I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes when it first came out, but hadn’t seen the other two movies in the trilogy until just this week (prompting a return to Rise), and this time around the Jewishness of the narrative & references to Moses in the character of Caesar really struck me—especially in War for the Planet of the Apes, where Caesar leads his people as they wander through the wilderness to a better land, attacks a taskmaster for whipping one of his people when he sees them enslaved, and climbs to a high place at the end of the film to look out over the promised land as his people enter, unable to go with them.
I was unsurprised but delighted to find the parallels to Moses were 100% conscious, The Ten Commandments being one of several films they watched for inspiration while writing the screenplay. Matt Reeves even directly talked about War being about Caesar’s journey as he becomes a “biblical” foundational figure, “like Moses”.
Additionally, despite the fact that the camp in War was most directly based on the WWII POW camps in The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and not necessarily Nazi concentration camps, it’s difficult to deny there are still some parallels to Jewish experience, especially given the Alpha-Omega Colonel’s eugenic bent and the sentiments of racial (spec-ial?) superiority that infuses his regime’s cruelty, as well as the kapo-like role of the “donkeys”.
And of course, watching Rise again, the parallels there became evident as well: a baby hidden & sent away to evade an order to kill him, raised by his mother’s captor, who comes into his own as a leader after being exiled for spilling blood, leading his people in an exodus, even crossing a body of water while being pursued by their captors as they escape to freedom in the wilderness.
I wouldn’t want to overextend the Jewish elements of the narrative to suggest Caesar is meant to be Moses or that the movies are equating the apes with Jews (much less, heaven forbid, the other way around); there are plenty of aspects of the stories that would break any attempt to make them a 1-for-1 allegory for any person, group, or conflict. But I know at least a few people on the creative team (including Amanda Silver & Rick Jaffa, who co-wrote Rise & Dawn, & have been producers on every movie in the reboot series) are Jewish or have Jewish family members, and it’s exciting to be able to clock that shining through. It really shows in the Jewish elements of the story not just being there, but having a surprising complexity I wouldn’t expect from most movies, even ones directly about Jews—much less the action blockbuster sequels to a reboot of a sci-fi series from the 60’s/70’s about ape people.
