The character:	Otto Hasslein
The actor:	Eric Braeden
The movie:	Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Genocide ought to be fairly easy to accomplish when you’ve only got to knock off two, maximum three individuals. Hasslein, the scientific advisor to the president, has a problem here not because he can’t accomplish it, but because the president himself stands in his way. Cornelius and Zira, time refugees from a newly destroyed time, born in a timeline that humans destroyed generations before, are the closest things that anyone in ’70s America has seen to a space alien. They’re chimpanzees, but as they are they couldn’t fit into the wild or a zoo exhibit as chimps. Maybe things would have gone better for the couple, expecting their first child, if they had said they came from space. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, given the kind of rhetoric Hasslein feels comfortable spewing in front of his boss. “The people must be told that the killers of today could become the mass murderers of tomorrow,” he spits. That the chimpanzees haven’t killed anyone would be a noteworthy logical misstep if he weren’t already deep in the mania of geometric growth, arguing that some obvious self-defense might engender a killing spree.

The language of the genocidist takes this approach. It’s us or them. If we do not act, they will. In fact, they have acted already, and we are simply responding in kind. We are inherently justified. And after all, they’re animals, and we alone are people.

Hasslein gets his way by the last few minutes of the film, even though that requires him to go afoul of the president’s orders to bring the (seemingly dangerous) apes in alive. He shoots Zira and the infant chimp in her arms. He doesn’t get to finish the job with Cornelius, who kills him first, but the point is moot; Cornelius is killed shortly afterwards. Knowing that he has personally killed the baby and the mother who could conceivably bear more, Hasslein must go to his death with some contentment. Surely he regrets not finishing the job himself, or having to die before he can lord this accomplishment over a frustrated president, but he knows he has backup. If he’s serious in believing that he is working for the preservation of humanity, he has made a trade, pawn for queen, that any chess player would be thrilled to make.

I struggle to think of examples in film that mirror what Hasslein does in the late stages of this film. For one, commercial film shies away from the slaughter of infants. Killing little kids is common enough, because he can’t see without his glasses. Killing teenagers in gory ways in movies has functionally replaced killing teenagers in drag races on the strip in American society. And I have no idea how many adults I’ve seen killed in I have no idea how many ways in my movie watching history. Hasslein shoots a baby out of a mother’s arms. That this is also a moment where a genocide succeeds, the last moment, the moment of extinction, is basically unprecedented. In movies, not even atomic bombs or the Great Jehovah ever knocked out everyone. In the micro and the macro, Hasslein is uniquely sinister, as if Pol Pot were going out into the killing fields himself to take potshots at the dissidents.

The movie tempers this conclusion, not least because there are sequels to make. If there weren’t, I think this would be so bleak as to be almost unwatchable. It turns out that the infant shot dead was a chimpanzee baby, recently born himself, and Cornelius and Zira’s child is safe in the care of, incredibly, Ricardo Montalban. That bit of strategic planning makes Hasslein’s sins a little less spectacular, though, of course, it’s through no fault of his own.