Anyone Asked If The Apes Wanted to Speak English?

When you're not a fan of the "Planet of the Apes" series and you watch one of the movies for the first time, you might chuckle—humans experimented and created intelligent apes, leading to a struggle between the two. Then, the Simian Flu virus breaks out and spreads worldwide, nearly wiping out humanity. Meanwhile, the evolved apes rise to the top of the food chain. In short, humans and apes have completely switched places.

I want to clarify that I'm not laughing because I look down on apes or out of arrogance towards my fellow homo sapiens; absolutely not. It's just that these stories seem to challenge human-centrism at first glance, but upon closer thought, they're just nonsense. They are still human self-portraits.

To be clear, I didn't watch the first three movies; I jumped straight into the fourth one. I usually avoid starting in the middle of a series, but I had no choice. A good friend of mine, who is a fan of the series, dragged me to watch it because the fourth movie had just been released on streaming platforms. So, a fair warning: my complaints might be very subjective and biased.

By the fourth minute of the film, I was already feeling awkward. What happened? The first scene shows apes holding a funeral for a deceased ape, raising their arms in a seemingly solemn ritual amid the flames. I later learned this followed the third movie's ending, where the ape leader Caesar led his people to a victorious escape and then died of old age. Then, the timeline jumps several generations into the future, showing three young apes, Noa, Anaya, and Soona, agilely climbing a cliff to fetch eagle eggs, as their tribe has a tradition of falconry. And then! By the fourth minute, they three suddenly start talking! They begin discussing how to divide the eagle eggs—in English! None of the apes had spoken human language until then, so I wasn't expecting it at all. Thankfully, I wasn't drinking anything, or I would've choked. Maybe because English isn't my native language, this scene felt really odd to me.

I just thought they have their own ape language. Some well-made movies create unique languages for their protagonists, like "Avatar," "Arrival," and "Dune." But it's not a big deal, given that these apes' ancestors were raised by English-speaking humans. Ironically, the movie makes an effort to tweak how they speak, making the apes' speech very... stilted? As the movie went on, I found their dialogue increasingly unbearable—it felt like the 145-minute runtime was stretched by at least 30 minutes due to this manner of speaking.

As for the technical aspects, alas, I’m not a special effects expert, but I am an honest viewer. The effects in this movie don’t seem much improved from "King Kong"(2005) nearly 20 years ago! Is it the only progress to evolve from creating one ape to creating hundreds? I'm hardly convinced by that.

Watching this movie is quite disheartening. You see how self-centered and arrogant the remaining humans are. The human girl Mae refuses to let human-made weapons and technology fall into ape hands, preferring to set off a bomb, flooding the area and endangering innocent apes. At the end, when she rides a horse to bid farewell to Noa, she still hides a handgun, even though Noa and other apes have saved her multiple times. She remains suspicious of them. While I don’t condone the villain Proximus Caesar's actions—destroying other tribes, enslaving apes to build an empire—I can't disagree with his motives. He accurately sees humans as selfish and arrogant, who are always ready to bully other species and monopolize resources, even the whole Earth.

In the story, humans are still selfish and arrogant; outside the story, it's the same case. The entire plot is essentially another "prince's revenge" tale. Oh, the production company thinks we're tired of lions (like in "The Lion King"), so they racked their brains and decided to give us apes instead. These apes are written to be more and more human-like; you can always predict their next move, as their behavior mirrors that of humans. The core of the story revolves around American national narratives, which has dominated the global market for decades, and now it's arrogantly assimilating ape stories into its framework. These movies show that humans sometimes just need to fabricate threat of another species to confirm their central position on Earth, providing both excitement and a sense of security.

But what would the apes in the zoo think? Has anyone asked if apes want to speak English? Or if they want to become the next species consuming the Earth?