Planet of the Apes: When Sound Speaks for the Other

This week’s episode steps a little outside the usual rhythm of recent releases.I know it doesn’t fully match the premise I’ve been keeping, and yes — I already have the next two films lined up — but I think this one deserves a space.

It’s not exactly new, but it reminds me of the Mission: Impossible episode in one sense: it’s also a saga.The difference? This one doesn’t have a leitmotif — not that structured, repeating element that sneaks quietly through the soundtrack.That’s precisely what makes it so different.

And I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of this saga.One reason I’m including it now is because I recently rewatched it.It’s a series I deeply enjoy.

The saga I’m talking about is Planet of the Apes.Let’s take it from the James Franco reboot — and forgive me, cinephiles who prefer to talk in terms of directors, but honestly, I locate it through Franco (though the director is Rupert Wyatt, of course). Personally, I really like that one. Obviously, the original is the foundation of it all — a classic, no doubt — but I’m just more visually used to twenty-first-century technology.

Anyway, from my perspective, what’s fascinating here, musically speaking, are two main things.First: the music has the task of sketching otherness — an otherness that, in an alternate world, challenges the dominance of the human species.Second: the challenge of narrating through silence — of giving life to silence itself.

Because if we think about it, the amount of screen time filled with CGI — and without human voices — is huge.The protagonists, to a certain degree, are the chimpanzees.

A Literary and Cultural Origin

This franchise is based on a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, written at a time when studies of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans were flourishing.Curiosity —and perhaps anxiety— about the limits of non-human culture was growing stronger, and maybe even more troubling.Today, debates about animal cognition and trained language use in apes are still alive.

All of this connects with a broader sociocultural fear — about control, power, and life itself.The saga is a brutal allegory of otherness — of the alterity that disturbs and challenges dominant orders, especially the order of the human as the measure of all things.

So, the music here must pursue that ideal: to trace what it means to be another species, what it means to be dissident.

Composing Otherness

What do the composers of this rebooted trilogy do across the films?They play with emotion — a lot.They turn silence into voice.They direct silence toward a pole — heroic, or irrational.

They incorporate uncommon sounds.Remember Conclave? Volker Bertelmann used an instrument that sounded both strange and divine, because he was searching for something that belonged to human experience yet escaped humanity itself — something made by humans but not entirely of them.

Here, the composers —besides using Western instruments— introduce literal percussions, ambient noises disguised as electronic effects.They search for “primitive” sensations, for instruments that differ from the melodic, standardized ones we associate with modern orchestras.

So who are these composers?In Rise of the Planet of the Apes (the first film), we have Patrick Doyle; for the second and third —because I’m talking about the reboot trilogy from 2011 to 2017— we have my beloved Michael Giacchino, whom we’ve already discussed before.

They decided to lean into that direction — to use drums and sticks, if I may put it in the most unrefined terms.Listen, and you’ll get what I mean.

Why these choices?Because it’s the rarest, most primal sound one can imagine for these characters — the apes.

I find Caesar extraordinary as a character (that’s a whole other discussion), but what matters here is how music orchestrates that trajectory.From its literary origins in 1963, we can already sense a cultural unease:What would happen if humanity’s place in the chain of power were reversed?If animality —that thing we’ve worked so hard to leave behind— looked down at us from above?

That question is deeply political.It reflects a discomfort with everything that escapes the Western, rational model — or perhaps a need to reinforce it, a need to reassert a domination whose collapse can only be imagined “in a world of fiction.”

Sound as a Political Actant

And that’s where music enters as a political actant.Because when you choose to evoke “the primitive,” you’re symbolically loading that sound.

What does music tell us when it sounds tribal or unstructured?What does it prepare us to interpret?What codes —what “plug-ins,” as Bruno Latour would say— are activated when we decide that such sounds represent the Other, the wild, the non-human?How does that “wildness” speak when there’s no dominant language?

The sound design here is anything but innocent.Using non-tempered tones, “rudimentary” percussion, or musical structures that don’t follow the Western logic of theme and variation —or of a clear leitmotif— is a political decision.Maybe not a conscious one, but an effective one.

Because musically, it educates the ear — it teaches balance itself to identify those sounds as foreign.“This isn’t Mozart, or Beethoven, or Williams; this isn’t the idealized human. It’s something else — and that something else doesn’t fit.”

The Ecology of Sound

Many films tend to portray nature as chaotic — something to be contained.But if we think about it, chaos isn’t the problem.Life itself is chaotic.It flows in complexity, it’s rhizomatic.There’s what we could call an ecology of practices.

Caesar and his community embody that:not an alternative civilization in the modern sense, but another form of organization, another form of knowledge.

And so the question isn’t only what the composers do with sticks or noise —it’s whether sound itself can become a tool to reinforce stories.Can sound open a crack — or feed into hegemonic fears and narratives?

That’s why I find these soundtracks so fascinating.Because they don’t just narrate with music —they politicize through sound.Not through the poster or the plot,but through the sensory design that reaffirms, modulates, or establishes social and cultural codes.

Pretty wild, right?

Original Version