Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (4 page)

Comes the Dawn

An
Apes
Franchise Retrospective

Tim Burton’s reimagining of 
Planet of the Apes
 (2001) will always serve as a ready example of why Hollywood reboots are often as forgettable as they are unnecessary. This, in spite of all the love and artistry that went into making the film, is the extent of its legacy. Chalk it up to Mark Wahlberg’s wide-eyed performance, which in the larger context of his filmography makes 
The Happening
 look like a masterwork of cinema by comparison—or to the offensively absurd ending. Either way, you are unlikely to find anything redeeming whatsoever within the film’s tedious runtime.

These kinds of confused, played-too-safe efforts tend to earn a lot of money by catering to filmgoers’ nostalgia and then under-delivering on the promise of something worthy of the original source material; the movie industry has grown increasingly fond of this lucrative business model, frustrating though it may be.

At the heart of this half-century-old franchise lies a sort of bleak, post-Darwinian poetry: the notion that two distinct species of sufficiently advanced intelligence, however similar, cannot coexist on the same planet in the same moment. It’s the key cultural meme that permeates the pre-2011 
Apes
 films: “The only good human is a dead human.” Owing as much to George Orwell’s 
Animal Farm
 as it does to the original ’63 Pierre Boulle novel, 
La Planète des singes
, this conceit echoes the universal struggle between oppressed and oppressor—between those with vast, unthinking power and those who lack the capacity to overcome it.

Burton’s film seems a touch too preoccupied with the cutesy ironies that result from its central reversal, and as a result is rife with overtones of racialism, xenophobia, and even latent bestiality. (“No, I think I’ll stick with my chimps,” says one of Davidson’s coworkers aboard the Air Force space station in which the film’s clumsy opening sequence takes place, when asked whether she plans on ever getting an “actual boyfriend.”)

But what keeps us coming back to this mythology, I think, are the themes explored so richly in Rupert Wyatt’s inspired 
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
 (’11)—a starkly different kind of film, which manages at once to reintroduce the world to its larger, established franchise while also maintaining a sense of novelty and relevance to contemporary audiences. Through Caesar’s viewpoint, we are made to empathize with the apes like never before as they gradually make preparations to escape their abusive habitat and seek refuge and freedom in the wild.

Let’s not forget, of course, that
 
Rise
also presents the first hard-science explanation for the uplifting of common primates to a level of sentience comparable to that of the average human being. By exploring the human struggle alongside Caesar’s journey, we see that each side has its reasons for the distrust and that ultimately leads to the sort of mutual, militant hatred glimpsed in the series’s 1968 original, starring Charlton Heston, and its handful of lesser sequels.

Andy Serkis’s MoCap performance in this entry is arguably the best in the franchise’s long, venerable history. And
 James Franco, delivering a solid performance, lends heart and believability to scientist Will Rodman, who spends most of the film’s plot trying to reverse his father’s dementia by developing a viral compound to pinpoint and repair damaged tissue in the human brain, effectively curing Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

There’s little doubt that
 
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
 (’14), which opens later this week, will continue to deepen and complicate the human/simian dynamic introduced in Wyatt’s brilliant 2011 reboot. Having established that a manned mission to Mars on the eve of the ALZ-113, or “Simian Flu,” pandemic has gone awry (a headline in the San Francisco 
Chronicle
 reads, lost in space?), we can probably assume that this new timeline intends to leave at least some of the original series’s tentpole moments intact.

I think it’s also safe to say that we won’t likely see the
 
Icarus
 spacecraft returning to Earth in 
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
; particularly if this new take on the mythology is intended to be a trilogy, that iconic moment ought to be kept in reserve for the third and final act. But!—I would anticipate, however, that 
Dawn
 has more than a few climactic surprises up its sleeve, given the amount of storytelling ground covered by its predecessor.

For instance, the trailers reveal a great deal of straightforward, armed combat between apes and humans following a few well-meaning individuals’ failed attempts at peacekeeping. It isn’t entirely out of the question to expect another apocalyptic moment like the Simian Flu outbreak, or even the nuclear holocaust that was so pivotal to earlier films in the franchise. While the first two
 
Apes
 entries toyed with audiences’ cultural anxieties about the Bomb, I’d expect the next two 
Rise
 sequels to employ destruction on a global scale in keeping with the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

Perhaps near-future tech involved in climateering, which we’ve seen handled well in “cli-fi” technothriller novels but rarely on the big screen, will become weaponized by Caesar’s resistance as a last-ditch effort at survival. Or perhaps the film will explore new modes of urbanized living, given the dramatic shift toward a small, endangered human population, that more readily benefit the apes. It’d be quite nice to see arcology and green initiatives play a role in the
 
Apes
 mythos, in light of changing ideas about climate change, Earth’s biosphere, modern apocalyptic realities, and neo-futurism.

