Planet of the Apes

Well, 2 down in the AP Film Festival. So far Mrs. Kirk, you've picked good movies. I thoroughly enjoyed Planet of the Apes.

The movie was full of Secular Humanist philosophy, mainly focusing on the backdrop of Secular Humanism itself - evolution. In order to address these ideas about evolution, the writer of the book it is based off of turned the world as we know it upside-down with man on the bottom, treated as brute animals, and apes at the top of the evolutionary chain. In fact, the apes evolved from man. This enables the direct expression and criticism of how we "do" science today.

There was religion in the movie, but the gods never had any power. Actually, as we find out in the end of the film, the gods are just a ruse made up by the gorilla leader to prevent the apes from ultimately destroying the world as the humans did a thousand years before. While I'm not labeling the movie as Marxist, but this is one of the Marxist viewpoints - that religion is a institution created by the bourgeois to prevent a proletariat uprising.

There were several slams on Christianity, that I tried to make a mental note of while I was watching the movie, but I have forgotten the specifics. What I can remember, though, is that the movie was claiming that Christians won't look at the scientific evidence for evolution. When the scientist couple uncovers "evidence," the leader dismisses their story, destroys the evidence, and convicts them of heresy.

I definitely enjoyed watching this movie and I found that after the beginning, I wasn't paying attention to the corny graphics, but was completely drawn in to the storyline.