Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. – Sophocles

　　“I cant help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” So ponders astronaut George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) in the 1968 original Planet of the Apes. Decades later, in an interview promoting Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, co-leads Owen Teague (“Noa”) and Freya Allen (“Mae”) declared they were on “Team Ape” against humanity.

　　“Look at what the humans have done to the earth,” Teague said. “I dislike humans a lot,” agreed Allen. “There are times when you see humans come together and you go ‘Oh, isn’t this lovely?’ And then there’s times when you go ‘I absolutely hate us.’”

　　Such anti-human cliches, beyond their typical Hollywood superciliousness, betray an ironic blindness to the rich humanist legacy bequeathed to these actors by the preceding trilogy of movies, beginning with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

　　A story about sentient apes runs the obvious risk of coming across as taking itself too seriously. And yet, the reason it works so well is that the viewer finds that he has accepted—perhaps never even questioned—that these apes are, actually, quite human.

　　To have lasting relevance, a drama must transcend what is incidental—or, as in this case, one’s own species—to present as an object for contemplation those experiences that constitute what Samuel Johnson called “the genuine progeny of common humanity.” The choice to endow apes with human intellectual and spiritual qualities throws into relief the permanent, immaterial aspects of human nature. Through these apes, we witness the human drama unfold anew from a fresh perspective.

　　Rise

　　Though I think this ethos, which Teague and Allen misunderstand, is on display most fully in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, I want first to lay out a few thoughts concerning its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

　　At its core, Rise is a drama of the coming-into-being of the rational—and therefore, political—faculty in a nonhuman animal. More specifically, within a chimpanzee named Caesar, played by the brilliant Andy Serkis, whose intelligence is the result of exposure to ALZ-112, a drug developed to cure Alzheimer’s.

　　Caesar struggles to comprehend his own nature because while physically, he is a chimpanzee, inside he possesses the mind and heart of a man. He desires to be with his own kind, yet he belongs fully neither to the category of human or ape. Apes may share his biological lineage, but they do not share his moral essence.

　　Caesar’s internal conflict is compelling because it stems from Aristotle’s core insight into human nature, in Book I of The Politics:

　　Whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals … the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like.

　　Caesar’s rational nature becomes most apparent when his adoptive human father, the scientist Will Rodman (played by James Franco), houses him in an ape sanctuary. Caesar signs to Maurice (an orangutan who also knows sign language), “Apes alone weak. Apes together strong,” only to then watch as the others shriek, fight, and act like, well, animals.

　　That is, until Caesar manages to steal canisters of the ALZ drug and expose the other apes to it, elevating them to his level of intelligence. From this, solidarity and organization quickly follow. The apes escape and, after a dramatic showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge, make a new home for themselves in the redwood forest. However, as Caesar learns in Dawn, life as a rational animal is defined not by the upward climb of IQ points, but by the moral horizons that logos unveils.

　　Noble Savages?

　　Dawn takes place a decade after the events of the first film. An epidemic resulting from a mutation of the ALZ drug has wiped out most of humanity, leaving civilization in ruins and only a few of the genetically immune alive. The apes, meanwhile, have formed a fledgling hunter-gatherer society in the woods. They raise families and pass down to new generations the three principles—literally etched into stone—that bind their community together:

　　Ape not kill ape.

　　Apes together strong.

　　Knowledge is power.

　　A group of humans, led by the well-intentioned Malcolm (played by Jason Clark), unintentionally trespass into ape territory while attempting to reactivate a hydroelectric dam to restore power to San Francisco, where a few hundred survivors have gathered. The apes, though initially suspicious, cautiously agree to let them do so, mostly because Caesar, raised by humans, is sympathetic. Soon, though, dissension spreads, sparked by another ape named Koba (played by Toby Kebbell), a bonobo scarred physically and mentally by laboratory experimentation and who harbors a deep resentment towards humans.

　　Koba pushes for a preemptive strike against the human settlement, but is shut down by Caesar, who cautions, “If we go to war, we could lose all we’ve built. Home. Family. Future.”

　　Koba: If they get power, they’ll be more dangerous! Why help them?!

　　Caesar: They seem desperate. If we make them go, they’ll attack.

　　Koba: Let them! We’ll destroy them while they’re weak.

　　Caesar: And how many apes will die? We have one chance for peace. Let them do their human work. Then they’ll go.

　　Koba storms off, the seed of murderous treachery planted in his heart. “From humans, Koba learned hate,” Caesar tells his son, Blue Eyes, “but nothing else.”

　　Though he grasps the moral complexity of humans, Caesar is an idealist when it comes to apes. “Humans destroyed each other,” Caesar signs to Maurice while reflecting upon humanity’s demise. “Apes fight too,” the latter counters, but Caesar is dismissive. “But we are family.”

　　Paradise Lost

　　Koba poses a deeply personal challenge to Caesar’s faith in the basic goodness of apes, compelling him to confront a darkness that does not dwell in man’s heart alone. Even after their disagreement comes to physical blows, the look on Caesar’s face when Koba raises a rifle and shoots him is shock and disbelief.

