The main character is able to display his capacity for intelligence and speech to Zira, a chimpanzee psychologist specializing in the study of humans, and her fiance, Cornelius, a respected archaeologist. Both characters rely on their intellect to survive and to attempt to bargain and communicate with the apes, but Taylor is much more forceful and aggressive than the reasoning and polite Ulysse. In the film, Heston's character's name is the more American George Taylor, and after an accident aboard their ship, his crew finds itself lost on another world. The message is the account of French astronaut Ulysse Merou, who traveled to a distant world his crew named Soror.

In Boulle's novel, the story is told via a message in a bottle that a wealthy couple stumble across while vacationing through space.

The first big change is in the framing of the story. The movie featured innovative costume designs for the apes, which led to the first Oscar award for makeup artists. The film version of 'Apes' featured Charlton Heston as an astronaut who crash-lands on a foreign planet and is taken captive by the apes who rule it over the wild human population. The immediate popularity of the book led to a film adaptation, released in 1968 and co-written by Michael Wilson, the same man who wrote the screen version of Boulle's 'The Bridge over the River Kwai' about 10 years previously. Humans are wild animals captured and studied by apes, who talk, dress and rule just like humans do on Earth. This month saw the release of the latest in one of science fiction's most well-known movie franchises, 'Planet of the Apes.' The franchise that includes eight movies and a TV series all spawned from Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel about an astronaut who stumbles across a planet where the roles of humans and apes are reversed.

Planet of the apes boulle