Planet Of The Apes Essay

In both versions of ‘Planet of the Apes’, I interpreted much of the films to have underlying racial meanings. It is offensive to people of colour mainly because the tagline of this film is “rule the planet” and this helps explain that these films are about racial minorities taking over white supremacy. Whereas the white people must fight to gain back power, as if they are the people who must be in power. In the films it is seen as apes, though I saw them being the racial minorities or “others”. The lectures gave insight to Hollywood as a whole, in the sense that many of the cast members in each of these particular films were white. This happened quite often in films especially around the 1968 period, though improving slowly with time. In my eyes, this is because the white person is a social norm and subject of the majority in society. In the 1968 film, I really picked up on how the apes seemed to represent racial others, and it almost was used to give a sense of fear of racial minorities “taking over”. This was offensive to me and I completely understand how people of colour could be
This itself is simply representing the white dominance and portraying them as the people that should be in power. It seemed to me that humanity was seen as all white in this film, which obviously leads to the apes being seen as people of colour. The topic of apes ruling the world as well isn’t only Sci-Fi but relates to horror, as mentioned in the readings how these two genres are usually linked. I believe that these films were to provoke a sense of danger or fear of world dominance, whether by the apes or of white supremacy. This film to me almost seemed to be symbolic of the history of black slavery which also made it seem like a different form of racism in that