Here's another show you can enjoy in the True Story FM Family of Entertainment Podcasts. Ever wonder what bridge is the gap between your favorite film genres, subgenres and movements? CinemaScope is here to explore these connections, taking you on a thrilling odyssey through the ever-evolving art of cinema. I'm your host, Andy Nelson, and in each episode, we embark on a deep dive into the forces that sculpt the world of film. From the styles you know and love, like high films or the French New Wave, to the ones you may not be as familiar with like Turkish Yeshelcham or Brazilian Nordesterns, my expert guests and I unravel the complex tapestry of storytelling, style and innovation that defines the world of film as we impact the myriad catalysts of change that shape these diverse styles. Whether you're a student of film, a creative professional, or simply a devoted movie enthusiast, CinemaScope is your gateway to a richer, more immersive film experience. Don't just watch movies, understand them, appreciate them, and revel in their artistry with CinemaScope. Subscribe today. Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Today, myself, Matthew, joined by my co-host, Riki Hayashi. As we talk about the movie, the Kingdom of the Planet of the Yapes, but even more, a larger discussion of this entire planet of the Yapes franchise, and the fascinating questions that it brings up about culture, society, religion, language, and the extent to which if humans were to be wiped out on this planet and a new species of simmians, of even more sentient apes were to take over, what would we learn from an anthropological standpoint? What would we learn is distinct humanity, and what would be perhaps replicated, and what does it say about humanity, or about society in general, or any of these kind of things? It's a very broad topic. If you haven't seen Kingdom of the Planet of the Yapes, don't worry. Neither has Riki Hayashi, my co-host. We're trying something a little bit new today. Once Riki became co-host, he and I had bounced around a lot of ideas about where we wanted this podcast to go. One thing Riki had really been strong on was the idea of moving away from kind of more movie review style things into, like, literally talk about the issues here. One of the natural ideas that we'd go to is, could we do an episode where only one of us had seen the movie in question, or the series, or the book, or whatever, because the point wasn't to discuss it specifically, but to discuss the larger issues involved. I'm going to walk through some ideas from the plot of this movie, but we're largely talking about the larger themes and the larger issues that it raises. Riki, let me say hello and let you introduce yourself. Why don't you start by saying, before we talk about it, what was your knowledge base of the Planet of the Yapes movies? Hey, good day to you all. Obviously I'm familiar with the franchise. I think I've seen all of the original movies at one point or another. It's been a while though, and then I watched the Tim Burton one, disappointing, very weird, and I believe I watched the first two in this reboot series, and more than anything, I'm struck by how this franchise exists, that it is a franchise. The original Planet of the Yapes came out in 1968. Think about that. This very well could be the first movie franchise, or at least sci-fi movie franchise. You can make an argument, obviously, for the Godzilla franchise in Japan, but for a Western movie franchise. I guess James Bond would also be started in the 60s, but this is all before... Now we have the MCU Star Wars is becoming its own massive thing, Star Trek. Planet of the Yapes was there, doing it first. It really was, and even the James Bond movies that you mentioned, I think of that more as a series than a franchise, or it is a franchise, but it's not really a series in that most of them reboot the series, particularly with each new James Bond we get, in part because, you know, since he was a man in his 30s and 40s and the 60s, you kind of have to, but also they just keep reinventing the character, whereas this is because it's not the story of any one character, it's the story of literally evolution over a period of thousands of years. Yeah, there's a way in which you can see all these stories as as fitting together. And I think, at some point, want to have someone on who really has a background knowledge of horror movies, especially from this period, because that's my... Maybe this, I mean, horror movies in the 60s, not quite so much. I think that would be like Alfred Chicken Hitchcock. Yeah, I mean, part of what I was thinking, maybe it's more the 50s, but is that like things like innovation, like a lot of the stuff that, like, you know, maybe people went to see and drive-throughs and stuff like that. I mean, there's more 50s, we're going into 60s and 70s. Okay, yeah, yeah. You did all have like them, the giant ants. Yeah, that you often have like part two, part three, part four, etc. So I think Planet of the Apes was not incredibly like unique in that regard. President Bartlett's now yelling at me, because something's either unique or not. But more importantly, the fact that it's now been rebooted and that they've never actually specifically said so, it started, it seemed like a reboot, but the more you pay attention, the more you're seeing all these connections, and especially in these most recent movies, it really is feeling like what it is is the prequel to it, because I hear to give people some background, those original movies, and wreaking and speak more to them, I've seen all of them as well, but a while ago, those original movies start when the spaceship called the Icarus, piloted by Charlton Heston, in a really wonderful depiction of like 1960s ideas of what future spaceflight would be like. It's kind of wonderful and kind of ridiculous. Crash lands on the strange planet, and they have all these adventures on this planet that is ruled by Apes. And they're kind of surprised because the Apes speak English and do things that seem very similar to human constructs in a lot of ways. And what he originally, what he finally comes to discover at the end of that movie, and learns through the future movies, is that it is not a strange planet that his ship went through a time wormhole of some kind. Back in the 60s, they didn't waste so much time explaining these things. They just waved their hands and said time wormhole. And as you should, as you should, I think it's much better that one time travel, never explain your time travel, just do it. 100%. That it's actually Earth, thousands and thousands of years later. And that some cataclysmic event happened, causing most of humanity to be wiped out. And very few humans to continue, but as like kind of a very primitive, like almost, you know, chromagnet kind of level of the species, and that they're mostly hunched over, they cannot speak. They have sort of very basic understanding, and they're basically either pets or slaves or tools of the apes who rule civilization. And then, of course, there's lots of like social commentary in that perspective, some of it fairly heavy-handed, some of it fairly subtle, and a lot of it very progressive for the 60s and 70s, and even for today, about racism, about culture, about policing, about all these great topics. Which is ironic, given the man who stars in the movie. Yeah, Charles and Heston has become sort of, you know, great grandpuba of the actors for Trump and all that kind of thing. So, some humor there. Though there is certainly a lot of raw, raw United States in those movies. The most recent set of movies, which started with James Franco, and I think one of his best acting performances, opposite Andy Serkis in another phenomenal acting performance, is about a