coming to predominate in our behavior. The evolutionarily advanced neocortex that we have spent five million years constructing — largely due to the sexual selecting of our females who, it seems, have (up until nowadays, anyways) chosen smarter males over dumber ones — is now in process of devolving, dismantling and deconstructing itself back into its ape-based limbic system of emotional aggression and alpha-male dominant tribal hierarchy. Our women now are sexually selecting stupid males — or “demonic males” as Dale Peterson has called them — in order to provide the rich with poor, dumb, but testosterone happy males to go fight in wars that are increasingly going to become the new norm. Indeed, our children and our grandchildren may never know a time of peace in which war does not exist, for the grim outlook of the 21st century that is about to unfold before us will make the annihilation wars of the 20th century look like a dress rehearsal by comparison.
Our oil will be gone by 2050; CO2 levels, by that same year, will have reached 500 ppm and will drag along with it a global increase in temperature of three degrees, an amount which experts now say is sufficient to tip the Greenland ice sheet into a complete process of irreversible melting, and that means an inexorable sea level rise of 3 – 5 meters (10 to 15 feet), an amount that is more than sufficient to put Miami, New York and Shanghai under water. And, of course, melting glaciers means disappearing rivers, which means that no one is going to have any fresh water to drink. Except, of course, the guys with the guns.
And so, it appears that we are standing upon the threshold twilight of the experiment of the funny monkey from the forests who has wrecked the earth so thoroughly that he has even managed to put his own civilization in jeopardy. The Age of Reason and rationality — together with the neocortex — is long since gone, and what’s left is the human monkey climbing back up the trees where he can watch his cities, together with all his dreams, sink into the mire of historical oblivion.
That is what the myth of apes taking over our cities is really conveying.
