When one is born into life they are born with something altogether spiritual, evolutionary, and undefinable. Whether it be a gene or some idea cooked up in the brain of primeval men it is here to say. What I’m talking about is the will to live – the will to survive, to fight for ones life and to become eternal. Planet of the Apes is a movie in which we see the will to live represented in humanity like no other, the apes have no such ache to evolve and master their surroundings. To subdue ones environment and control it is a guaranteed way to survive – if there is nothing to kill you how will you die? However dangerous it becomes after it has been subdued through things like nuclear bombs – I am not talking about the “need for war” or anything like that, because even a nuclear war would be rooted in one peoples will to live on and survive.

We see our captain, lost and far away from any home he ever knew struggling with these people who sit idly by and live at the mercy of their environment. He sees them subdue “stupid” humanity by keeping their population down, because if they were to breed they would spread across the Earth like a virus. The captain is an interesting character for a couple of reasons – the first of which being his pessimistic attitude of man, when he realizes that he is in fact on Earth he screams, “You finally did it!” But then he continues to want to live, he never wants to give up – he takes his companion with him as they ride into the forest to start over. To start what over? Humanity. This is an essential scene in the movie because it shows us that no human is without the will to survive, the spirit cannot be destroyed. Even in the face of the destruction of ones race and their slavery the captain wishes to continue. What else is there to do but survive?

All of this begs to answer the question, “Then what will kill the spirit?” Is it destroyed when there is no hope left at all? When we die? However that is a question that cannot be answered. Sure there are a select amount of cases where people abandon all hope – but I guarantee that if you were to give a man backed against a wall with a gun to his head a way out he would take it. And if he chose not to take it it wouldn’t be a failure of the spirit but rather a failure somewhere in his brain to select the evolutionary preference – an emotional tidal wave that will momentarily drown sense.

We watch Planet of the Apes not to say, “Oh, look at how bad we are! Look at what we can do if we’re not careful!” No, we watch it so in the back of our minds we have a pride and we can say, “Look at what we can do! We can destroy a planet with a couple of buttons – we can strangle this environment and now the fate of this planet is intertwined with us. Look how important we are!” Does this make us narcissistic? I don’t think so – I think that hubris is as much a part of being human as surviving is.