It

Over the years, I have seen a number of adaptations of Stephen King novels and stories. It (dir. Andy Muschietti, 2017) is one of the best. I think Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining stands in front of all other adaptations, despite the fact that King himself dislikes it. It's a Kubrick film. It's artful on its own terms, and a reflection of that fact is that Kubrick himself felt free to make significant changes to the plots and the characters in the novel. Even so, he evoked, especially in the film’s first half, the same intense dread that one felt in reading parts of the novel.

It is definitely a horror film. There are many frightful moments. There are several intense scenes of violence, one in particular at the beginning. But the moments of horror are counterbalanced by other elements, the most important of them being the main characters: six boys and a girl on the verge of adolescence. They become wary partners, and then friends, as they gradually learn about and experience the horror at the core of the history of their town Derry, Maine, and of the men, women, and children who have disappeared or been killed in unusual numbers since its beginning. The barely hints at Derry’s history.

The clown Pennywise (“the Dancing Clown”) is the cause of everything wrong in the town. He appears to each child in a form most likely to disturb each his or her psychological fears. The children are on the verge of adolescence. Hormones are beginning to flow. The monstrous clown is a real evil. But he is also a symbol: of the future, of adolescence, of puberty, adult sexuality, all the challenges and disappointments and horrors that lie ahead, or that might lie ahead, in adulthood. He is the unknown, the darkness and uncertainty of the future.

It is also about friendship. One of the main characters, Bill, lost his little brother to Pennywise the summer before the main action of the film. He is still grieving that loss, for which he feels some guilt. For him the clown is a personal matter. He wants to find and destroy it. And he still has hopes that his brother might be alive somewhere. His search for the clown is a way of resolving his grief over his missing brother. The other members of the group support him. Each of the group’s members has encountered the clown, in different forms. They realize they can't ignore him.

As is the case in many films that feature young adolescents as main characters, these boys and the girl have a knack for not asking for adult assistance. There's a reason: the girl, Beverly, is being molested by her father. One of the boys, Eddie, has an overbearing and controlling mother. Bill has a strained relationship with his father. There's a long history in the town of evil and calamitous happenings that the adults have either ignored or never figured out. The children decide it's their responsibility to take action. This does challenge one's credibility. Most children are not as courageous and ingenious as these.  But that's okay. This is an adventure as well as a horror film. You have to suspend your disbelief. It reminded me of The Goonies, directed by Richard Donner (1986), and Stand by Me (dir. Rob Reiner, 1985), based on a Stephen King story.

Friendship, confronting uncertainty and mystery, and loyalty are at the center of this film. It's highly entertaining, suspenseful and sometimes frightening. But I found it a moving experience. That's unusual in a horror film.

The final scene, where the group swears a blood oath to one another, ensures a sequel, as does the fact that much of the novel is not covered at all.

Cool Hand Luke (novel), by Don Pearce

The novel Cool Hand Luke (1965), by Don Pearce, was the basis of the film of the same name released in 1967. Pearce co-wrote the screenplay. In many ways the film is a fairly close adaptation of the novel. The essential events of the novel remain in the film, with some minor reordering. The main difference between novel and film is in tone. The novel struck me as a kind of folk novel. An unnamed narrator tells the story of Cool Hand Luke, beginning at a table in front of the church where a prison warden murdered Luke sometime before. Many of the same characters or character types are present in the novel: Dragline, the man with no eyes, and others. There is no unnamed narrator in the film, of course. The differences between the novel and the film are matters of nuance. Luke himself has an actual name. He gains his prison nickname Cool Hand Luke as the result of the same card game that we see in the movie: he wins the game by pretending to have a better hand than he actually has. He plays the move with such coolness that his fellow prisoner Dragline gives him his name: Cool Hand Luke.

The novel reveals more about Cool Hand Luke's background than the film. He's the victim of battle fatigue, posttraumatic stress syndrome. Though he fought bravely in the war, he gradually suffers the effects of it. His battle with authority seems to have predated his military experience. The war merely exacerbated that tendency. We also learn that in Cool Hand Luke's background was a love affair with a woman that for whatever reason has ended. It's implied they had a child.

