Sinful Sunday: Ranking the Villains of the "Planet of the Apes" Franchise
From brutal humans like the Colonel to thoughtful doctrinaires like Zaius, "Planet of the Apes" has always excelled at presenting the many shades of villainy.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
The Planet of the Apes franchise remains one of the most enduringly popular in Hollywood history. There are many reasons why this would be the case, but one of them is, I would argue, each film’s ability to give audiences villains who are more than just cardboard cutout baddies. All of them, whether human or ape, have motivations that are explicable to the audience and most of them find that the road to Hell, or a postapocalyptic future, is often paved with good intentions. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that the tragic ethos that is so key to the Apes franchise can in many ways be attributed to its villains.
Now, an important caveat before I launch right into the rankings. There are two characters and one group who might be construed as villains but who I’ve omitted. The first is Douglas Hunsiker, the asshole neighbor from Rise. He’s just not enough of a presence in the film as a whole to really warrant a ranking, even if his actions did help trigger the Simian Flu pandemic. The second is Mae, the young woman from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. I have a lot of thoughts about her arc and whether she is in fact a villain, but I’m going to save that for another post down the line rather than limit her by saying she’s an outright villain. The third are the mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. As with Mae, their status as villains is a bit more contested and vague, and so I want to save some space to address them with more subtlety and detail down the line.
So, with that out of the way, on to the villains!
Aldo
By this point it’s rather uncontroversial to say that Battle for the Planet of the Apes is one of the weakest of the Apes films. This weakness unfortunately extends to its primary villain, the bellicose gorilla Aldo, played by Claude Akins. While he serves as a useful foil for Caesar–while Also wants to dominate humans and rely on force, Caesar seeks a path of reconciliation and peace–we’re not really given enough story or background for his motivations to make sense. Instead, he comes across as rather flat and one-dimensional and, in a strange way, he ends up playing a role in putting an end to the mutant human invasion that is one of the major elements of the plot. Aldo is fine, but he’s definitely not among the top Apes villains.
Steven Jacobs
Rise of the Planet of the Apes actually has several villains in its stable of characters, one of whom is David Oyelowo’s Steven Jacobs, the CEO of Gen-Sys, the genetics company who ends up being responsible for developing the Alzheimer’s cure and the virus used to transmit it. Jacobs is the prototypical corporate type, desperate for profits at whatever cost, and he’s also the kind of guy who can summarily order a bunch of chimps be euthanized once an experiment goes wrong, just as he’s also the kind of guy who can lead the cops to try to kill Caesar and his compatriots once they escape. There’s not much depth to Jacobs, but that’s okay, because he’s literally the epitome of corporate greed. It’s thus fitting that he meets his fate at the hands of the scarred bonobo Koba, our first indication that the latter is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the years to come.
The Landons
Rise is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to its supporting cast, and both Brian Cox and Tom Felton give credible performances as John and Dodge Landon, a father/son team who own the ape sanctuary where Caesar is sent after he assaults a neighbor. As with Jacobs, there’s not a great deal of depth with either of them, but there’s no doubt that Dodge is far more sadistic than his father. While John is basically just negligent–he sees apes as nothing more than animals–Dodge goes out of his way to be a total and unrepentant jackass, particularly because he senses that Caesar is not like the others. Felton goes full Draco Malfoy on the grieving Caesar, but he ultimately gets his comeuppance, electrocuted by his own cattle prod.
Governor Kolp
I know this might be a controversial take, but I actually think that Governor Kolp is one of the more interesting of the original Apes villains. When we first meet him in Conquest he’s one of Governor Breck’s loyal lieutenants, and he plays a key role in torturing Armando until the latter commits suicide. By the time of Battle he is now the leader of the mutants living in the ruins of the Forbidden City and, when Caesar and his companions invade his domain he takes it as an invitation to declare his own war on the sentient apes. Darden keeps things just this side of camp in both of his performances, and in some ways he reminds me of Donald Sutherland’s unsettlingly charming performance as President Snow in the Hunger Games films.
Governor Breck
Whew, where to begin with Governor Breck of Conquest? To begin with, his villainy is about as subtle as a brick, and he is not only a brutal fascist but also a sadist who relishes the position of power he has over both apes and humans. Indeed, there’s something quite fun about the lack of subtlety. We know from the beginning that this is a Bad Guy, and we love to loathe him. Likewise, there’s something almost Shakespearean about the fact that the brutality of his regime and his approach to ruling is exactly what leads to the very fate he sought so assiduously to avoid: the takeover of the planet by the ape subalterns. And, as Apes fans know, he meets a fitting end in the original ending, in which he’s bludgeoned to death by gorillas.
Thade
As anyone knows me can attest, I am manifestly not a fan of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. However, while I find the whole thing kind of a campy (and surprisingly boring) mess, one stand out is Tim Roth’s scene-stealing General Thade, the film’s primary antagonist. Brutal and zealous in his belief that humans should be eradicated, it’s clear that Roth is acting in a very different film than everyone else. I’m not sure that it’s quite accurate to say that he chews the scenery. Instead, he seems to just devour everything in sight, including his co-stars. One can only wish that he’d had someone of Charlton Heston to act against rather than the unremarkable Mark Wahlberg (though, oddly enough, Heston does make a cameo as Thade’s dying father, Zaius).
