By pure hot-streak longevity, the most impressive feat in Hollywood franchising is the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and may – may – finally wrap up next year, after eight entries and nearly 30 years without a single continuity reboot. But true to the fictional history of the Planet of the Apes series, it may be the apes who ultimately inherit this title from the petty, small-minded humans. The original Planet of the Apes came out in 1968 – and based on first weekend box office and positive reviews for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest installment of a rebooted series that began in 2011, the series will probably remain when the first movie reaches its 60th anniversary in just four years. This may be the most purely resilient series in Hollywood.
Yes, when you factor in reboots, the James Bond series has been kicking around for longer (though not by all that much). But the Bond movies have a lot of things that a lot of people traditionally like in their motion pictures: cars, guns, globe-hopping locations, attractive human beings triumphing over supervillains. The majority of the Planet of the Apes movies have little of this, and instead feature – multi-spoiler alert? – humans losing, badly. It’s a hallmark of the series, whether through the psychological damage inflicted by the original movie’s now-famous twist ending (the ape world isn’t a far-flung planet at all, but Earth!), the deadly Covid-like flu that spreads over the end credits of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the savage beatings and killings administered for 30 solid minutes at the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, or the total destruction of all life on Earth – amazingly, that last one happens in the second film.
How the series manages to recover from that early blow involves time travel and a continuing question of whether a grim future for human and/or ape-kind is inevitable, or something that can be altered with more peaceful intentions. The fifth and final film of that cycle, 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, leaves that question hanging with impressive boldness, considering it was, at the time, considered something of a kiddie-movie programmer. (The stuff the older movies got away with under the auspices of G ratings – only one of them went as high as PG, and it’s not the one featuring full-frontal nudity and the end of the world – is truly stunning by today’s standard.) The first five movies came out in rapid succession, and if their attempts to quickly process turn-of-the-decade tumult sometimes turn awkward, their willingness to do so lend them surprising immediacy.
The current four-movies-and-counting series is more straightforward and less twisty, starting from a present day that looks much like ours did in 2011, before diverging into a world where the super-intelligent ape Caesar (played via motion-capture by Andy Serkis) leads his compatriots as they form their own society as the scarce human survivors grapple with their place in the world. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set hundreds of years past Caesar’s story, and though there are a few humans in the movie, the film-makers feel more comfortable than ever letting the apes carry it. All four movies showcase some truly astonishing special effects, fusing the lifelike detail of cutting-edge computer graphics with the ineffably human weight of real actors – perfect for movies about redefining humanity, where it can be found, and how it might persevere (or not) over the years.
Then again, the increasingly chintzy-looking ape costumes from the earlier movies got their point across, too. The older films’ progressively diminished budgets afforded the film-makers some major creative pivots and potentially audience-alienating risks, especially in establishing the many ways that humans might bring themselves to the brink of extinction. Plenty of movie franchises spend time saving and re-saving the world; the Apes movies observe it on the brink of apocalypse. Admittedly, the newer ones move at a more deliberate, franchise-approved tempo that repeats certain story elements in order to stretch out the prequelizing, and occasionally cry out for some heedless leaps into the unknown. At the same time, their more staid plotting is also a form of evolution; they’re adapting to sustain themselves in a different cinematic environment, telling more familiar stories while still managing to push the experimental elements of constructing movies around photorealistic animal characters. (If this ever looks simple, consider the unwatchably dull Lion King remake.) Stuck in the middle of the two series is a Tim Burton version from 2001 that virtually no one likes; even this has bold flourishes, like terrific ape makeup and an admirably WTF attempt to replicate the original’s twist.
The Burton film ended a 28-year silence from the Apes movies (though marathons and a couple of TV series kept the franchise in the popular consciousness). This means that the films haven’t been plentiful enough to reflect every major sociopolitical anxiety since their inception; imagine what the series, which has tackled racial unrest and environmental devastation, could have done with the Reagan 80s! At the same time, this is the rare long-running franchise that doesn’t feel wrung dry by the wrenching demands of nostalgia or the sheer number of spent ideas. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may ultimately play it safe with some of its more provocative ideas, opting to punt some developments into the realm of future installments’ problem. But one of those ideas speaks precisely to why the apes endure.
In the movie, the leadership of Caesar has inspired multiple interpretations in generations-later apes; justly or not, he’s become an abstraction, and he can’t be revived to provide guidance – to the characters or the franchise. Caesar may be a pivotal figure in both iterations of Apes lore, but the series’ long-term durability does not and cannot depend on him. The real main character is the ticking clock running on this world’s potential ruin.