In the novel, when Luke’s mother comes to visit him at the prison camp, she has no evident illness. In the film, Luke knows that she is dying and that her visit will be his last chance to see her. She is not ill in the novel, and her death is unexpected. The novel thus suggests that three events in Luke's past have contributed to his state of mind: his wartime experience, the failed love affair, and his mother's death.

Both the novel and the film make Luke out to a redemptive character who inspires and gives hope to his fellow prison mates. Images of crucifixion and other religious associations appear in both. But in the novel one of the main aspects of Luke's influence on the prisoners is his music. He's an excellent guitar player and a singer and throughout much of the novel he sings songs that linger in the minds of his fellow prison mates. When he learns of his mother's death, he goes to his bunk bed and sings a hymn to himself. In the film the song he sings is not a hymn but is instead the well-known sacrilegious tune "Plastic Jesus." The film therefore makes Luke out to be a more irreligious person than the novel, where he is clearly struggling with his faith and may have even lost it. Even though in the film we finally realize that Luke has been struggling with his belief or disbelief in God, in the novel makes this struggle clearer.

Apart from the film, the novel stands on its own. It's well-written, it's interesting, and the characters are well drawn. Like the film, it's a story of the individual struggling against anonymous institutional authority. As with the film, the novel is an allegory of the individual versus society and authority.

The novel struck me as a folk novel. I don't even really know what the definition of a folk novel is. In certain ways, its tone is similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and of Tom Kromer’s wonderful and depressing depression novel Waiting for Nothing (1935). But even though the characters in the novel are well drawn and vivid, it's tempting to see them as generic types: each of them has a prison name, not a real one. They seem to stand for something greater than themselves. They have no lives outside the prison, they are required to follow prison rules to the letter, they must get permission for every move they make, they even must get permission to get out of bed and go to the bathroom. Any infraction of the rules, any questionable glance at one of the guards, results in solitary confinement for one day or more.

In the film, we quickly realize that Luke is a man with an attitude. There is no question after the opening scenes that he's going to have issues with the prison authorities, that he's going to rebel against the rules and regulations of the prison camp, and that this is going to be what the film is about. Luke is a rebel, a prankster. In this way, he occupies a tradition in southern culture and letters of the fool killer who rebels against and shows up those individuals who, among other things, take advantage of and brutalize the people over whom they have power. The novel builds Cool Hand Luke into this same kind of fool killer character, but the process is slower, more drawn out, and more interesting. It's interesting because we learn more about the pathology of Luke's background, something that the film only implied.  The film’s most famous line--"What we have here is a failure to communicate”--is not in the novel.

It always seemed odd to me that Cool Hand Luke's fellow prison camp inmates are all white. The southern chain gang is intensely associated with race and racism, and most depictions of it tend to show gangs composed entirely of black men. Of course, we can think of exceptions, including the 1932 film I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, in the opening scenes from O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). I think there are two main reasons why the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke is entirely white: at the time in Florida when the novel take place, prison gangs were segregated--white and black prisoners did not work together. The second reason is that the novel describes all the chain gang members as white. From the perspective of 2017, the all-white chain gang still strikes one as odd.

My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tennant

Parul Sehgal, a reviewer for the New York Times, has praised My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent, for its portrayal of the central character: a fourteen-year-old girl who has a horrifying life and who doesn’t fully recognize the fact: “With her scabby knees and clear eyes, her native iconoclasm and funny nickname, she recalls the great child characters of American literature, all of them wayward and wounded: Scout from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Bone from ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Frankie from ‘The Member of the Wedding,’ Huck Finn. Her name is significant, too; like Pip from ‘Great Expectations,’ she has chosen it herself, and it harkens back to yet another character — Turtle, the tomboy detective from Ellen Raskin’s young-adult novel ‘The Westing Game.’”[1] Her name is Turtle. She lives with her father, Martin. It's not clear exactly what Martin does. He may be some kind of repair man or handyman. But he's effective at repairing problems in their house whether they have to do with electricity or plumbing or the water supply or maintaining any number of the many guns and other weapons that he owns. He’s well-read and highly intelligent. He’s a survivalist. A woman he was married to, Turtle’s mother, has disappeared. It's assumed she drowned, or at least that's what Martin tells his daughter. Given what we learn about him, other explanations may explain her absence.