scientist who's doing experiments on monkeys and on apes. And you spend most of the movie trying to figure out, like, what does this have to do with a planet of the apes? Because this is very much about humanity. But what you come to understand, there's massive spoilers here, is that he is attempting to design a virus, no, he is attempting to design a treatment for Alzheimer's, because his father has Alzheimer's, others have, and a lot of his experiments are on apes. And in so doing, he's managed to help apes achieve a much higher level of intelligence and become fully conversant with humans through sign language, including this one ape Caesar. By the end of the movie, there's lots of corporate malfeasance, there's lots of shenanigans. The thing that he has designed has been taken by corporate and sort of supersized to the point that it can make all apes. Apes are already sentient, so calling them sentient, I think, is incorrect, but raising their intelligence level and raising their communication level, leading to the next couple of movies in which I think what we're seeing is the slow evolution of the planet of the apes that becomes in those childhood Heston movies. Because we eventually find out that the virus wipes out most of humanity, that it reduces the humans who are left into this sort of pre-verbal pre-evolutionary state, and that the apes are becoming more and more in control. And those movies are all set during the time of Caesar's life, and then this movie is set many, many generations later, about 200 or 300 years later, and it's about what has happened and how both human and ape societies have evolved. So we'll get into all of that. But stepping back a bit, Riki, what do you think are some of the things you took away from this planet of the apes movies in terms of what they had to say, or what you took from them, or what you disagreed with about the way these kind of societies would not evolve? Well, to me, Planet of the Apes has always been about contrast between the human characters and the ape characters. And in the original series from the 60s and 70s, the apes are already the dominant species on the planet, which turns out to be Earth. And they are the civilized ones, and the humans who are left are shown to be more animalistic. And then you drop Charlton Heston in as a human who comes from a civilized time. So he sees what's going on, and he's confused, and frankly, he's angry, right? Because the famous line, get your hands off me, you dirty apes or whatever, paraphrasing. He's very much in favor of his own species, humans. And yet, mate comes to see the point of view of some of the apes, I believe you, and forms bonds with them, and realizes like he discovers that humans ruined the planet. Like humanity was the one responsible for nuclear apocalypse, and destroyed the planet, and apes after that became ascendant, they became the primary civilization. I believe you've, in the second one, beneath the planet, the planet of the apes, he actually also explodes in nukes so that he becomes kind of he fulfills humanity's promise, kind of in a way. And then they also, the apes themselves, time travel, they go back, and it becomes a loop, maybe, a time loop. So it's a confusing franchise, because it was at a time when you didn't have like a Kevin Feige overseeing the entire process and saying like, this is where we have to end up, like these, like they just made movies because they were popular and made money. These came out 68, 70, 71, 70, to 73, the original five. So they were rushed out to make money. And frankly, like the latter three pretty much don't make sense because of that. Then the reboot franchise, we've had a lot more time, 2011, 14, 17, 24, like that's a big, that's a big gap. So there's like much more intentionality to the reboot franchise, not just within itself, but also connecting to the old one. Like you said, there's a lot of Easter eggs, there's a lot of dropping of things. In the very first one, rise of the planet apes, the James Franco one, there's a scene where they're showing like a new story of Charlton Heston's spaceship taking off. And I think there's like a newspaper story about like the astronauts are lost, like we've lost contact with the astronauts. And then there's complete background, like no, like if you don't know to look for it, you don't see it. But once you see it, you're like, Oh, okay, like, is it just an Easter egg? Yeah, or are we going to connect? And it seems like we are now, right? Like in this new one, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. There's a number of ways. One, just in that, one of the plot points of this movie is that there's a scene in which both that there should have an ape hero and an ape comes across a human. I'll tell more about that movie in a second, but I wanted to make this point, both an ape and a human who they're working with look through this ancient telescope and see something that scares them quite dearly. And Noah, who's our ape protagonist, describes it as a hole that eats light. And one of the theories is it wasn't explicitly said, but one of the theories is that it wouldn't make sense for it to be the Icarus, but what they're seeing is the portal, the time portal or whatever it is, the black hole, you know, whatever it is that causes the Icarus to go through space at such a crazy rate, space and time. A more concrete, though, connection that you can definitely see in the Charlton Heston movie, there's a attractive brunette character who is one of the echoes the humans who can't speak, I believe played by Raquel Welsh. And then that kind of visual of a character appears again and again. And the original character is named Nova. That's the name that is sort of given to her and the apes call her by. In one of the original of the in one of the earlier of the James Franco's reboots, he's an actress just in one that was in mind of this of the reboots. There's a young child, a human named Nova, who gives Caesar hope that maybe humans aren't all bad. Flash forward to this movie. One of the things that's most being discussed in this movie is the idea of the legacy of Caesar and what do people remember about Caesar and it's very explicitly a religious kind of context where people remember the teachings of Caesar, even if they don't always understand. And so at one point, we meet this character named Raka, who's really kind of like a prophet of Caesar, one of the last members of the order of Caesar as he describes it. And he names this human, no, Nova. And when he says to, he's a very kind of like wise old man with a lot of sense of humor in a lot of ways, kind of reminds me of a Yoda kind of figure, or kind of like the drunk old man on the mountain kind of idea. And he, what he says is quote, we will call her Nova. We call them all Nova. It is from Caesar's time. I do not know why. And he says the kind of, I don't know why, and kind of a humorous like, I don't know, but that's what we do. That's what Caesar did. And that gets into a lot of the religious stuff we'll talk about. But also, it's very clearly that sets up why the one who rides with Charles and Heston is named Nova, because that's what the apes have always done. So in the original movie, Nova is played by Linda Harrison. Oh, okay. Raquel Welch was also scantily clad in one of these movies. She's the one on the poster in the prison break movie, Shawshank Redemption. Oh, okay. Yep, that's right. Let's talk a little bit more about the original movies. What role did you see kind of like religion or belief systems playing in those movies? I don't recall religion being as big as it seems in the new ones, especially among the apes. Like they have like the humans have a cult, right? Yep, pretty much the cult of the bomb or something along those