Whatever path director Matt Reeves, along with screenwriter Mark Bomback and a truly phenomenal cast that includes Jason Clarke (
Zero Dark Thirty
) and Keri Russell (
August Rush
), ultimately chooses . . . well, it’s safe to say we’re likely to be spared another atrocity like Burton’s 2001 contribution, which I hesitate to dignify with its unearned, studio-given title. But that’s putting it all a bit too cynically. In truth, the franchise’s future has only brightened following the release of 
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
 three years back, and I look forward to seeing where Andy Serkis’s Caesar takes us.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Decade’s Best Sci-Fi Film Since
Inception

As a species, making war is something we’ve gotten pretty good at. It stands to reason that, when the threat of extinction rears its head, talk of machine-guns and rocket launchers and C-4 will follow soon enough. It’s why the United States and its allies invade nations and topple dictatorships so routinely: We don’t like the possibility of another group controlling the resources we depend on, or overstepping established territorial boundaries—as a country, we’ve killed for far less.

The idea that our world’s leaders might have questionable intentions when it comes to warfare is something that, while pretty incendiary as a matter of public discourse, has been examined in post-9/11 art and cinema with relative frequency. Films like
 
Green Zone
(2010, Greengrass) and 
Zero Dark Thirty
 (2012, Bigelow) set their sights on issues of falsified intelligence, torture, surveillance—and war as something governments and high-profit industries manufacture deliberately for monetary gain.

Science fiction has also taken a number of stabs at this sort of subject matter in the recent past, and most have come across as admirable in their ambitions, regardless of critical success:
 
Star Trek Into Darkness
 (’13), 
A Scanner Darkly
 (’06), 
The Dark Knight
(’08). There exists a pervasive understanding in this country that privacy is a thing of the recent past, handed over at will to powerful people ranging from Mark Zuckerberg to the more proactive members of the Bush administration. Films like Christopher Nolan’s have done a fine job of exploring this problem.

Never sacrificing the needs of the story at hand to make a political point, however, Matt Reeves achieves a new standard for complexity and nuance in contemporary SF cinema. One surprise standout character is Koba, an ape held captive and tortured by the very same Gen-Sys Laboratories researchers who created the Simian Flu and wiped out much of humanity in the previous film,
 
Rise
, several years earlier. A reluctant but helpful ally to Caesar in Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 entry, Koba’s tendencies for violence and deceit bubble to the surface in this tremendously successful, heartfelt sequel.

While we are made to empathize with his hatred toward human beings, Reeves ultimately shows us that Koba is incapable of devotion to anyone or anything beyond his own selfish hunger for vengeance, given the harm inflicted on him in the past. And this is an important and understated facet of warfare in the modern age: Our cultures and nations are hesitant to cop to anything resembling forgiveness for the crimes and injustices of the previous century, and it eats at our global civilization like a cancer.

Caesar, by contrast, is steadfast in his belief that peace is the solution to most of our problems—and no wrongdoing is so severe that an entire race should be made to suffer for it. No doubt the third film in this newly rebooted incarnation of the 
Apes
 saga will present a far more cynical version of the creature Andy Serkis has portrayed twice with such groundbreaking skill and finesse. Along with the apes who stand beside him—Maurice, Rocket, his own growing family—Caesar represents the very antithesis of the human-loathing, slavekeeping apes first seen in Franklin J. Schaffner’s original 1968 masterpiece. I fear the weary leader shall eventually be made to suffer for the goodness in his heart.

Overall, the film is an emotional and technical marvel. Its visual effects are used sparingly in light of the MoCap work done by Weta Digital on Serkis’s and the other apes’ performances. Several tense fight sequences serve as tentpole moments to delineate the quieter, more universal tragedies and debates that propel the plot along
—but audiences can rejoice at being spared the kind of ludicrous, explosion-riddled battle scenes that plague most summer blockbusters of late.

Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman, and Kodi Smit-McPhee (no longer the child actor you remember from
 
The Road
 and Reeves’s own sublime horror film 
Let Me In
) round out a stellar cast that nevertheless surrenders most of its camera time to the scene-stealing apes. I dare say that 
Dawn
 can easily be called 
The Empire Strikes Back
 of this generation, and, outside of a few high-concept outliers like 
Source Code
 and
Inception
, is perhaps the single greatest science fiction movie of the decade.