Point of view is everything in this novel. It's narrated through Turtle’s perspective. She rarely speaks, though she thinks a great deal, and Tennant provides access to her thoughts.  She at first seems almost autistic (this is the wrong word) but gradually reveals the intelligence beneath her exterior.  Silence is her protection against the world, including most significantly her brutal father, some sort of failed philosopher, and also his daughter’s incestuous molester.  She's completely under his influence and control. It was shocking to realize that not only is Martin an eccentric survivalist who trains his daughter in survival skills and who tells her that she needs to know how to fend for herself, to protect herself, should it become necessary, but that he is also a child rapist. He has sex with her repeatedly, and this is the fundamental and overwhelming fact the novel confronts. For much of the novel Turtle doesn't think of herself as her father's victim. She doesn't think of herself as a rape victim. Sometimes she thinks that she loves her father and that she doesn't want to lose him and even that she wants to have sex with him. But this is because she is his hostage, and underneath it all he terrifies her. He's abusive of her in non-sexual ways. At one point he slams her to the ground and beats her with a metal rod so badly that she has difficulty walking and is in pain for days.

Turtle gradually recognizes what her father is, especially when he leaves home for an extended period and returns with a 10-year-old girl he picked up at a gas station. He says that he brought the girl home because she needed somebody to take care of her, but by this point in the novel we have learned enough about him to suspect that he has other plans. Turtle herself begins to suspect what those plans are and when one night he carries through with them, we are led to the extended and horrific final pages of the novel.

Martin is so possessive of his daughter that we begin to worry that he has the potential to do more violence to her than he has already carried out. When he learns that Turtle has become interested in a boy who lives nearby, his possessiveness leaps pathologically into action. We don't at first realize what a monster Martin is, because Turtle doesn't think of him as a monster. She thinks of him as her father, whom she loves, as an obstacle, as someone whom she must deal with when he is in temper. Only at the end does she come to see him for what he is. She comes to feel protective of the ten-year-old, she doesn’t want her to be abused, and these feelings motivate her actions late in the novel.

The climax of this novel is horrific. I'm not giving anything away to say that. It's horrific because of what it portrays, and because it's so well handled by the author.

Tennant writes an extremely powerful and lyrical prose that gives this novel its distinctive character. There are moments of over-writing.  Martin's father lives in a trailer near their house. Turtle spends a lot of time with her grandfather and she loves him—he often expresses concern for her. When her grandfather sees the scars on her back, he realizes what he has suspected might be going on all along – that his son is abusing his daughter. He confronts Martin. They have an argument, and the grandfather has a stroke and dies. This is an overwritten scene—I’m not saying it's a badly written; I’m saying it needed to be edited and abbreviated—most of the novel is not over-written.

Turtle is a wonderful character: believable, likable. The reader feels concern for her, anxiety about her safety, as the narrative moves forward. I was sure that a woman had written this novel because of its delicate and perceptive handling of Turtle’s character, because of the concern with child abuse, child rape. It was a surprise to discover that it was written by a man. I don't know much about the psychology of child abuse victims or child rape victims, but Tennant makes you believe in the situation and the characters he describes. He makes you understand how Turtle could be the hostage of her father's ghastly nature. He's a monstrous character, and yet the surprising and in some ways almost miraculous fact about this novel is that it takes you a while to realize the extremity of his monstrousness.

All the people in the novel talk as if they have been taking modern literature classes for years—this includes teenaged boys, their parents, Turtle’s father.  The atmosphere in those moments is artificial.

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[1] New York Times, August 29, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/books/review-my-absolute-darling-gabriel-tallent.html?mcubz=1).

How Strange to be Named Federico

How Strange to be Named Federico (Che Strano Chiamarsi Federico--2013) is Ettore Scola’s final film, a documentary about the life of Frederico Fellini emphasizing his own friendship with the great director.  It is composed of recreated and dramatized scenes as well as clips from Fellini’s work.  It’s a fanciful homage that in its conflation of life with art summons up Fellini’s films themselves as well as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.  An aged narrator leads us from one event to another, introducing us to Fellini when as a young man he joined the staff of the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio before the start of the second world war.  We move through Fellini’s unsuccessful attempts to write for the stage, his collaborations and work with other directors, and finally to the making of his own films.  The narrator tells us that Fellini sought to combat his insomnia late at night by driving through the streets of Rome along with Scola, stopping to gaze at and comment on interesting scenes and people as they encountered them—street painters, prostitutes, and so on.  Often, they would offer these people rides. Characters based on some of these people found their way into the films.

