Re: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

On 2024-05-14, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

I remember the original Planet of the Apes movie quite well, despite
having only seen it on teleevision. That movie was justly praised...
and then its many sequels were justly execrated.

>
You should read the book.  It's also good, but different.

I did read Boulle's novel and found it poor.  Extracted from my
20-year old review:

[...]
The story is hopelessly naïve. Three guys just hop onto a space ship,
designed by a genius professor of course, travel hundreds of light years
without giving much thought to the fact that they will only return after
centuries of relative time, and parade around on a strange planet like
tourists. I mean, this may have seemed plausible at Verne's time, but a
century later?

The protagonist, Ulysse Mérou, is a fool. Humans are the crown of
creation, apes are lowly beasts. If they had met intelligent tentacle
monsters, that would have been fine, but apes? Preposterous. Come on,
you idiot, this is a strange planet, face the facts! I would have been
preoccupied with figuring out how a different planet came to be
populated by primate species so similar to their terrestrial
counterparts. Parallel evolution doesn't cut it. But this mystery never
comes to the mind of the narrator and we're forced to just accept the
absurdity. And of course there are real anatomical differences that
account for the fact that humans behave as humans and apes behave as
apes on Earth. On Soror, we're told, the only difference are the
exchanged roles. Primatologists will have a heart attack.

The main shocker is supposed to be the revelation that apes actually
succeeded humans as the top species on Soror. Apart from being
intrinsically implausible as depicted, where's the problem? Obviously
humanity _will_ evolve or perish. The whole book is steeped in outdated
mindsets, and I can't tell whether the author tries to mock them or just
considers them normal.
[...]

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de