lines. Yeah, the bomb that they blow up in the second is protected by these humans. So I don't know, I don't know what it's trying to say. And I don't know if they knew what they were trying to say. They just had, yeah. Again, like this franchise, it lacked intentionality, in my opinion, as a franchise, as movies. Like which is not to say that that's wrong. Movies should be for entertainment first and foremost. But I don't recall it hitting you over the head with any religious imagery. So I think I would disagree with you there a little bit. Okay. First of all, in terms of the intentionality point, I think it's hard for us to remember to think about this that right now, every movie we watch, we have the ability to instantly go back and watch the prequels to it, or whatever else is in that line, not to mention go on Wikipedia and look all this stuff up. And 20, 30 years ago, we didn't have the internet necessarily, well, 30, 40 years ago, but we still had VHS, we had Betamax, we had ways to go watch those movies. When you're watching a plan of the apes movie, you might have seen it in the theaters once or twice or five or 10 times. But then you didn't see it again for another year. And I think that the need to have the details all line up so exactly didn't really make sense because people wouldn't have the chance to kind of like put them all together quite the same way. And I agree with you that I think a lot of details get changed because of that and certainly there's different actors. I think Charles and Hessen is only in the first, maybe in the first two, but certainly there's different directors, different writers, a lot of things don't line up. But I do think that there are some intellectual throughlines and I don't think they ever explicitly call it religion. But one of the ones that I thought was really important was this idea of sacred beliefs, of that there are things that we know to be true and when we see something that does not fit, we have to, instead of saying this thing should change our view, we say this thing should be destroyed because it challenges our view and our view can't accept that, which is to me a thing that religion very much does. And not just religion by any means philosophical schools do this, we do this in our own lives and our families and stuff like that. You know, we selectively remember things to fit our own narratives. But you know, one of the very big deals is that Charles and Hessen has to be killed because it is so essential to their society that ape is better than man and that ape evolved from, that ape is, you know, overcame man. And I think actually there are some evolution debates where some people think the apes came from man and others think that's an insult to ape kind, that we all came from the great founder, the great elder, who by the way is very clearly what the modern version of Caesar is modeled on. And maybe that's a good time to transition to this movie because that's very much what this movie is about, is about the early stages of how this character named Caesar becomes this profit figure around whom numerous groups are building kind of proto religions that have very different ideals and that we as the audience kind of knew who the real Caesar was, but of course, they don't. So I know you haven't seen those movies in a while, but let me just kind of help that transition by asking you, what do you remember about those about the James Franco movie and the one that came after it that you saw? Well, yeah, like the character of Caesar is the main character. Like James Franco is the primary actor we think of, but the character of Caesar is the through line through what the three most recent ones and is not just the main character, but like the protagonist, like the hero, right? Like he is presented as the person who is morally good and is trying to find this balance and trying to keep peace between apes and humans and the forces around him kind of conspire to make that fail in a bunch of ways. And he is forced to take actions that bring apes and humans into conflict out of his own need to protect his kind or to protect apes. And it really like goes against, I guess, what he wants to do, but he feels forced into it. And even through that, like he still tries to have compassion for humans and tries to maintain friendships with some of them, right? So I do like where we end up, like I understand why he is presented as this like messianic figure, right? In the most recent movie, because he did, you know, preach, like he wasn't preaching, but he had a message of peace and togetherness. And yet he was forced to take actions that led to ape ascendancy. So now there are also ape characters who are like, he is the one who made us powerful, like he's the one who defeated humans type of thing, right? Yeah, and it's interesting because I remember when one of the earlier movies came out, with Andy circus, his complaint is he's doing motion capture, but also the voice of Caesar. And I think the fact that he can get up accounting the award for it is just criminal because he's utterly phenomenal. Yeah, I agree. Like, I just want to say like Andy circus is, you know, one of the most amazing actors of our time. And if you want to see like him acting as a human, like watch Andor, right? Like amazing performance. But like his performance as Caesar golem slash mingle, like, yeah, I think because of the way that those are filmed and created, he hasn't gotten the credit. And I agree 100% like he should have gotten more nominations and more and or awards for so these performances. It's kind of like if someone's both a voice actor and does 75% of the animation. Yeah, because the motion capture software is turning everything he does into looking like an ape in his case of chimpanzee. But it's him doing all the motions. It's him with the facial expression, so that how that plays into all the acting. Anyway, the point that I was going for is that one of the things I think those movies really show is that and this is something religions and like profit ideas really try to wrestle with is that he's by no means consistent through his life. As you said, he's wrestling and at different points in the different movies, he holds different positions. And one of the things that he really wrestles with is how does he how does he reconcile his personal experience of humans where James the James Franco character and his part really romantic partner, whose name unfortunately forget, are very kind to him and treat him well and with whom he has a familial bond. But then when the government orders that he be locked up, he he perceives it as them doing it. And then when he starts to see the way the rest of humanity treats apes, often with, you know, horrific scientific experiments and cruelty, he's trying to wrestle with like where the people who I knew, were they the exception or or they the rule, you know. And I wish I could remember this person. And if someone knows, please let me know because there's great series of you tubes that were made on it. When I think of the third movie came out, a black creator did a great series on comparing the teachings of Caesar with Malcolm X. And that way he was looking because one of the things that's happened by then is even though Caesar is still alive, a lot of people are starting to take the teachings of Caesar and twist them and manipulate them or just misunderstand them, especially this idea of apes strong together. And like, does that mean that apes should build communities? Or is it apes should mean that apes should build armies? And he said that like, if you look at someone like Malcolm X, who depending on what position you want to take, you can look at stuff he said early in his career, you can look at stuff he said in the middle of his career, or