Ursus
Oh, Ursus, we hardly knew ye. The Apes franchise has always kept its toe firmly on the line separating camp from serious sci-fi, and by having the scenery-chewing James Gregory play the warmongering gorilla general Ursus from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it comes as close to going over that line as it ever did. Gregory brings to Ursus the same sort of blustering folly that he brought to the red-baiting Senator Islein in The Manchurian Candidate, giving us a bellicose gorilla who believes that, in the film’s best-known line, “The only good human is a dead human!” Ursus might not be as clever or as subtle as Zaius, but he is nevertheless a compelling screen presence. And, as it turns out, he’s one of the architects of Earth’s destruction.
Dreyfus
I wouldn’t say that Dreyfus is one of the best Apes villains, but there are a couple of things that elevate him. First, there’s the fact that he’s played by the great Gary Oldman, who is a master at digging deep into his characters. That’s certainly true here, and he gives us insight into a man who has survived the near-end of the human race, only to be confronted with what he sees as a belligerent group of talking apes. Second, there’s the fact that he is one of those responsible for creating the conditions of the third film. After all, he’s the one who touches base with the forces in the north, bringing down the wrath of the Colonel. Third, there’s the fact that he’s literally willing to blow himself up if it means that the apes won’t take over the world. In his way, his fate is almost as tragic as Koba’s, which earns him some villain points.
The Colonel
Woody Harrelson was perfectly cast as the Colonel, the primary antagonist of War for the Planet of the Apes. He exudes menace, from the way that he clamps his jaw so tightly you’re surprised he doesn’t break a tooth to the way that he is willing to shoot an aged orangutan in cold blood in order to make a point. This is a man who sees the future clearly, and he recognizes that if something isn’t done that, indeed, it will become a planet of apes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Colonel has any of the complexity of a Dreyfus or a Koba, but there’s still something magnetic about the way his loathing of Caesar and his kind is mingled with a grudging respect. Ultimately, the man who was willing to shoot his son after he contracted a mutated variant of the Simian Flu is also willing to take his own life, choosing to go out on his own terms rather than be reduced to a dumb beast.
Dr. Otto Hasslein
While Eric Braeden may be most famous for playing Victor Newman in the soap opera The Young and the Restless, very early in his career he made a notable appearance in Escape from the Planet of the Apes. He plays Dr. Otto Hasslein, the Science Advisor to the President. There are many reasons he belongs high on this list, not the least of which is the fact that not only does he shoot our beloved Zira in cold blood; he also does the same to her baby, all in the hopes of preventing a future in which apes become the dominant species. Ultimately, however, the joke’s on Hasslein, because it turns out the baby chimp he shot was the mute one from the circus; Cornelius’ and Zira’s talking baby will become the ape revolutionary Caesar. Hasslein, as so often with tragic villains, ultimately brings about the very future that he fought so hard, and so ruthlessly, to prevent.
Proximus
Kevin Durand is nothing short of terrifying as Proximus Caesar, the bonobo monarch who serves as the primary antagonist of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He’s a ruler who isn’t afraid to use force to get what he wants, and to this end he has enslaved several other ape clans, and he uses their labor to try to break into a vault that he believes contains human technology. However, in the tradition of the Apes franchise there is far more to him than meets the eye, and while his methods might be questionable, he does truly seem to want a better future for apekind. When it comes right down to it, he wants apes to be able to evolve to the point where they need no longer fear the prospect of being thrown back into cages by their former human oppressors. Sinister and charismatic and compelling, he’s one of the best Apes villains we’ve ever had.
Zaius
Before the release of the Caesar Trilogy I would have said that Dr. Zaius was unequivocally the best villain that the Apes franchise had ever produced. After all, he’s the one who was the primary antagonist of the first film, correctly deducing that Taylor was a harbinger of doom to apekind. He’s also the kind of ape who will willingly keep the truth about the past from other apes (even those he respects as much as he does Cornelius and Zira), blow up an entire cave to make sure no one learns the truth about humanity, and even lobotomize Taylor’s colleague so as to keep him from speaking. Yet for all of his villainy, we can’t help but sympathize with him at least a little. After all, he’s been charged with heavy secrets, and he really does seem to want to prevent humanity from inflicting the same damage on apes that it was able to do itself. Of course, the best-laid plans go awry, and his hubris and callousness toward Taylor at the end of Beneath ends up bringing the planet to total ruin.
Koba
And finally we come to the best Apes villain of them all: Koba. From the moment that we meet him in Rise it’s clear that he has been subjected to a great deal of torment at the hands of humans, and while at first he takes this out on Jacobs at the end of Rise, it’s not long into Dawn before his inner darkness starts to turn him against Caesar. The thing about Koba is that we understand where he’s coming from, and this makes him something more than just a bad guy. Yes, he does terrible things–shooting Caesar, killing Ash by throwing him over a railing, etc.--but this is because he’s essentially been driven mad by both his torture at human hands and by his (justified) fear that humans won’t be content until they’ve destroyed the apes that they see as a threat to their own continued existence. Koba’s tragedy, as with so many other villains in this franchise, is that his actions bring about the very future he sought to prevent.
So, there you have it. My ranking of all of the major villains that have appeared in Planet of the Apes. I know some are likely to disagree with my thoughts, so feel free to sound off in the comments!