I did not know that Fellini drew sketches, lampoonish cartoons, of characters he was planning for his films—this makes sense, given his work for the magazine that specialized in humor and cartoons.  The film shows many of his sketches and drawings.  We visit the studio where he made his films.  This film has a gentle edge of satire, but is admiring in tone. Impressionistic and dreamlike—like many of Fellini’s films—Scola’s documentary may not give a literally factual account of the director’s life (though the facts cited seem to be accurate) so much as an imaginative and emotionally evocative portrait.  The last ten minutes, a powerful, imagistic pastiche of scenes and objects and people associated with Fellini’s work, are truly wonderful.  I take it that the final view of Scola sitting on the beach, gazing at the setting sun (in imitation of a sketch Fellini drew of himself) makes clear that he knew this would be his final film. Scola downplays his own film career in this documentary, keeping the focus on Fellini.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 1977) last week in a local theater—it was playing in commemoration of its 40th anniversary and had been “restored” and enhanced to 4K clarity so that it could be shown in digital form.  Two other people were in the theatre with me: a woman about my age and a man in his 30s who came in late and chose to sit directly behind me and who breathed and moaned heavily throughout the film, expressing his approval and disapproval as things progressed.  He tried to start a conversation afterwards: he had the appearance of an aging and overweight hardcore video game enthusiast.

I liked Close Encounters a great deal when I first saw it in 1977, but over the years I’ve come to feel that it was (and is) mostly spectacle.  There is nothing wrong with spectacle, to a point. I love how the film riffs on American popular culture obsessions with UFOs (and Bigfoot), but the domestic scenes involving Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) and his family are almost unwatchable—is this because they were poorly filmed, or because the sight of a man and his family falling apart is too painful?—probably both.  Spielberg must have thought the domestic scenes were a necessary way of grounding the film and giving a personal dimension to the prospect of UFOs and alien visitors, but they didn’t work for me.  On the other hand, the film builds great excitement around the UFOs and Neary’s obsession with making his way to Devils Tower.  The end of the film is genuinely moving—almost a religious experience.  In this new edition of the film, Spielberg removed the final scenes (added to earlier versions) of Neary entering the spaceship and beholding its internal wonders—that’s better left to the imagination.  The film is basically a fairy tale.  “When You Wish Upon a Star” is an underlying musical theme.  Close Encounters expresses the characteristic optimism of Spielberg’s early films.  He liked to tell stories through the eyes and experiences of everyday people, the common citizens of America. There was a Norman Rockwell element to these early films, a Capraesque optimism.

If and when aliens arrive, I’m not sure there will be such a love fest.  For years SETI scientists have been probing the cosmos with radio telescopes, trying to identify radio signals from other worlds. So far, they have not heard anything. Paul Davies’ book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (2010) suggests reasons for this failure. This year a group of scientists began sending messages out into space, seeking to contact alien civilizations.  I don’t believe this is a good idea.

Fire from Heaven, by Mary Renault

The first half of Mary Renault 's Fire from Heaven (1969) held my interest just enough to keep me going. The second half significantly improved. The novel certainly creates a credible atmosphere. I don't know how accurate its recreation of ancient Greece and Macedonia is. Apparently, Renault was praised for the historical accuracy of her narrative.  Some found fault with her portrayal of certain characters, such as Demosthenes.  But how can we really know what is accurate in a fictional historical narrative, however well researched, even if the details accord with what historians think might have been true? The historical records contain only third- and fourth-hand accounts of Alexander, based on first-hand accounts that were lost.  It was never quite clear whether Renault was describing a close friendship between Alexander and his companion Hephaestion or a homosexual relationship.  It was apparently something of both.  She was so coy in implying that they might have had sex that I couldn't tell.   Alexander also had sex with women.  (Renault’s biography states that she is widely respected as a LGBT writer, though she didn’t care for the label). She certainly described Alexander as a kind of super-human who could do no wrong, at least up into late adolescence. In that sense, the book is not credible.  Its main narrative thrust measures the development of a future king who from an early age is in competition with his father.  Towards the end of his reign Philip of Macedonia came to suspect and fear his son.  In the end, Alexander takes up the throne and is prepared to reign and to wage war.  The next two novels in the Alexander trilogy contain that story.

Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston's Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America, by Jay Atkinson

The “massacre” of the title, Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston's Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America (Lyons Press, 2016), by Jay Atkinson, refers to the decision of Hannah Duston to kill Indians who attacked her family, kidnapped her, and murdered her newborn infant by throwing it against a tree.  The event comes several weeks after she has been taken by the Indians on a forced march through the New England forests towards Quebec, where they will either sell her as a slave to the French or ransom her off.  One night she and two fellow kidnap victims rise from where they are sleeping and kill two men, two women, and six children by impaling them with stakes, crushing their skulls with axe heads, and beating them to death.  A short time afterwards, Duston scalps the corpses so that she will have proof of her deed to show the Puritan world. She returns with her companions and the scalps to her home and is praised for her courage.  Over the decades, her deeds have been viewed more ambiguously.

Author Jay Atkinson acknowledges that over the years Duston’s killing of ten Indians has been conveniently forgotten, and that when it is remembered, it has been a source of shame, confusion, or embarrassment.  But he fails to make much of this change in attitude and instead for the most part describes in his book the details of Duston’s kidnapping and escape.  He also places her experience in historical context by explaining the history of English-French-Indian relations in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries.  No one should feel good about that history.  The French and English exploited the Indians in furtherance of their own efforts to dominate one another on the North American continent.  They killed many Indians outright.  Others fell sick and died from illness brought to the continent by European settlers. The Indians, periodically, attacked villages and killed colonists in small and large numbers: men, women, and children.  In the end, of course, the Indians were wiped out.

Atkinson’s method is similar to that of Erik Larson, who in such books as the Devil and the White City illuminates historical events by showing how disparate individuals and stories intersect and influence one another. Atkinson’s book sometimes drags, especially in its overlong history of Indian-French-English intrigues.

Atkinson freely imagines and recreates what he thinks Duston and others must have seen and felt.  He relies on a number of historical accounts, specifically the account of Duston’s experiences as she related them to Cotton Mather—this is, I believe, the most important source of information about happened.  (I’d like to see a more skeptical examination of Mather’s narrative about Duston). Atkinson visited the geographical areas in which Duston lived and where her ordeal transpired.  As a result he often imparts a vivid sense of what she might have experienced.  But his book is full of imaginative fabrication or speculation based on a few first-hand sources and many second- and third-hand ones.  We cannot tell where fact stops and imagination begins. His book is more like a novel, inspired by true events, than a credible account of history.

The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley

The ambiguous ending of The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley (1982), recalls the end of Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon as well as William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! These novels actually have some sort of inter-textual relationship. There may also be a connection with Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King’s Men (1946). Both The Chaneysville Incident and All The King’s Men have a historian as the main character and narrator. In both novels, the main character is attempting to uncover information about the past that has a direct bearing on his personal and public situation in the present. However, I must confess that because I’ve spent so much time reading and studying Faulkner and Warren I am prone to see influences in all sorts of places where they may not be. So that's a caution.

The Chaneysville Incident is about a son attempting to understand and discover his father, a man named Moses Washington, who has been dead some twenty years. John, his son, was only around ten years old at the time of his death, ostensibly in a hunting accident. As John investigates over a period of decades his father and learns about him more than he ever expected to know, he comes to a disturbing understanding of his father's death, its nature, and of American history. The story of John's ancestry is intimately linked to the history of American slavery. In fact, during the course of the novel, John's research moves back and forth between present and past, often as far back as the early 18th or late 17th century. The analytical objectivity of the historian is confronted by and challenged by the intimately subjective nature of the narrator's personal past, of his desire to understand his father better, to come to terms with his father's death, and to apprehend in the fullest possible way the nature of slavery in America's history.