My Dream Anthology

Recommended Reading (Short Fiction) for SFSignal.com’s Mind Meld

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I’ve always felt that the literature of science fiction and fantasy
—or 
fantastika
, to employ John Clute’s simpler, far more inclusive-sounding term—ought to make us feel uncomfortable in some way. Unsettled. At the very least, a reader of fiction should be left with an experience worth remembering; and an idea presented in a way that’s strange or inobvious is going to stay in the mind much longer than a story told via the path of least resistance. Certainly a work of fantasy should get us thinking about the world in fresh, unfamiliar ways—even, I’d argue, if it makes us feel slightly disturbed.

Consider Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Is there any greater conversation-starter for the topic of social responsibility, or the ethics of suffering, in literature? And I’ve always felt a profound sympathy toward Bradbury’s tragic Leonard Mead, who went out for a peaceful walk in the nighttime air and found himself declared a criminal. The short-story form is a graveyard packed full of these kinds of dystopian injustices.

I once caught an episode of the 
Outer Limits
 reboot, circa 2000, about a scientist who uses the preserved consciousness of his dead son to build an android replacement. The acting and writing were pedestrian, at best, but the quietly horrific nature of the grieving man’s ambition, coupled with the dissatisfying end result of his efforts at resurrecting his lost child, is ultimately an unforgettable piece of storytelling. Not that I wouldn’t 
prefer
 to forget it; I simply won’t.

This technique made Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” a canonical piece of writing. Call it “shock value,” if you like. But it so often defines whatever genre makes proper use of it. Flirting with human deviance and taboos; exposing the faults in all our technocultural hive-making; not to mention the use of nightmarish imagery to evoke a more visceral reaction in the reader
. . . .

Science fiction often becomes a study in contrasts, painting for us a clearer picture of what it means to be human by filling the negative space with a reality we’d rather not experience ourselves. There is a perceived dichotomy among critics
—between fiction that holds scientific progress in a high regard, and that which shows it to be inherently dangerous or wrongheaded. But I sincerely doubt that any writer working in the field of SF believes that science or invention is a thing to be feared; instead, it seems that the literature concerns itself first and foremost with maintaining the humanity in our global society.

Whether holding to light the frightening metaphysical implications of idealism, as with Dick’s “The Electric Ant,” or showing us just how utterly
 
different
 we may one day become in our unending quest for immortality through advancing biotech, as with “Married,” “Jenny’s Sick,” or “The People of Sand and Slag,” fantastika is becoming increasingly more imaginative and diverse. More 
dreamlike
. And I think that notions of genre will prove just as elastic in the years to come, whether the intent is to elevate scientific progress, to terrify the reader, or both.

A Study in Contrasts: Fantastika in All Its Forms

•
“The Electric Ant,” Philip K. Dick, 
F&SF
 (Oct. 1969)

•
“Jenny’s Sick,” David Tallerman, 
Lightspeed
 (Dec. 2010)

•
“Liking What You See: A Documentary,” Ted Chiang, 
Stories of Your Life and Others

•
“Married,” Helena Bell, 
Upgraded
, ed. Clarke (2014)

•
“A Touch of Strange,” Theodore Sturgeon, 
F&SF
 (Jan. 1958)

•
“The People of Sand and Slag,” Paolo Bacigalupi, 
F&SF
 (Feb. 2004)

•
“Real Artists,” Ken Liu, 
TRSF
 (Oct. 2011)

•
“Significant Dust,” Margo Lanagan, 
Cracklescape

•
“The Pedestrian,” Ray Bradbury, 
F&SF
 (Feb. 1952)

•
“Anuta Fragment’s Private Eyes,” Ben Godby, 
Shimmer
 no. 18 (Feb. 2014)

•
“The Brave Little Toaster,” Cory Doctorow, 
TRSF
 (Oct. 2011)

•
“She Unnames Them,” Ursula K. Le Guin, 
The New Yorker
 (Jan. 1985)

•
“Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),” Geoff Ryman, 
F&SF
 (Oct. 2006)

• “All My Princes Are Gone,” Jennifer Giesbrecht,
Nightmare
(Aug. 2013)

•
“Of Time and Third Avenue,” Alfred Bester, 
F&SF
 (Oct. 1951)

•
“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland,” Gwyneth Jones, 
Off Limits
, ed. Datlow (1997)

•
“A Jar of Goodwill,” Tobias S. Buckell, 
Clarkesworld
 (May 2010)

• “Resurrection Points,” Usman T. Malik,
Strange Horizons
(Aug. 2014)

•
“Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” William Gibson, 
Unearth 3
 (1977)

•
“You Will Hear the Locust Sing,” Joe Hill, 
The Third Alternative
 no. 37 (2004)

•
“Six Months, Three Days,” Charlie Jane Anders, 
Tor.com
 (Jun. 2011)