Throughout my Apes journey, I kept coming back to this not-so-odd thought: that Christopher Nolan must be a big fan of these movies. The time travel shenanigans fit to a T, and chunks of the first film’s opening act feel right out of Interstellar. It’s also the themes at play: man’s inhumanity to man, the unintended consequences of actions played out across time, and the moral weight of choice. There are also moments, like this one about nuclear weapons in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, that had me recreating the Leo Pointing Meme:

It was back in the mid-‘00s that Christopher Nolan got himself attached to direct Troy, the film that would eventually be directed by Wolfgang Peterson to not much acclaim. “As part of that process I had to work out how I wanted to treat the Trojan Horse,” Nolan told Thomas Duke in an interview on TikTok. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.” It was an image, an idea, that Nolan held on to for two decades. The Horse, an offering to Athena and a gift to the Trojans, serves as the foundational sin of Nolan’s The Odyssey, and its connection to the Statue of Liberty is more than superficial. “That idea of a fallen monument,” sounds simple enough, but a monument is vested with meaning, and the Statue of Liberty bears more meaning than most. At the end of Nolan’s Homer adaptation, Matt Damon’s Odysseus sails off to the Unknown West with his wife, Penelope. “Civilization will rise again,” she says, to which he replies, “A new dawn will break over the darkened world… And our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” The final images of the film are Odysseus on the steps of the Trojan temple to Athena, staring up at the Horse, destruction and fire all around. If the Trojan Horse is the Statue of Liberty, here at the end the connection feels apt. More than just an aesthetic similarity, Nolan reveals the diabolical gift to be just that, a breaking of the covenant between men and the gods that has sustained civilization. The maniacs, they blew it up.