you can look at stuff after he broke with Elijah Muhammad and the nation of Islam and took on some fairly different positions. And that, you know, the people who hate Malcolm X will almost always ignore all the later stuff. And the people who want to really kind of like ignore his radicalism will only look at the later part of his stuff and ignore everything else. And I just thought those very interesting thing of looking at, and I think this is something that the movie explores even more so is not just how someone's teachings belong, but how teachings like this can be very easily manipulated to fix to solve whatever kind of agenda you're trying to put them into. Yeah, well, that phrase apes strong together, just that simple phrase, depending on what word you emphasize, right, like strong strength could mean conquest of humans and like other apes, you know, groups like subjugation, or it could mean strength in a way of like bonding together. And yeah, like the togetherness, like, is it just your group, like your ape group, or is it all ape groups, right? And then even though it's ape, you could make an argument that you should include humans. Yeah, that's the thing, like, to me, stronger together. Yeah, like, because even in our own modern, like, human society, like we have a phrase like in the United States, like all men are created equal, and that was not applied equally at all, like the United States had slaves, and then you also have like men, but not women, right? So like these words, depending on how you view other people or other groups, like, can be exclusive or inclusive. Yeah, I think that's really true. I think that's what a lot of this movie explores. Let me go through some of the parts of the movie, and I'll stop by those questions, but also please stop to, you know, jump in with a theory point, or just a question about it as I go. So we start with kind of words on the screen, kind of like the Star Wars crawl idea, although not going in that direction. And it talks about like, you know, the humanity ruled the world and the humanities hubris led to their downfall. And it ends with, as ape and human struggle to coexist, one ape rose up and sacrificed everything for his kind, his name was Caesar. And part of what it's referring to is at the end of the third movie, the last one, which I think you can kind of see is like the Caesar trilogy. And now this is the beginning of the the middle trilogy or the next trilogy, the Noah trilogy. And they've said that, right? Like they said that they want this to be a trilogy. Yeah, starting with the newest one. Very much so. And that this is at the end of that Caesar sacrifices himself as part of the allowing the the apes to escape the the last kind of human army and help wipe out this human army that's trying to kill all apes. And so he does become very much a kind of like martyred figure. And I think in some ways, a messianic figure who doesn't rise from the dead, but his teachings live on. Yeah, but he also sacrificed his family. Like not he didn't sacrifice, but he lost his son and wife. Is that correct? Yes, one point. Yeah, he loses his family, which is again, the second time that's now happened to him, but he has eight family, he loses. And and so we start with the society 400 years later, or 200, 300 years later, I'm bad at math. And we learn that kind of apes are now living in different clans. And this group calls themselves the eagle clan. And they've basically kind of domestic, well, they haven't fully domesticated eagles, but it's this rite of passage for young, young boys who are about to become men within the are, you know, young apes who are about to come adult apes. I think I see of all genders, within their clan to go and find a eagle egg, and then raise that eagle from birth as their companion, and they train the eagles to hunt for them and to bring them fish, and to respond to music, and things like that. And it's it's interesting that it's now like a society. I think of like rituals often are one of the things that anthropologists often look to is like the beginnings of society in a civilization is when you start having not just total survival, but like, here's what we the tribe do for births and for deaths and for coming of age rituals and for pairings and things like that. And they understand that these things called echoes exist, but most people have never seen one. They are in the forbidden areas, which is very much a quote that gets carried all the way down back to the Charlton Heston movies. And we know that there's rival clans, and in early on in the movie, another one of those clans attacks them. And the thing that really is startling to someone who's seen the earlier movies is when we see that rival clan attack, first of all, they have weapons, they have these kind of electro spears, you think about like tasers on like long rods, which police actually have things like this, stun gun kind of things, but as as poking sticks kind of like used for like large animals and stuff. And the battle cry is for Caesar, which really kind of hits you in the face of this idea of, oh, someone's taking this in a very different way. And so Noah escapes. I will say here that again, this isn't a review podcast. I think this movie gives a lot of great reasons to discuss. And I think the second half of the movie is truly fantastic. I think the first half is very slow and some of the battle scenes are not the best. It's one of those like, it's a much better movie for starting conversations than just like the most entertaining two and a half hours you're going to have. It's a pretty good movie. Well, they have to do quite a bit of world building, right? Even though it's a sequel in a franchise, it is several hundred years later. So they have to reestablish what the what the world looks like in that setting. It felt like they're trying to do two things. They're trying to do that, but they also felt like I think there was a sense of that people wanted the action movie of the CGI apes fighting each other. So there's also a lot of very drawn out fight scenes, which look amazing. But I think a lot of folks commented that the pacing, like, it's a fairly drastic change between philosophical exposition about the world to fight scene and back again. Yeah, because the earlier ones often have a climactic fight scene, but the buildup to that is usually like apes and humans facing off, but not actually fighting and they're being like an uneasy like, what are we going to do? Right, there's all this tension. Yeah, there's a lot to fight. So most of Noah's family is killed. Noah's sent off to kind of like try and find what happened and to maybe rescue his mother and sister if he can, or his mother and his family friends if he can, and he comes across Raka. As you may remember, the original movies, the chimpanzees are often kind of like the leaders, the gorillas are like the muscle, and the chimpanzees are often like the clerics. They're the wise ones. They're the elders who have, they don't give knowledge, but they give wisdom. The orangutans? The orangutans. You said chimpanzee the second time. And I also, real quick, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not an expert at all. But some of these ape characters are listed as bonobo, which is also called pygmy chimpanzee. So I'm not sure like how different bonobo and chimpanzee are supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know in the original, they were literally three different colors. And this one, I think the lines between gorillas and chimpanzees have melded a bit, but definitely this character Raka is very distinctly an orangutan. He has kind of the bone in his, the bone face and the more orange hair. And he is kind of this wandering priest of, as he says, the order of