In Tim Burton’s, Planet of the
Apes, the duality that I found to be most prominent was civil liberties verse
slavery. The film presented two different living worlds, each with opposite
values. Values which were based off of who is deserving of civil rights and who
should be put into slavery. Throughout the film we see through the eyes of
Captain Leo Davidson as he travels between these two different societies.
Davidson, who works for the United States space program, starts off in America
where ape were in caged and trained to do human like activities. During a space
exposition, Captain Davidson gets pulled through time by an electric storm and
ends up falling into a completely different planet. In this new world he finds
that his rights do not apply to life anymore. In fact, it seems to be a
complete switch. The planet in which he has land on is ran by apes. Humans were
deemed the weaker animal. Therefore, instead of the ape’s beings behind the
bars, the humans were the ones in cages.
In the beginning of the film there
is a scene where the apes are slaves in the spaceship. In this scene, the
control man of the space pods pushes Captain Davidson’s chimp out of his cage
and into space despite the dangerous risk of it. The chimp was chosen to fly
into space because he is considered the weaker animal due to the fact that he
is different, and can’t speak and act like humans. So, in turn, the chimp is
like a slave- following the demands of the humans. An opposing scene would be
when Davidson is taken to this opposite world and the humans are in cages and
branded by the apes to signify they are of difference, and lower ranking. The
human’s purpose is to become a slave and to serve the apes. Both scenes
demonstrate character development on Captain Davidsons part because we can
experience through his eyes what it is like to be on the flip side of the cage.
He seems to be the only character who has a complete understanding of what it
means to have civil liberties, and what it is like to have zero liberty at all.
I agree that the film showed a lot of meaning towards civil liberties. The way the apes treated the humans was as if they were the slaves...mainly domestic slaves from what I remember. Even though the humans could speak and were probably educated, they kept quiet in fear that they would be punished if they were to speak. Even though I obviously did not live during the times of the 1960s...I imagine that the life of a slave would have been somewhat similar. -Ximena Garcia-Ruiz
ReplyDeleteI liked how you related the humans (on the planet of the apes) to twentieth century slaves. Because both in this movie and times of slavery, a certain group of people believed they were better than others because they looked different than another group of people-- even though both groups of people were very similar and neither was better than the other.
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