![]() ![]() Imagine falling in love with a woman so beautiful at first glance that you’re convinced she must be the apex of creation, and then finding out that instead of communicating with language, she can only mewl, grunt and growl. This inversion sets the stage for a neat philosophical allegory a series of tongue-in-cheek revelations about the way things are and the way they could be, and about human carelessness and complacency. When they look around, they soon discover that’s where the similarities end - that this a planet on which monkeys are king and humans mere primates. ![]() The premise is both smart and simple: in 2500, a bunch (a shrewdness?) of French scientists travel to a distant star and land on an Earth-like planet. But, by the time James Franco and Mark Wahlberg got involved, the original story had mutated into action-heavy, plot-light popcorn fare (the latest being 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes) – a shame, because the book is great and its offspring, as most parents know to be true but refuse to say out loud, far from does it justice. In 1963, Pierre Boulle, author of 50s’ bestseller The Bridge over the River Kwai wrote La Planète des Singes, an unanticipated success that would eventually give us the Planet of the Apes film franchise and several decades of disturbing prosthetics. ![]()
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