Perhaps it is being under the influence of a head-cold that just won’t go away, or perhaps something deeper, I decided to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Raised in a fundamentalist household, I was enamored of Planet of the Apes (the original one) and watched it and all its sequels repeatedly back before VCRs made owning such chestnuts possible. Perhaps it was that taste of forbidden fruit—evolution—that left such an exotic buzz in my head, or perhaps it was the unforgettable climax. The message that we’ve done this to ourselves. I once even missed seeing a high school friend after several years’ absence on a visit home because an all-day Planet of the Apes marathon was airing on TV. Perhaps it was the subtlety, the Rod Serling feel to it, or the deep level of empathy it evoked, for whatever reason, that original movie remains one of my personal favorites. In Rupert Wyatt’s slick new backstory, something was missing.

The CGI of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is pretty remarkable, except for the occasional jerkiness of violent scenes intended to pump up the testosterone. The subtle emotions visible in Caesar’s every glance conveyed the sense that animals share rights to this planet with us. I’ve been reading about animal intelligence again, and it saddens me that we’ve reached this far in our development only to continue the fiction that homo sapiens are unique among the tree of life. It’s not much of a tree when one of the branches is not and never has been attached. Our animal cousins have much to teach us, and perhaps that’s why I keep returning to Planet of the Apes, despite Charlton Heston. Even the new movie makes several nods to the original with naming the main family Rodman, Caesar building a three-dimensional puzzle of the statue of liberty only halfway complete, calling his mother “Bright Eyes,” spraying Caesar with a hose in his cage and calling the primate center a madhouse, and the cheesy repetition of “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!” It simply can’t rise to the level set by the writing of Rod Serling and Michael Wilson.

The box-office success of the film tells us something about ourselves. Ironically, and perhaps intentionally, Wyatt’s version neuters the evolution. The apes don’t rise from an unspeakably long evolutionary track from us, but we create them with the nemesis of twenty-first century humans, the virus. Caesar and his friends are genetically engineered by humans, and God has nothing to do with it. In the original, a theological subtlety lingered as a religious court of orangutans condemned Taylor for religious reasons. His claim of human primacy was heresy to primate sensibilities. The new version takes itself too seriously for that. We can’t jangle the evolution keys anymore because of our own national schizophrenia concerning the raw power of nature. Just when we think we’ve evolved beyond petty superstition masquerading as righteousness, yet another state attempts to guillotine the entire scientific enterprise. It’s a sure thing that if the apes don’t get us, we’ll take care of it ourselves. That was the message already in 1968.