People forget that it is just a movie, a means of entertainment, and in sense, awareness of the things that happen in our world. One day the time will come when we the human race will not be at the top of the food chain….then we will understand what it feels to be oppressed and tested on.

The excellent new film purports to be a “re-imagining” of the origins of the Planet of the Apes saga. Set in the modern day San Francisco Bay area, the film is a vast improvement over the muddled mess that was the Tim Burton effort of a decade ago. The acting is fine and CGI apes look great. To placate fans of the POTA series, they pay homage to the original in a variety of fun ways; “Bright Eyes” is what Taylor (Charlton Heston) is called by Cornelius and Zira in the first film, the guard is seen watching Heston as Moses – who sets his people free, in The Ten Commandments (an unlikely film choice for a low IQ guard at a primate facility), but it is the films plot and subversive message that is appealing.

The appeal of the POTA series has always been the subtext.

The original series dealt with the issues of the late 60′s: cold war fears of nuclear holocaust, the black civil rights, and protest movement doves (the chimps) versus war-mongering hawks (the gorillas).

These themes played themselves out across all five of the original films. The first two (Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes) are set in our distant future while Escape From the Planet of the Apes was the only movie with a contemporary (1974) setting, and Conquest was set in the (then) near future of 1991(a fact that is inexplicably obscured in later DVD releases of the film. If anyone out there knows why, I am interested.)

Conquest is the most revolutionary of the series with a full blown radicalism and pretty blatant references to the Black Power movement of the day. Caesar even appeals to a Black man ( it is unclear if the character is living in America ) with the plea “You of all people should understand.”

The racial elements are well documented in Eric Greene’s magisterial 1996 book Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture

The series tones down all the race war implications in the final installment, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, by having Caesar join forces with humans against war-mongering, troglodyte mutants and eventually a gorilla general memorably named Urko.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes on new subject areas, aging baby Boomers/ dementia specifically, and the touchy subject of IQ and destiny.

Freedom is predicated on intelligence. Being smart, it seems, is a necessary antecedent to freedom.

The stupid are slaves because they are stupid, and not the reverse. The Aristotelian logic of some being “slaves by nature” seems to be the argument.

This is not to say that those who are less intelligent will not have cultures of their own. They will and they do.The scenes of Caesar’s incarceration resemble nothing less than that of a prison yard, complete with overly macho posturing and gang-banger attitudes and behaviors.

Caesar’s politeness and intelligence are seen as threatening behavior by the low-IQ simians.

Only when the smart chimp uses his superior reasoning to divide and exploit the monkey house multiculturalism does he gain freedom from being a victim.

Some reviewers misinterpret the film to be more liberal happy talk against animal testing. This is simply absurd. The film seems to be an extended paean to the benefits of testing potential Alzheimer cures on apes for the benefit human superiors.

The film continues the science fiction tradition of masking uncomfortable “us versus them” issues in an era of political correctness that marks such discussion as verboten “crime think.”

EVERY movie,book,play is about something

EVERYTHING has a message

Waiting For Godot is pointless because existentialists believe LIFE is pointless.

Even Seinfeld- a “show about nothing” was about Larry David struggling to make RULES for a world that rejected the RULES of the 1960′s

hence episodes about double dipping,re gifting etc…

THIS is about something- IQ and it’s implications for freedom and government.

http://elvisnixon.com/2011/08/06/what-the-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-is-really-about.aspx

Yes, that’s correct. Introducing human DNA into an ape will not make said ape human-like. For that you’d need to severely alter its development and basically steer it from a clutch of cells into an infant through constant intervention. As for intelligence, well, apes are already quite intelligent but they didn’t evolve the same kind of intelligence as us so any cognitive enhancement in apes is more likely to make them better at organizing family packs, finding food, and wooing mates. But the odds of them learning how to conduct warfare against humans is infinitesimal to none.

And even then, apes armed with what we’d call Stone Age weaponry are unlikely to pose much of a threat to humans armed with drones, tanks, bombers, missiles, and nuclear warheads outside of a movie universe. There are 7 billion of us and many of us are quite technologically sophisticated, so while we would certainly loose to chimps and gorillas in hand to hand combat, we have the weapons to subdue them.

I don’t want to see an ape revolution actually occur in my life.

Can’t wait for you response.