Caesar. And he finds out about, you know, these people who attack in the name of Caesar and says that they don't know the true Caesar. And as he says that there were two true laws to Caesar, one of which is ape strong together, but that the corollary of that is ape not kill other ape. And so he's kind of really outraged at what's happening, which is not true. Right. Caesar killed, what's his name, koba? koba, it was his lieutenant, because koba had betrayed him. Right. Koba had tried to kill him, and he wasn't feeling koba. And he feels a great deal of shame about that. And that's one of those, like, how much does the prophet even live? And I think that's kind of intentional is that the, this Raka character has a very sort of, um, DFI, DFI is the wrong word, but kind of like up on a pedestal. Idealized. Idealized. That's a perfect word for it. Idea of Caesar. And we learn a lot about kind of what the apes have come to believe through Raka. First of all, he's just a fabulous character. His voice actor is the actor for boardess. If anyone knows the Orville, the Moklin, who goes to this wonderful gender story with his child. And it's just like the actor has so much empathy, while also being able to sound like, you know, the, the, the apes don't speak the, um, the apes speak a version of English that is kind of not, not pigeon, but like, it often leaves out verbs where we would put in verbs, you know, apes strong together instead of apes are strong together. Peter Macon. Sorry, Peter, Peter Macon is the American thank you phenomenal voice actor. And there's a couple of things that I think become really relevant here in terms of like this religion that they're building. One is, do you remember then in the first movie? Caesar lives in the attic of the house. And there's this window that he looks out through that has this kind of interesting design where like a bunch of glass panes they're in ovals. It was yeah, like not, not quite stained glass or maybe it was stained glass, but that kind of design. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That metal framework is now worn around the necks of everyone in the order of Caesar. Oh, wow. Yeah, which is, and it's painted on the walls of both the order of Caesar people, but also of these bad apes who will learn about, uh, who are like the we're attacking for Caesar. So it's become this religious symbol. Is that something? Sorry, is that something in the movie that they explicitly let you know? Or do you have to have, do you have to recognize that as an audience member? I'm curious. You have to recognize it, but it was shown. So I think we see Caesar painting it at one point. Okay. As you sort of founding this next, uh, uh, ape colony in the third movie. And so it's been very drawn as a very specific, like it's a very easy to see and pick up on reference. And they describe it as the, as the sign of Caesar and it's passed down. Raka gives it to Noah and Noah later will give it to someone else. And it's also interesting because Raka knows these stories, but Raka doesn't know anything about what actually happened. They come across various parts of like old human civilizations, including this, um, a museum where they have this huge telescope. And in Raka's understanding, this is a place that, as he says it, there used to be vast herds of humans. And in places like this, humans were cared for, fed, even taught because there's pictures of humans like at the museum on the walls of this museum. And there's pictures of humans learning on the walls of the museum. And I just, I just love in terms of the idea of how we understand history or the little context we have. He doesn't look at this and go, Oh, once humans were dominant, he says, Oh, once there was huge amounts of humans and out and apes taught them instead of hunting them. Yeah, that's interesting. So they, am I correct that the apes think that all of the relics are ape relics? Like when they come across the cities that were human cities, they're like, Oh, this used to be an ape city. Somewhat. They don't come across those much because again, it's been 400. It's been many hundreds of years and evolution works really, you know, nature works really fast. So most of the large buildings have fallen down or just covered with forest. There's a couple of scenes where they're going through what is to them for all intents and purposes of forest. And they're walking on ground that's covered with gas and then they're walking on ground that's covered with grass that happens to be a glass pane that someone falls through. So there's not that much evidence left of human civilization, at least not in the areas that they're in. And then also might be why they have they're told don't go into these other areas because those are other areas where you might start to encounter things that challenge the idea that apes have always been in control. Okay. So we have this scene. So eventually they come across the character they call Nova, who's Raquel Welsh lookalike, although very good actress. She was the young woman in The Witcher. Yeah, this is Freya Allen is the actor. I think the character was named Silly in The Witcher. It was the Cintra. Cintra. Thank you. Great actress. And sorry. Sorry. Cintra was the name of the nation. Her character name was Cerilla. Cerilla, that's why I think they call her Siri or something like that. But anyway, when they meet her, she can't talk. We later learn though that she can. She has a name May that she is one of these humans who can still speak who seems to be immune from the virus for whatever reasons. And it's really kind of beautiful because Raquel doesn't believe it because Raquel is as much as he believes in Caesar. He believes in what's been passed down to him. And that's world in which the possibility of someone like May existing just doesn't happen. And it's portrayed very funny in a very funny manner, but it also really hits you hard about just how ridiculous this seems to him. And then we get into the third act of the movie, which I think is really good. And we're things shift pretty dramatically, which is where we learn that the these rating parties of gorillas are being sent out by a bone about gorilla named Proxima Caesar. And it's very intentional. He calls him that he has a human. He keeps with him named Trevathon Trevathan, who toils him about the Roman Empire. And he's intentionally called himself Proxima Caesar because that was a name that was used back in Roman times to indicate that they were like Caesar. And he was saying, I am the descendant of Caesar. I am the new Caesar, which by the way, something could happen all the time, all the way from people throughout history saying that I'm the second coming of Jesus or the second coming of Muhammad or the Buddha or any of these things. Like, and often using it for purposes that seem wildly different than what people think those prophets or people originally thought. And he's taken this idea of the ape strong together, but he's made it all about power, not community, that he's enslaving others. And there's this beautiful scene at the very beginning of where he learned about his world, where Gong starts chanting and all the apes come together and they start chanting Caesar. And he gets up on this pedestal, and he does this thing of call and response where he says, it's a very good day. And they all say, it's a very good day. It's a good day to be an ape. It's a wonderful day to be an ape. We as apes are blessed. And if you've ever heard the piece of God be with you, the piece also with you, we raise up his name. It is good to give God thanks and praise. Like these prayers that are called collects often in Protestant churches and in Catholic, some of them are ritualized, some they change every week, but there's always a call