In 1963, French author Pierre Boulle published his sci-fi masterpiece
"Planet of the Apes" (La Planète des singes) a title we have all now come to know and love.
And while the 1960s film franchise and the book share the same story root, the book is pretty different from its beloved
adaptation. As we all know, the movie starts with Charlton
Heston and his team crash landing on an unknown planet. In the book, however, the story begins when a space
traveling couple named Phyllis and Jinn pick up a manuscript
floating in a bottle. Inside, the message is a testament of Ulysse Merou, a member of a French space
expedition which landed him on a planet named Soror, in the Betelgeuse System. Similar to Heston's George Taylor
Ulysse is shocked to find this unusual planet occupied by human-like creatures who act like wild animals and are unable to communicate.
These humans are rounded up and taken
prisoner by a group of apes riding horseback armed with machine guns, knives and nets. This scene is also included in Tim Burton's
2001 version of the film, where Mark Wahlberg's Captain Leo Davidson crash lands on Earth and is immediately attacked by a team of armored apes.
Both Ulysse and his film counterparts Taylor and Davidson are tied up and taken back to the apes’ city to be experimented on.
Unlike the 1968 film, where Taylor ultimately impresses his captors – namely Zira – with his ability to speak
That bright-eyes is remarkable!
in the book Ulysse faces some difficulty convincing the apes that he’s not one of the feral humans, as he speaks French and the apes speak
an advanced Simian language unlike anything he’s ever heard. When Ulysse does speak, his Zira thinks
he’s just “aping” them (no pun intended) and brush him off. It takes stealing her notebook and drawing out complicated
mathematical diagrams to convince her and her team
that he’s actually pretty smart. After some hard work and patience, Ulysse eventually learns to speak the Simian language and in return Zira learns French
allowing them to communicate with each other. This approach is a little less dramatic than Heston’s
Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!
But equally as effective. And while George Taylor is basically forced to stand trial against an assembly of apes all keen on
castrating and lobotomizing him, Taylor’s book counterpart gets to give a well thought-out speech in front of the ape government,
calmly making a case for his freedom and earning the support of the public.
Not exactly the same vibe. Another important part of the book is Zira’s fiancé
Cornelius’ discovery that apes didn’t naturally evolve into intelligence
but copied an older more advanced civilization. This backstory is revealed in both the
1972 Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Some 2000 years hence their descendants will have all but exterminated the human race on the face of the earth.
and in the more recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. Both films include (different) histories for the ape known as Caesar
effectively the patriarch of the ape uprising, and in Conquest, the son of Cornelius and Zira.
Two talking apes arrived on Earth and conceived a baby whose survival could threaten the future of the entire human race.
Cornelius’ discovery leads us to the end of the book as Ulysse’s life is put into danger
suddenly, as a member of the ancestral race, he’s a threat to the apes
and he’s forced to leave the planet on a spaceship with his wife, son, Zira, and Cornelius
a space ship which takes him back to Earth. Taylor on the other hand has a much worse fate in store, quickly
exiled and taken to The Forbidden Zone only to find out he’s been home on Earth all along.
This is also similar to
2001's Captain Leo Davidson
attempting to time travel home only to find he never left Earth in the first place. Dissimilar to the book, the original
movie’s theme (and its remakes) is one of hubris
leading the audience to believe that if Taylor could escape, he could safely return to Earth and
rightfully take his place once again at the top of the food chain.
Unfortunately, mankind’s tendency towards self-destruction and xenophobia
eventually leads us down a path of near-extinction, allowing the apes to step in as our
replacements. While Rod Serling was writing the original screenplay adaptation of Boulle’s
1963 work, he noted that, while Boulle is a talented and creative author, his book was simply a prolonged allegory about morality
rather than a fully thought out sci-fi piece.
Serling saw within it, however, the potential for what he called “a walloping science fiction idea.” By the time the
1968 film finally went into production
three other writers had altered Serling’s script, with all three deciding to keep Serling’s famous ending with Lady Liberty in the sand. To this day
the image of Charlton
Heston on his knees in the surf screaming in front of the statue is one of the most iconic pieces of film in history.