3 Thoroughly Depressing Planet of the Apes Shorts Document Apocalypse, Promote Actual Documentary

It’s like The Walking Dead without zombies as directed by indie auteurs, or Gareth Edwards’ Monsters in a more tolerable short form: three short films that show different stages of the “Monkey Apocalypse” (yes, I know they’re apes, but monkey almost rhymes with zombie if you squint hard enough and that’s funny dammit). Isaiah Seret (“Kisses Over Babylon”) gives us a romance that ends in lethal flu and depression; Daniel Thron (digital matte painter on Tron: Legacy and Oblivion) delivers a picture of a post-disease world falling apart that ends in fear; and somebody or some bodies named “thirtytwo” show the progress of a gun from human hands to…well, you can guess, and probably figure out that it ends in both fear AND depression.

Made in collaboration with Motherboard, these shorts also build to what at first seems like a longer mockumentary about apes in Liberia, but in fact seems to be a legit documentary that’s only thematically related, about lab chimps left on an island after Charles Taylor’s revolution. On the plus side, because it’s apparently real, it does not end in depression and extinction for all of us.

Spoiler. Check ’em all out below…

Bonus question: would reducing the global population to 10% really be enough to put us at the mercy of apes? I would think we’d still vastly outnumber them.