and response aspect to it. And I think in other religions, there are things like this, where people just kind of know the call and response they're supposed to give as a way of bringing the people together into a religious space. That's exactly what this is. And it gave me chills hearing that and hearing him using it in a very manipulative way to be like, we as apes are powerful. And what we learn is that the humans have created this vault. It's kind of something like out of fallout, you play the video games, but that there were these vaults in which during the last days of humanity, they gathered all their weapons and their knowledge and a lot of humans together. And they all end up dying out, but these vaults have been sealed. And what he's trying to do is break into one, because he wants to get all these weapons in power. And so sort of our main sort of conflict for the characters is how do they stop them while working together? What was kind of your response just to that idea of an ape who's become this kind of like very intentional, religious political leader in the kind of ways that humans are used to seeing a lot. I'm fascinated by the naming. Like Cesar is a name that goes back to the original franchise. Like there was a character in the latter movies. But then to name this character Aproxima Caesar, like such a direct comparison to Roman times, using the name of Caesar as this like imperial figure, right? Right. Because that's what happened. Aproxima means the closest to. So it's a way of saying like, I am the most close to Caesar that there's ever been. And historically, like the character, not character, but the the figure Julius Caesar, he was he was a general in the Roman army who then basically like tried to become emperor of Rome and was assassinated for it. And then his not not his kids, right? Like Augustus, his relatives, Augustus Caesar eventually did did become emperor. Yeah, I believe Augustus is his son in law. It's been a while since I saw I Claudius, which is a phenomenal TV show. But yeah, and then they began to call it like Augustus became Augustus Caesar and then Tiberius is Tiberius Caesar and on and on and on. Yeah. So yeah, like it becomes not just a name, but a title, right? Caesar, which is how this character is using this random historical tangent. Caesar becoming a name that then is brought out into the worlds that the Romans conquer, including both what is now Germany and what is a lot of Slavic Eastern Europe. Caesar becomes the word and also becomes the word czar. Right. Or Kaiser becomes czar. So another kind of cool connection there. And then we get Caesar salads for some reason, you know, there we go. That's the thing he gave us. And so there's two other interesting conflicts that happened here where we do learn that May is kind of out for her own interests that what she wants is actually to find a key, a satellite decryption code, because we learn she's come from a settlement far away where they have satellites. And she wants the decryption code so they can use the satellites to try and see if to find other human civilizations that are out there. But what she wants and what the apes want are not always lining up. And in the process, one of the things they also find, and this is very much a reference to the early Charles and Heston movies, are children's books, which show children going to the zoo, in which apes are, you know, put behind bars and chained up for humans enjoyment. And that is kind of one of the last things that pushes back. And, you know, after Proxima's is defeated, it's kind of cool. Like, it's one of those very Marvel things of you think the villain's been defeated, but no, he's back. And then you think he's defeated, but no, he's back, which I wrote my eyes are at a lot. But it sets up this cool scene at the end where Caesar and Noah are fighting one on one. Caesar is mostly kicking Noah's ass. But Noah starts chanting the chant they use to summon the Eagles. And then the rest of his tribe starts doing the same. The rest of his clans starts doing the same, all the Eagles descend and attack Proxima and knock him off. And that's a really powerful statement about language and music that I'll get into later. But after all that's happened, you have this confrontation between May and Noah, where they basically both ask themselves, like, can humans and apes coexist? And they both admit they don't know. And Noah says that part of him thinks that Proxima was right, and that humans will always try to take everything. And Noah kind of does made us really have a good answer to that. And at the end, he says, like, what we should try, we should try to coexist. And so he takes off the religious symbol of Caesar and gives it to her and says, this is important. And the last scene that we see is he takes one of his eight friends back to look up through the telescope, she goes and looks up at the satellites, and they're both looking up at the same sky. And so I think it's really set up in a way that, I mean, makes me very eager to see the next movie of this question of can humans and apes coexist is going to be a very fraught one. Do you think the next movie or something in this trilogy is just going to be planted as the apes, the original, like with the astronaut coming back? I think that might be the last of the movies. Like, I think that it's not going to be a remake of it, but I could see it being maybe this trilogy stays in this time period, but gets us into the social structures where humans have been fully defeated and are fully under ape control. And maybe it might be something where, but like, right now, we're like 300 years after the fall, those movies take place 2000 years further in the future. But I could see it being possible that like, one of those movies ends with a time skip or something, or like, we have one movie set much further in the future, and it ends with them seeing like, something's called Icarus coming down to another planet or something, like a post credit scene with a crash landing. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I, this is interesting. I, this is not where I expected this franchise to go, quite frankly, in this, in this direction, I don't know, like the, the character of Proxima Caesar, utilizing the original Caesar's message in this way, I guess is not something I was expecting. I don't know, tell me, tell me what you think that they are trying to do, like as a franchise with, with this like, through line of Caesar, because he, he very much was not, I mean, he was a character in the original series of movies, but not, I don't think was presented as much as this like, this, this messianic figure, right? So I love this line from Lord of the Rings. And I don't know if they have this specifically in mind, but I think it's a good description of what they're doing. I think they're trying to show us how reality becomes legend reality becomes history, and then history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. And one of the points that they make in this is that Raka is one of the only apes who can still read, and that most of the apes don't know that books exist, they don't understand them at all. And he shows Noah, these books, and says that like, there's very powerful lines repeated later, the symbols have meaning. And like, the, and we see him later, like, find a book of ABCs. And so first of all, I think it's meant to show like, how important to the evolution of a society in a culture language, like, how important to a society in a culture written languages, yes. And that without it, and even with it, but especially without it, how easy it is for, you know, stories that are passed down from one generation to another to become distorted and changed. And that can be good in some ways. The story