The real triumph is Caesar, who will grow up to become the Che Guevara of chimps over the course of the film. Working with actor Andy Serkis and Weta Digital, Wyatt advances the art of motion capture to the point that all of the film’s key animal characters - which include dozens of chimps, a sage old orangutan and one incredibly temperamental gorilla - demonstrate incredibly detailed personalities that no trained monkey or ape-suited actor possibly could have conveyed. While the film’s stock characters and generic story components don’t feel especially fresh, the technical elements are so cutting edge that the film could not have existed in such polished form before now. Today, everyone knows the twist - that the topsy-turvy world the astronauts have returned to was Earth all along - which is the key element screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have carried over from the earlier movies, apart from a couple lines recycled for inside-joke appeal (e.g., “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”). The political context underlined the allegorical power of the Pierre Boulle novel that inspired it, raising the question as to whether somewhere in the universe a species more responsible than Man might exist.
When the first “Planet of the Apes” movie bowed in 1968, Fox’s cynical projection of man’s future came riding on a wave of nuclear alarmism, arriving just as the Civil Rights movement was in full swing.