An Original Character Is Coming Back for ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’
While the new Planet of the Apes movies haven’t done a whole lot to reference the originals, aside from Caesar himself and the Icarus in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the newest installment is going to bring a very important character in play who was originally introduced in the 1968 film.
Entertainment Weekly debuted a piece of concept art from the movie, in which a small blonde girl stands on a fallen log as a gorilla on a horse reaches out to her. The girl’s name is Nova, and if you’ve seen the original movies, you know exactly where this is going. The character of Nova was first played by Linda Harrison in Planet of the Apes, a mute girl who meets Charlton Heston’s Taylor and then journeys with him through the forbidden zone in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This new Nova is played by Amiah Miller, and represents an emotional touchstone for Caesar. According to director Matt Reeves:
The battle is not just between the humans and the apes, but in Caesar’s soul. The girl is his pull back to his empathy and — for lack of a better word — his human side.
Fortunately she’s wearing a lot more clothes in this image than her original adult version, and, if we consider a timeline for these movies (if they do correspond), we’re very close to where the original movies pick up the story. It might not work that way with this new series, though, since plenty of liberties have already been taken. The apes require many years of evolution to become the humanoids they are in Planet of the Apes, so if this series were to continue, there’d have to be a veeeery large gap in time before we meet Taylor, if we ever will. That means Nova would have to be extremely old, so her character being in War probably doesn’t hint at any future knitting-together of the two series.
War for the Planet of the Apes hits theaters July 24, 2017.