can evolve and become the story that community needs, but often can be manipulated and changed and things like that. I think though that overall, if I think there's a primary lesson to this, it's about, you know, that we have to be ever careful and ever vigilant about the way our societies develop and how natural the pull towards power and authority is, but also how vital language is. I was talking before about apes becoming more sentient, but I think that's actually not actually correct. I think part of the idea of this always was that apes are actually much smarter than humans give them credit for, we just have no way to communicate with them. And that is only when you break down the barriers of communication that you're able to find peace and to able to find connection. And that, you know, so it makes sense that by the time of the, of the original series of movies, if the humans can't speak, of course, we don't think of them the same way, you know, I think those apes think of humans like we today think of apes. And often in that regards people like I think both of us who see apes as like, you know, noble, wonderful creatures that shouldn't be like treated badly, all the way to people who see apes as, you know, food sources or things that can be hunted for sport or for, you know, science or whatever it is. And I'm grossly paving over like brushing over very, very complicated topics there. But my point is being this idea of how do you communicate with language? How can language be used in good and positive ways? All the way down to the fact that the apes have learned a way to communicate with eagles. And it is by doing that communication with the eagles that they're able to kind of win and defeat Proxima, I think is very intentional. And that the the potential that if there's any pretend along with the idea of the humans end with being able to communicate with other humans. So I think this idea of language and how we communicate with each other defines our societies and defines our chances of peace or not, I think is kind of really where they're going. But with a lot of social commentary on just how these things evolve. Yeah, the two sides of it, like what you just what you said about Raqqa being one of the only apes who can still read is very interesting to me because, you know, on the one hand you have Proxima Caesar distorting, you know, the the ideals of the original Caesar because, you know, time has passed. And there's no one still alive who even spoke with Caesar, right? So like this distortion over time of a message because it is passed down through a spoken lineage means that each generation can change the message and reinterpret it for their own uses bad in this case. But then like on the other hand, like I was thinking about the the idea of books and reading like documents. And we have counter examples in our history where you have something like the Bible or the Constitution of the United States that is is written and we can still read it and read the words. And yet those are also interpreted in different ways by by modern societies. And we don't we can't know for certain what the original intent was. And people try to say like this was the original intent, but we don't we don't know that for sure. And people are going to manipulate that for their own, you know, good or bad. And I would say even when we do it can be manipulated. And one of my favorite examples of this to take a very modern one. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about how horribly Vietnam veterans were treated and the way in which Reagan and Reagan economics destroyed an important part of America that used to have these very strong patriotic feelings. And to some in some sense, he's calling out the irony that they often still do about a country that doesn't treat them well. And it's called born in the USA. And if you read the lyrics or if you listen to the court, the verse of it, that's very clear. But Ronald Reagan used born in the USA playing just the chorus as his election slogan, you know, in one of the later elections. I think or Bush did 88. I don't remember exactly when but it was something that was played all the time. And to me, that's a perfect example. You know, or like the song by, I don't think it's kiss, but it's maybe kiss. It's one of like 80s makeup bands. We're not going to take it. Oh, Twisted Sister. Yeah. And it's about like authority and government and like being like they want to be able to like put the makeup on and live how they want to live and not be told by the government, you know, like it's this very, but it's libertarian, but in a very liberal leftist kind of a way, if now I'm an adopted by Christian right wingers and like, we're not going to take it, the government telling us we have to like, stop our kids from beating up the gay kids in school, kind of a thing, you know, I mean, it's just, we see these examples all the time. That makes me think the one I think of is Cretan's Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son. Oh, yeah. Which was an anti-Vietnam song. But the way it's used in the movie Forrest Gump, just makes it seem like a raw, raw war song, like if you're not paying attention and listening to the lyrics. And yeah, of course, like, yeah, that's interesting how now like music has also entered into that lexicon of reinterpretation. Yeah. One of my favorite, my, one of my favorite professors in seminary was one who was teaching us how to understand ancient texts in the context in which they were written, you know, and that to look at them without understanding that context, you lose a lot of meaning. And one of his favorite ways to kind of demonstrate this is he showed, you know, study is, but I think it's, if you think about it, it makes sense. If you ask people today, what war is the TV show mash about? They're probably going to say Korea, because it is actually set in the Korean war. But it was coming out in 1972. All right. And if you were watching at the 70s, you would know this show is 100% about Vietnam. They're setting it in Korea so that the, you know, it's not going to be censored. But it's very clearly meant to be a commentary on Americans going to an Asian country to interfere when they don't, when they don't have any ideas going on, all the chaos of that causes. And I think about that a lot. And I think that's kind of what this movie is showing as well, is that like, when we tell these stories down through history without understanding their context and meaning, you know, if it's just 10 years later, so much is lost. Do you think that this franchise will play off of this idea of written, written words being read interpreted? Or will that just fade away? I think it's going to be a theme that keeps going. I don't think it's the only theme, but I think that some of the apes will be reading. And I think one of the key issues is going to be apes trying to come to terms, apes who have never known themselves to be anything but these, you know, speaking, domesticating animals, fully like, you know, actualized, sentient, whatever words you want to use, like living as they are, that how could humans have ever treated them the way humans used to? And well, I think that it is in many cases a very fair question because we shouldn't treat any animals the way we do. And I say that as a meat eater, but also someone who thinks like the factory farming industries and hunting and things like that can be incredibly exploitative and terrible, not always by any definition, but often, especially hunting can be, you know, eight and eight different things. But I think it's that like, and we got a little bit of this in this movie, the humans trying to understand that the humans who treated apes that way, the relationship between the two was incredibly