Robert J. Sawyer is the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Heinlein, Hal Clement, Skylark, Aurora, and Seiun Award—winning author of twenty-three bestselling science-fiction novels, including the trilogy of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, which just won Canada’s Aurora Award for the Best Work of the Decade. Rob holds two honorary doctorates and is a Member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Canadian government. Find him online at sfwriter.com.

DECOHERENCE

by Robert J. Sawyer

1968

This year, 2018, is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what many critics call the two best science fiction films ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Planet of the Apes.

Both are adaptations of literary works, the former of a prize-winning Arthur C. Clarke short story called “The Sentinel,” and the latter of the 1963 novel La Planète des singes (The Planet of Apes, not the ridiculous and inaccurate Monkey Planet moniker that Penguin slapped on the first English edition) by Pierre Boulle, who had already gained fame with his 1952 novel Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (The Bridge Over the River Kwai).

Both movies deal with spaceship crews in suspended animation, both are unreasonably optimistic in their view of how fast the space program would progress (Apes insanely has humanity’s first interstellar voyage being launched in 1972; 2001, showing restraint only in comparison, posits manned interplanetary travel by the first year of this century), both have spectacular makeup for humans playing hirsute primates, and both have surprise endings.

But in most ways they are very different. Except for one brief shot (the famed femur toss), 2001 was filmed entirely on soundstages, Stanley Kubrick liking to control every aspect of each scene. Apes, on the other hand, was largely filmed outdoors against gorgeously stark Arizona, Utah, and California landscapes, with spectacular cinematography by Leon Shamroy.

2001 has very little dialog (the first line isn’t spoken until twenty-five minutes into the film and the last line comes twenty-three minutes before the end), whereas Apes, ironically for a film about humanity having lost its ability to articulate, is filled with speeches, starting with a fabulous soliloquy by Charlton Heston that includes a rhetorical question that’s as relevant today as it was a half-century ago: “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?”

Of course, science fiction is never really about the future; rather, it’s about the year in which it was written. The mid-1960s were the dawn of feminism, and Apes acknowledges this by including a woman astronaut in its space mission. That period was also the thick of the civil-rights movement in the United States, and Apes included an African-American astronaut. Contemporary reviewers tried to be blasé about that (Renata Adler, sounding painfully racist today, in the New York Times: “a relatively new movie type, a Negro based on some recent, good Sidney Poitier roles—intelligent, scholarly, no good at sports at all”), but in fact this was a breakthrough part.

2001, on the other hand, was completely oblivious to women’s lib (the only female in a non-subservient role is a Russian, played by The Forsyte Saga’s formidable Margaret Tyzack), and there’s not a person of color anywhere. Kubrick, working in the UK, may have been blissfully unaware of then-current American events, but he had to have known about Star Trek, which had given us a female African astronaut as a regular character starting two years before, in 1966.

Still, 2001 is every bit as much of its time as is Apes. It’s steeped in Cold War paranoia: the Americans have discovered an alien artifact on the moon, and the single most important thing is keeping the news from the Soviets. And although many misremember the bone the australopithecine throws into the air turning—in a four-million-year jump cut—into a Pan Am space plane, that’s not what happens: rather, it turns into an orbiting nuclear weapons platform, one of many we seen waltzing about.

Indeed, both Apes and 2001 acknowledge the 1960’s fear of nuclear holocaust. In Apes, humanity “finally, really did it,” as Heston’s character observes: “You blew it up! You maniacs!”

And although the orbiting nuclear weapons don’t reappear at the end of 2001—Kubrick got cold feet about coming anywhere near to repeating the ending of his immediately preceding film, the anti-nuclear satire Dr. Strangelove—Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of the screenplay makes clear the intent: the godlike Star Child, who comes to Earth at the end, wipes out the orbiting nukes, safely detonating them. Apes forlornly says that humanity is doomed to eventually use its nuclear weapons against itself; 2001 says nothing but divine intervention can save us from the same fate.

Fifty years on, which film holds up better? Well, of course, no one makes movies with complex latex-appliance makeups anymore; the recent rebooted Planet of the Apes films all use computer-generated imagery instead (which, I confess, leaves me cold; give me Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter any day). Nor does anyone do the sort of intricate modelwork and trick photography that was the hallmark of 2001; again, CGI has replaced that sort of craftsmanship.

In the end, though, Apes, for all its flights of fancy, stands the test of time better than 2001 does. Why? Because it’s about something. In fact, it’s about a lot of things including racism and class (the first ape to speak at any length in the film is Dr. Galen, a chimpanzee decrying that he’s been kept down by the racial quota system) and religious fundamentalism versus scientific truth (a literal Scopes Monkey Trial, if you will, as orangutan Dr. Zaius serves the dual roles of minister of science and chief defender of the faith).

2001, on the other hand, is a paean to nationalist space exploration that seemed passé even before its titular year actually arrived, and its ending is infused with mysticism and religious symbolism that I find much less tolerable than the sometimes broad satire of Apes.

Kubrick wanted to make a film that was open to interpretation, but, after five decades of analysis coming up with little more than it’s yet another retelling of the Christ story, we can say much the same thing of 2001 as the film’s character Heywood Floyd says, in the film’s final line of dialog, of the alien monolith found on the moon: “Its origin and purpose still a total mystery.” But the team making Planet of the Apes (the script for which was written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and the great Michael Wilson, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy communist witch hunt) crafted a film that was designed to provocatively engender debate about major issues.

In the end, the Kubrick of 2001—like Jules Verne before him, who also loved to showcase technology at the expense of real meaning—had very little to say that was relevant or human. Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, by doing what science fiction does best—social commentary presented with masks and metaphors—makes us continue to think and feel...and probably will do so for many more decades to come.