It Takes Orangutwo to Orangutango

short movie notes

Creatures, what can I say… sometimes you emerge from a business trip to discover that you have watched all four of the reboots in the Planet of the Apes series. Those films, plus a clever, creepy little meditation on AI and more, below. Also, I will be at this omniprotest on Saturday, repping Matthew 25:35 (“I was a stranger and you welcomed me”). Take a look and see what might be going down in your area.

Sister Fury, Brother PC

Christine: 1983, John Carpenter, Stephen King adaptation about an evil car. Surfacey, all glowing headlights and synths. Totally lacks sympathy for the bullied incipient-villain. The bullies are almost Class of 1984 level violent, and yet the film is not interested in them, and therefore not interested in their deaths. It cares about its incel villain (he has a girlfriend! but I think you’ll see what I mean) enough to judge his descent.

Computer Chess: Watched on Jesse Walker’s recommendation. This is the best movie in this post. It’s a 2013 mockumentary set at a 198…3, I think, computer-chess championship. The computers are glitchy and inscrutable in much the same way people are. The humans love these machines, identify with them, and act outside the rules in ways that reveal a kind of underlogic: when humans do it it’s not a glitch, but a “gentleman’s agreement”; not mere blank incomprehensibility, but leadership, or a grifty kind of charisma, or folly.

Then things get weirder. This black-and-white nerd satire opens out into hallucination. The limits of artificial intelligence are displayed, then tested. And then, maybe, overcome.

Whatever Happened to Fay Wray?

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: A film that assumes you know at least the “Simpsons” version of the original, and asks, “What’s a story where you know the ending already? That’s a tragedy, right?” Some solid acting, great ape CGI and motion-capture, great foreshadowing in little moments, the cloud as big as a man’s hand; and emotional elements that hit me, at least, much harder than I expected. The whole Planet of the Apes situation happens because of an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s. And we see the home life of the researcher, his care for his lost and angry father, who’s trapped in an internal world he no longer understands. I just realized the parallel here, where someone who once understood the world is now subjected to it—the father cared for and governed by the son, an overturning of hierarchies that everyone involved feels to be profoundly wrong and awful. Anyway, so I cried tears of the planet of the apes.

The main human tries to fit the main ape, Caesar, in around the edges of human civilization: a swing in the attic, a trip to the redwoods. (This is a stellar entry in the “Bay Area on film” collection.) These efforts feel endearing and then sort of mangled and sad. When the apes finally rise, that’s the beginning of the end for you and me; and the film’s vocabulary is gleeful. The camera mostly follows humans in the climactic attack, and yet it’s still filmed like you’re a traitor to your species. This right here is what I want from a Planet of the Apes film, I think: a certain masochism, a certain awe, a balance between the sense that the apes are deeply other and therefore maybe better than us vs. the suspicion that they are like us and so we should be afraid.

Mid-credits scene topples the “pandemic” domino. Very very smart, fun choice (she said, spritzing her groceries with hand sanitizer).

The thrill of Rise carried me through the next three, but none of them rose to its heights.

Dawn: Cardboard characters, especially the pointless woman character. A classic conflict (coexistence vs. conquest, good ol’ Xavier vs. Magneto) loses power because nothing comes of the big philosophical moment when the Peace Ape, Caesar, succumbs to us vs. them thinking. The inner conflict of Caesar’s hopes vs. his fears, his memory of peace vs. his need to protect the apes’ future, resets for the next film. Well, the War Ape has a very funny bit where he pretends to be a fool in order to straight murder some humans, so the film isn’t all bad.

War for the Planet of the Apes and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes have the same story, which I disliked—apes vs. a tyrant. In War it’s a human tyrant and in Kingdom it’s an ape one, which should feel like a progression in the story, but Kingdom feels like a retread.

Kingdom does a thing that should have been really smart and interesting: It’s set “many generations later.” Caesar is long dead. There’s an orangutan who’s like the last monk(ey) in Caesar’s order, whose partial, oral-history understanding of Caesar’s life and work form a Gospel of the Planet of the Apes. Loved the clash between differing interpretations of Caesar’s legacy. The apes have their own cultures now, and I can’t tell you how much more I wanted about ape religion. There are apes in masks! What are the masks about?

But the problem with Kingdom is that it isn’t set on the Planet of the Apes!!! It turns out, spoilers I guess, that there have been humans just lurking this whole time, in a bunker, being normal, able to talk and everything! Kingdom brings back the humans vs. apes clash in the dumbest, most repetitive way possible. This should be a story about what Caesar means for apes! We have told the other story already, and we’re going to have it again when the astronauts return (to the planet of the apes).

If you want to be inspired by the possibilities of Franchise of the Planet of the Apes, you could do worse than this Screen Drafts episode ranking all of the films.

Sumatran orangutan photographed by Kabir Bakie, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.