different because they didn't understand either apes just weren't as intelligent as they are now, or we didn't understand that they were intelligent as they are now. And that's kind of some of the breakdown we get even in this movie. I think that's going to be a further one is sort of how do you, how do you judge people today in the light of their actions of their ancestors and their, you know, great ancestors going back hundreds of years? Because I mean, that's certainly a question that we as humanity wrestle with all the time. Well, I like, I like what's going on in this movie with the humans. Because in the original, you know, other than Charlton Heston, the humans were basically like non characters pretty much. Yeah. Because they couldn't speak. And they were just treated as pets slash livestock by the apes. So having more interaction, continuing to have more interaction between humans and apes in this franchise, I think is very good because it makes it more relatable, right? Yeah. And also makes you question, you know, the classic question of like, who who is more human in the kind of moral sense? Because that's what a lot of sci-fi franchises try to posit is that, you know, the humans are the monsters and the monsters or the aliens or whoever have more quote unquote humanity in them. Right. I often think of the end of my favorite Star Trek movie, Star Trek to the Wrath of Khan, where Kirk at Spock's funeral, forgive me spoilers for movies 40 years old. Yeah, make me cry now. Well, and what Kirk says is that of all the alien races he has, all the alien beings he has encountered, Spock was the most human. Yeah. And I kind of feel like if Spock who, you know, were like able to watch his funeral from the Great Beyond or later in the story, if you know, but I won't go into that, Spock will be incredibly insulted by that. What do you mean? I'm not human, but that's the. That's the message for us, the audience. Right. And it's also, it's the moral framework that Kirk uses. Yeah. That I as a human and the highest thing. And so what is closest to me is the best. Yeah. And I will just say, you know, William Shatner's acting is often panned, but his delivery of that eulogy is just one of the best performances. I love when actors do this, just tangent, when they break, when they're saying something emotional, and they have like a stutter in the middle that it seems, I don't know, like, can you act that for real? Like it seems real to me. It really does, especially because and we're all in tangent land. So I'll just say this, you can respond and we'll come for a wheel it back and wrap up the episode. Today, there's still a lot of this part of toxic masculinity, but I think today we're much more comfortable with the idea of men crying at like, you know, the death of a parent or a best friend or something like that. In this moment in the early 1980s, it was not okay and the slightest. And what he portrays is someone who is so, as you said, so close to breaking, but absolutely cannot. That even though his best friend in the world, the person he's closest to for these last decades, the person who is so important to him has died that he is a man and he is a person in command authority, and he has to have these people respect him in that role, and he cannot cry. And it's, I can't reproduce it, but basically, he almost swallows the word human. His was the most gentleman, like he kind of just barely gets the word out because he's trying because like it's like, if he tries to keep talking, he's just going to cry. Yeah, is the what I get out of it. That's how I feel like the character of Kirk was in that moment. And it's it's very powerful. It's a powerful moment, obviously like in cinema history, but I just yeah, it was like one of the best things William Shatner has done as an actor. Yeah, I agree with that. All right, well, any other last thoughts on this movie will probably definitely come back to it at various points. Yeah, I think my question to you is, what the heck is going on with this franchise? Not in terms of like in the in universe, in the movies, but I want to like take a step back again and marvel at the fact that this thing is still going and is popular is making money. So it's going to continue. How did we get to this point? Like this is you look at the original movies. They're very hokey. They're product of their time. The matte the ape masks are frankly not good, right? It's like representations of ape beings. And they've been I think they've been parodied and been mocked. I don't in my opinion, they don't stand the test of time. Yeah, in the same way that like the same area like 1960s Star Trek alien masks, like some of them are ridiculous. I think one thing that the special effects are bad, but I also think and this is relevant. Those movies are showing as silly as kind of sounds, anthropomorphized ape men, like they stand on two legs, they wear writing, they look like ape people. None of them like do the walk on fours type. And actually there's a part in this movie where Raka is kind of teasing. Not teasing, but it comes across very much as that like well-meaning social worker who's incredibly racist without meaning to be. Because he's kind of like, oh, I've always felt bad for you humans. You only use two of your legs to walk. If you fall from a tree, you only have two arms that you can grasp with. We have all four. We have four times the amount of success, which the math doesn't actually line up, which I think is kind of brilliant as well. We're going to talk about that exact question of where is this franchise going. There are a lot of thoughts and I want to hear yours in the bonus member section. Good time to say, by the way, two quick things. One, we now have a partnership through Amazon. I'm working especially with Bookstore.org, which helps you buy things through neighborhood bookstores. But sometimes when you want to be able to rent a movie or get a movie or something like that, Amazon's going to be the best choice, especially when it hasn't come to streaming yet. This movie hasn't. So, as far as I know, one of the only ways to get it online is to purchase it through Amazon Prime. And if you do, we're going to have a link in the show notes that will be able to allow you to do so and also have a little bit come back to this podcast. It helps support us. If you notice, my camera is a much better quality today, which is good, I think. It also means you can see my facial twitch a little bit more, which is unfortunate. I'm working with doctors to kind of try to get rid of. But, you know, our audio equipment, we're trying to upgrade all these things. We do it with support from folks like you. So, if you're interested in the movie, it would be great if you bought it through that link. And with that also, please know that the other great way to support us, though, is to become a member. $5 a month, $55 a year, you get access to the bonus content, you get access to full episodes, which we're going to start with this podcast in the fall. And we already have on the Star Wars podcast. And of course, you get to help support us and do all we do. Of course, also, we want all your feedback. We got some great feedback about Star Wars and anime that Ricky and I are going to talk about in upcoming episode where we talk about that anime. So, I believe it's fall of Titan, but I'll double check that. But so, keep an eye out for that. Keep an eye out. Let us know what you think of these movies. What you think of the religious commentary or the social commentary or the ideas of language or how nothing about the Eagles makes sense. I'd love to know what you have to think. For those of us who are members, thank you so much. Check around for the bonus content for everybody else. We have spoken. (upbeat music)