　　Koba’s actions are those of a proto-Machiavel, and like an apish version of Richard III, his human-inflicted scars and deformities seem to make him “determined to prove a villain.” After framing humans for Caesar’s assassination and setting the ape village on fire, Koba leads the apes in an attack on the San Francisco settlement. As he witnesses firsthand the sacking and violence inflicted upon the humans, Blue Eyes runs into Malcolm, who leads him back to the house where his family has been nursing Caesar’s gunshot wound.

　　The Planet of the Apes movies show us that life as a rational animal is defined not by the upward climb of IQ points, but by the moral horizons which logos unveils.

　　Reflecting on the conflict that has devastated both communities, Caesar admits, “I am to blame. I chose to trust [Koba] because he is ape. I always think ape better than human. I see now how much like them we are.”

　　This revelation is the beating heart of the movie, and it’s a shame that it seems to have been lost upon Owen and Freya. Like Koba, they cynically choose to see only the evil that humans do. But as Caesar shows, cynicism is insufficient. Instead, the problem of evil should rekindle the noble qualities the human heart is capable of: compassion and endurance and sacrifice.

　　Reluctant Foes, Kindred Souls

　　When the final showdown between Koba and Caesar ends with the former dangling by his fingertips from a skyscraper, he appeals to the first and most foundational of ape laws: “Ape not kill ape.” Surveying those Koba has killed and wounded, Caesar declares, “You are not ape,” before allowing him to plunge to his death. Koba’s actions have betrayed his nature as an ape and severed the moral bonds connecting him to others.

　　Dawn’s final scene is a positive, mirrored version of this moment. Malcolm and Caesar lament the war that, thanks to Koba, is now unavoidable:

　　Caesar: You must go before fighting begins. I am sorry, my friend.

　　Malcolm: I thought we had a chance.

　　Caesar: I did too.

　　Then, Caesar presses his forehead to Malcolm’s, a tender gesture typically reserved only for apes. This gesture indicates more than mutual respect. It is an acknowledgment of a bond between two noble beings, kindred souls united by a shared nature but tragically forced into enmity by circumstances beyond their control.

　　The dirty little Aristotelian secret to understanding the Planet of the Apes series is that the characters most deserving of the title “human” in its fullest teleological sense may walk on either two or four limbs. Likewise, those who choose malice, treachery, and violence are less worthy of the title, regardless of their physical form.

　　Caesar and Malcolm want above all to preserve life and maintain the peace. They fight to ensure that their families and communities can live in safety and security. In a significant sense, Caesar has more in common with Malcolm than he does with Koba.

　　Bronze Age Revert

　　Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes—which premiered in May of this year—takes place centuries later in the ape equivalent of the Bronze Age. Apes have organized into clans, while humanity has regressed to be a primitive herd animal due to a further mutation of the ALZ virus, which deprived them of their rational faculty and ability to speak.

　　Noa, a young chimpanzee from the falconry clan, embarks on a quest to find his friends after the raiding forces of “Proximus Caesar,” the warrior-king of a coastal empire, torch his village and enslave his clan (apparently forgetting “Ape not kill ape”).

　　Proximus Caesar legitimizes his rule by distorting the teachings of the original Caesar, who has passed from historical figure to largely forgotten myth. Pomp, pageantry, and aggressive shows of force have replaced Caesar’s courageous leadership. Each morning Proximus greets his subjects with, “What a wonderful day!” and declares himself Caesar’s rightful heir.

　　Proximus’s kingdom surrounds what used to be a human military installation, and unlike most apes, he knows what humanity used to be. He believes that an impenetrable vault, which he has amassed a large slave labor force to open, holds the knowledge necessary to secure a flourishing future for apes via “instant evolution”—the notion that in order to possess utter dominion over nature and the last vestiges of humanity, apes must recover all the knowledge and technology that was lost when human civilization fell. When Proximus and his subjects chant “Apes together strong,” it is a reaffirmation that they are the embodiment of progress that will propel apekind from hominidae to homo technē. But how different from the scientific hubris of the humans is the idea of “instant evolution” really?

　　Team Human

　　We thus return to the silliness of choosing Team Ape. Misanthropy is not an acceptable attitude; not even when it wears the less threatening mask of virtue-signaling. The ethos of softcore anti-humanism constricts and compresses one’s moral imagination, while at the same time afflicting the heart with a double-blindness: a blindness first to the nobility and beautiful acts of which humanity alone is capable, and secondly a blindness towards evil and cruelty. If Teague and Allen are vehement supporters of Team Ape, that means apes conduct themselves in a morally superior manner … right?

　　More viscerally than any of its predecessors, Kingdom shows that apes are not a foil to mankind, but its mirror. Apes murder and enslave one another. Apes seek to exterminate humanity. And apes desire the same scientific mastery over nature for which, presumably, Kingdom’s actors condemn mankind.

　　In the movie’s final scene, Mae returns to a colony of intelligent humans and successfully makes radio contact with other colonies, starting the process of rebuilding civilization, while through an old telescope, Noa gazes with wonder at the night sky, a distinctly human activity according to Aristotle, as “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.”

　　“A human by any other name …” et cetera, et cetera.

　　So, apologies to George Taylor, but there is no creature “better than man.” No other creature is capable of morality or any other way of being beyond unconscious obedience to Darwinian law. It is man’s unique privilege to carry the spark of the divine.

　　But to be fair to Teague and Allen, swinging from vines does look like good fun. What a piece of work is man indeed.