I didn’t expect to see a man in a monkey suit (or a man’s identity concealed as a high-tech ape) when I went to the latest summer blockbuster on Saturday. I went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes for what I thought would be mindless entertainment and came away 110 minutes later dazzled by a film where imagination ruled the screenplay from start to finish.

Apes was well birthed in drama emphasizing perennial problems often found on the social landscape. From Jacobs (the unethical owner of a drug company) to Caesar, Mr. Lead Ape (giving out free chocolate chip cookies to enlist recruits in revolt), the movie could not have driven the needle of oppression into the psyche any deeper if it had tried. The gorilla-sized implications of rejection, humiliation and brute force were only out-played by the apes leaping from windows in high-rise office buildings and improvising war tactics on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The movie also showed how mistreatment influences behavior. Should we have been surprised that when the end of life came to Jacobs in his spiraling-towards-earth helicopter that world domination had, at that moment, just made a paradigm shift? I don’t think so. The apes looked on their human dominators as though they were looking in a mirror, which of course they weren’t. But what they saw in evil men, they became as evil apes.

And maybe Caesar is home, as he tells his once-loving human family member who remains otherwise naïve at the end of the film. Then again, Will, there are many more Chips Ahoy! to be manufactured. Meanwhile evil contamination is spreading like so many tainted tubes of intelligence.

Wherever the sequel to this film is headed it’s sure to pick up on Apes’ closing scene of Will’s neighbor reporting to work. Let me ask you…if you were given the job of writing the next screenplay how would you write it? Can the human race be saved?

(Remember this is all imaginary.)