Both ape and human societies have individuals who push for war, and those that want to maintain the peace. One human shoots an ape, and this conflict eventually leads to an uneasy peace, as the members of both the "ape home" and the human colony weigh their fear of the other against their desire for peace. As in our world energy demands lead to conflict between different cultures. The are seeking access to a dam in order to restore power. The peace is disturbed when a small band of humans from what remains of San Francisco enter the woods. The political structure of ape society is caught somewhere between genetic superiority and a benevolent monarchy as alpha chimp Caesar (not the children of time travellers from a distant future as in the original films, but the most accelerated of the apes) rules with wisdom and consideration. There is also the emergence of ape style and fashion, from face paint to garlands of flowers, a trend that mirrors real discoveries in primatology. They have had to adapt to the ecology of northern California, hunting elk instead of gathering fruit and hunting termites, and to their new social structure, the ape categorical imperative 'ape not kill ape" is written on the wall where an orangutan teaches a class of young, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas. Everything about this scene shows that the apes, having previously been hurtled through genetic evolution by way of lab experiment, are now gradually moving through cultural evolution. This is revealed in the opening credits, the film itself opens on the apes now living in the Muir woods. Much of humanity is decimated by the simian flu. Like Rise before it Dawn constitutes as kind of guerrilla war on the franchise, attacking not its most iconic and memorable stronghold over the cultural imagination ( Planet of the Apes and its Statue of Liberty Scene), but the weakest points, the points where the gap between concept and execution is wide enough to ride an ape army on horseback through.ĭawn takes place ten years after Rise. Must man and ape always be at war? Dawn in some sense addresses the same question, minus the time travel loop and with a much bigger budget. The central question of Battle, which takes place after Caesar's parents have been sent back in time, is one of repetition and fate. Battle tried to wrestle with the time travel loop and a diminishing budget. Dawn is in some sense a remake of the last and most burdened of these films, Battle for the Planet of the Apes. These allegories have been explored by Eric Greene in his Planet of the Apes as American Myth. One of the real merits of his book is that it shows that the shifting subtexts of the Apes films, from Serling's atom age anxieties of annihilation to the militant racialized revolutionaries of the later films, are less a plan than an attempt to keep up with the shifting readings of the films while still getting a film out on time.
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