You can judge a classic of science-fiction cinema by its longevity. The success of Planet of the Apes was such that it immediately resulted in a film saga (four titles between 1970 and 1973) and two television series (one by the same name in 1974 and an animated one the following year) and, much later, a remake by Tim Burton (2001) and a new saga- reboot of a further four films between 2011 and 2024. That said, the initial project for Warner Bros. did not take off. Blake Edwards, who was tasked with directing, quit. Then 20th Century Fox stepped in with Franklin J. Schaffner, who thus achieved his first hit. The original story came from the book of the same name by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle, and was adapted by Rod Serling (the brilliant creator of The Twilight Zone) and Michael Wilson, who had won Oscars for A Place in the Sun and The Bridge on the River Kwai – the latter another Boulle adaptation, for which the blacklisted Wilson received his award only posthumously. The story is well known: three American astronauts land on an unknown planet dominated by apes. The primates have constructed a highly evolved society and hunt humans, who are unable to speak and have been reduced to animal- like conditions. The science-fiction paradox resides entirely in this game of reversal and mirroring, in the human voices “displaced”, as Vivian Sobchack put it, onto simian bodies. It is a backwards world, in which those who are normally dominant are dominated, an “upside-down civilisation”, as the protagonist played by Charlton Heston defines it. The world produced by this reverse evolution picks up on and exaggerates the negative qualities of Western civilisation. When the film came out in 1968, these themes inevitably led to political readings – which the disconcerting and hallucinatory ending only reinforced. It is worth noting that in the obscurantist world created by the apes, the only truly positive character, who is motivated by a thirst for knowledge and the ability to observe the world without prejudice or ideological filters, is a chimpanzee woman, Dr Zira.

Alice Autelitano