The novel is divided into two sections: they seem to be about equal in length though I'd have to check to be sure about that. The first section is a narration by John of his growing up in a small town and his uneasy relationship with his father and his nearly as uneasy relationship with his mother. John returns to that small town when an old man who had served as his friend and mentor after his father died himself passes away. His discovery of books and papers in the attic room where his father spent much of his time, and, later on, his interview with an elderly judge who knew his father well brings new revelations and information about Moses Washington. There are all sorts of parallels at work in this novel. John has been in a relationship with a nurse, named Alex, for nearly 9 years. She is white and he is black, and this factor has a bearing on his attitude towards her. The family stories he investigates begin to center on a relationship his great-grandfather had in Philadelphia. So, while he is in the process of learning about and coming to terms with the story of his great-grandfather's ancestry, the facts of which he knows in considerable detail, he is also in the process of coming to terms with his relationship with Alex. And while he is in the process of discovering and coming to terms with the story of his own father, and his father's father and grandfather, John is also in the process of coming to terms with himself.

The second section of the novel largely takes place on top of a mountain when Johnny and Alex are caught in a blizzard and have to abandon their car. They camp in the middle of the blizzard, taking shelter under the shelter that John has built. The next morning they walk towards the site where Moses Washington died. Discoveries at that site lead to the climax of the novel, which occurs entirely within John’s mind as he narrates the story to Alex. He has complained earlier in the novel about having the facts but not knowing how to fit them together. Alex tells him that all he needs is to apply some imagination, but he says that imagination isn't involved. In the second section of the novel he tells a story about his ancestor that is clearly both the product of imagination and fact.

This novel was highly entertaining and readable, but it was also dense and slow going. I have to admit that I was somewhat challenged by the narrative structure, especially in the second section where John tells a long and detailed story to his girlfriend that in real life would normally have taken much more time than they both actually devote to it. This is a narrative convention. We’re supposed to suspend our disbelief, just as we did in the long-winded later chapters of Absalom, Absalom! where Quentin and his roommate Shreve tell each other a story that neither of them could have known much about. They reconstruct it from a few facts and from their own deeply engaged imagination with those facts just as John does with the information he’s uncovered about his ancestry. There is a powerful and unsettling end to this novel. It's frustrating in a way, but it's also satisfying.

What Bradley gives us in The Chaneysville Incident is his own theory about slavery and its impact on African-Americans, white Americans, and race relations in American history. He sees the entire American economy as built on and by slavery.  He sees whites as blind to the truth of their heritage, as still engaged in the perpetration of the many sins that slavery involved. Bradley, like James Baldwin before him, is not forgiving of white America. But in the course of the novel he makes clear the reasons why.

War for the Planet of the Apes

Reviews of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017; dir. Matt Reeves) praised Andy Serkis for his portrayal of the head ape Caesar, who leads the simian rebellion against humanity.  To me, Caesar looked a fairly credible but nonetheless artificial, digital creation.  Serkis was convincing here as he was in the role of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films—convincing, but never real. He was easy to accept as a character, just as characters in cartoons can be convincing, but he never seemed to be what he was supposed to be: a thinking and talking ape.  The basic premise in this third and hopefully final installment in the revived Planet of the Ape series is that the war between apes and humans has reached a standoff.  War and disease have nearly wiped out the humans.  A spreading virus is causing humans to lose the ability to speak and to think on a high level. The apes are hiding out in the forest.  The humans track them down, and carnage ensues.

This film never suggests that there might be two sides to the story.  Whatever sins they might have committed, it is understandable that the humans would resist the apes who threaten to take over their world.  It’s also understandable that the apes would seek to protect their own welfare.  But there are no subtleties in this film.  Humans are bad.  Apes are good.  Ugh.

Woody Harrelson appears as the commander of the human forces.  Is there any recent film he hasn’t appeared in?  He rivals Samuel Jackson for his number of film appearances.  In this one, Harrelson’s character reminds us of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and at one point we see the phrase “Ape-pocalypse” scrawled on a wall--some kind of homage?

There’s an Old Testament parallel.  The apes in their search for a part of the world where they can live in peace unmolested by humans are like the Israelites in their quest for the Promised Land.  Caesar is their Moses, and like his Biblical prototype he dies on a mountain top, overlooking the land he has found for his people, before he can actually enter it himself.