Intruders: New Neighbors in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Hundred-Foot Journey

Conflicts over territory are about the power to establish dominant cultures in territories and are often accompanied by cultural claims to legitimacy by each side. The cultural claims, or ideologies, are often expressed in terms of “homeland” dwellers versus “intruders.” Two recent movies, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Hundred-Foot Journey, depict such conflicts. They refer to novel groups in the depictions, but they follow the pattern of earlier movies, such as Broken Arrow. Novel groups are required because the earlier examples of despised alien cultures no longer convey to modern audiences the extreme hostility felt by the combatants in the earlier movies.