The franchise inaugurated in 1968 by the American director Franklin J. Schaffner —with successful prequels during the last decade— opened an unsuspected field of aesthetic reflection about the existence of man and life in the biological trajectory of planet Earth.
By Felipe Stark Bittencourt
There is no doubt that the beginning of Franklin J. Schaffner's The Planet of the Apes (Planet of the Apes, 1968) contains a good part of his catastrophic and moralizing parable: the cynical captain George Taylor, an astronaut -or more appropriately, a flaneur of the stars, is recording his log while the other crew members of his spaceship have been asleep for months. He talks about the troubles of deep space exploration, about the metaphysical smallness he experiences when he realizes that time on the ship is not the same as on Earth where almost 700 years have passed while only a few months on Earth. his little sidereal boat and wonders if, despite that tremendous sore that time has opened, the human being continues to fight against his brother.
Somehow Taylor knows the answer and because of it, he feels alone. So he sinks into his own cabin and lets hypersleep consume him. A thousand years later, he wakes up to find himself on a hostile planet ruled by a singular species: primates hunting a beast called man.
The unfortunate fate proposed by The Planet of the Apes is counterpointed by the one announced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film released just a few months later and which gave an even more radical twist to cinematographic science fiction: the first commitment to a future where the human being is a simple parasite, a despicable vermin that has grown on an unknown planet under the shadow of the monkeys, masters, and lords of a sacred, but questionable knowledge. The second, on the other hand, announces a promising future in which human beings have begun the conquest of the cosmos, although with no less a splinter in their visionary eyes: they work mechanically, their attitude is mediocre and they are invaded by tedium and banality.
The Planet of the Apes, in that sense, doesn't even bother to boast of a technical empire. The primates that rule this arid and strange world have firearms at their highest technology, but they ride horses and drive wagons. When Taylor affirms that he arrived on a ship from a distant planet, they do not believe him and take him for a heretic, because the mere fact of flying is an affront to nature. Likewise, they live in a centralized city, far from what they call "The Forbidden Zone" and to which no ape can reach without prior authorization from a council of mysterious and reserved elders.
That distrust and control clash with Taylor's individualistic and iconoclastic spirit. Although the apes have managed to build a society that functions relatively normally, they are heirs to the ills of human beings. Schaffner announces it with that listless and annoying hero, eviscerating several of the vices of the society of the sixties that persist until today and that the apes continue to replicate unconsciously: the irrationality of the arms race, the dogmatic imbalance, and the violence that the being human drags, even in circumstances as dark as the present.
A human being, in fact, is not better than an apes ape. Taylor realizes that his species tends towards destruction, although a ritual where transcendence is outlined —what Nicanor Parra synthesized as “angel and beast sausage”— coexists in it. He acknowledges that self-destructive tendency, but, even in the worst circumstances, he expects, perhaps, a shred of humanity.
The apes, for their part, believe that it is not possible and that leads them to a blind dogmatism that masquerades as a false religion. They acknowledge the evils of the past but do not believe in the promise of a future.
