A Furry Tale
"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes", a sequel to "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (2011), will be released on July 11. This is a reboot of Franklin Schaffner's "Planet of the Apes" (1968), so successful that four more films followed. It was first thought to be unfilmmable.
Pierre Boulle was already a celebrated author by the time he came up with the premise of the novel. His legacy was assured after the publication of "The Bridge on the River Kwai", which David Lean adapted to the big screen and won the lion's share of the Oscars in 1958. After a visit to the zoo, where he witnessed the apes' mimicry of human mannerisms, the French author came up with a story that would be a culmination of his lifetime experience. He studied science and engineering. He was a rubber planter in Malaya. He won the French Legion of Honor for his heroism during World War II.
Boulle used the story-within-a-story approch to create an engrossing tale. Jinn and Phyllis were sailing on space when they noticed a floating bottle. It contained a manuscript by a certain Ulysse Mérou. He was a journalist invited by Professor Antelle, a wealthy fellow who put his entire fortune into an ambitious project, the exploration of Betelgeuse, the second-brightest star in the constellation of Orion. It was super gigantic, the professor pointed out, and he thought of someone like Mérou to chronicle the expedition. Together with Arthur Levain, physicist and the professor's disciple, they traveled closed to the speed of light, reaching Soror, which have the same features as Earth. Or so they thought.
The trio discovered that the apes ruled the planet and men were nothing more than savages. Mérou was lucky enough to live long, struggling to keep his sanity, as he found out that these primates were intelligent, they have a caste system (of sort) to follow, and a human civilization once flourished on Soror. But what happened? Only Boulle could speculate, using a seam of socio-political satire to make this tale thought provoking. Mérou, with the help of chimpanzee researcher Zira, was able to convince the furry populace that men were also endowned with a mind. It brought him freedom, but many saw him as a threat. He managed to escape and travel back to Earth. To his chagrin, he met a gorilla driving a truck. As for Jinn and Phyllis, they shrugged off Mérou's account.
"Jinn let out the sail, exposing it to the combined reays of the three suns. Then he began to manipulate the driving levers, using his four agile hands, while Phyllis, after dismissing a last shred of doubt with an energetic shake of her velvety ears, took out her compact, and in view of their return to port, touched up her dear little chimpanzee muzzle."
On the surface, "Planet of the Apes" is a science fiction novel. But as the plot thickens, it becomes clear that the book is not defined by one genre. Some look at it as a portent of darker things to come, others see a cycle of evolution and devolution and evolution and so on. Boulle lets the readers decide. But there's a sensational effect, which even Hollywood couldn't ignore. But it took them years before the film version was finally shown.
