Today, Planet of the Apes airs on TCM and it’s a movie that I saw, honestly, dozens of times in the seventies and eighties. I watched it and its sequels over and over again, even giving the lousy television show a chance, and buying anything associated with the franchise, from lunchboxes to Viewfinder slides. POTA, as it will hence be called with each sequel following suit, was much bigger for me than Star Wars ever was and a part of the appeal is and was the time travel element. Specifically, the way the story folds in on itself and the consequences of one action will become the set of events that sets off the actions that become the consequences of the first action. It’s like one huge cinematic Möbius strip, with each side being the same side while occupying different sides at the same time. Yes, the movies got cheaper and except for the leads, every ape became an extra in a low-rent rubber mask and, no, I don’t care. There’s a storytelling arc there and it’s gutsier than a lot of sci-fi that gets produced.
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If that opening paragraph doesn’t make any sense to you, let me explain by giving you a quick and easy plot synopsis of the whole series. The way the story is setup, the end of the story is the end of the second movie and the fifth movie ends before the first movie starts. If one were to try and follow the story on a linear arc, it would probably be best to start with the third movie, go through the fourth and fifth, then loop back to the first and second. Of course, the third wouldn’t make as much sense without watching the first and second so we have a story that requires the third act be understood before the first and second acts are presented. Here’s what happens (SPOILER, I guess, but don’t we all know this by now?):
In the first movie, POTA, Taylor (Charlton Heston) and his two fellow astronauts, Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton), crash land on a mysterious planet in the year 3978 AD, meaning they have traveled a couple of thousand years into the future on their journey. They don’t know where they are but soon discover a band of humans who are mute and a ruling class of apes who speak. The apes are shocked to find Taylor can speak and don’t believe his stories about his home planet or that he came on a spaceship. Landon and Dodge are lobotomized and killed, respectively. Taylor eventually escapes with the aid of two chimpanzees, Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), and discovers that he is, in fact, on Earth in the distant future.
In the second movie, BTPOTA, another astronaut from Earth, Brent (James Franciscus), shows up looking for the lost expedition that preceded him, the one led by Taylor. He finds Taylor, eventually, and a group of mutant humans living underground that have a doomsday device and, long story short, they set it off and a narrator announces the world is now dead (though no one has the wherewithal to play We’ll Meet Again).
That’s technically the end of the story as it is the end of the planet. So if one were following the story of men and apes, it ends there and the beginning of the story follows with EFTPOTA. In that one it is revealed that three of the sentient, speaking chimpanzees from the previous movies (well, two were in the first movie, Zira and Cornelius, and one is a new character, Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo)) fixed up Taylor’s spaceship and escaped on it just as the planet was exploding, sending them on the same time journey the other way, landing on Earth in 1973. There, Zira has a child, Caesar, who is seen speaking at the end, asking for his now dead mother. The fourth and fifth installments further the story of Caesar and end over a thousand years before the events of the first movie, with humans and apes coexisting peacefully. Not that those two are unimportant but it is the third film that circles back to the first: If Taylor never ended up on the planet in the first place, apes would have never become the dominant speaking species. They only became so because they were able to go back in time and establish themselves thanks to Taylor landing there in the first movie. At the moment Taylor and his ship enter the atmosphere, the planet is either ruled by apes or it isn’t. If Taylor’s ship blows up into a million pieces, the apes aren’t down there talking because without his ship, they’ll never make it back to past Earth to become the dominant species. If his ship survives, they do exist.
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But here’s the thing: How did they learn how to talk? They never actually evolved to be speaking primates. Caesar was simply born to Zira who was already an ape who could talk. She could only talk because Caesar existed to start an ape civilization that would eventually allow for Zira to be born. So Zira and the rest of the talking apes of the first movie only exist as talking apes because they already did exist as talking apes. Their existence begets their existence. It’s like the watch in Somewhere in Time. Jane Seymour, as an old woman, gives it to Christopher Reeve in 1972. Christopher Reeve travels back in time to 1912 and gives the watch back to Jane Seymour when she is a young woman. She holds onto the watch for 60 years, then gives it back to Christopher Reeve in 1972. He travels back to 1912, gives it back to her. She holds onto it for 60 years, repeat. The watch was never manufactured, never bought, never sold. It just exists. The universe just made it, at some point. We don’t even know who had it first. Reeve couldn’t have because it was given to him by Seymour but she couldn’t have had it first because it was given to her by Reeve. The watch exists because it exists. The apes can talk because they can talk. Why? Because, that’s why. It’s the perfect circle, if you can square it in your head.