‘Planet Ape’…

A Nineteen-Sixty-Eight film allegory…

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The final scene…

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Astronauts Taylor, Landon, and Dodge awake from hibernation after a near-light-speed space trip. Their spacecraft crashes into a lake on an unknown planet. Taylor’s estimate places them in Orion’s Bellatrix System, light-years from their home Solar System. Before abandoning their vessel, they read their chronometer as November 25, 3978 – two-thousand-and-six years after their departure in 1972. Time dilation means the astronauts have aged less than a year in that time.

The men travel through wasteland, coming across a lake with lush vegetation. While swimming, the men’s clothes are stolen by primitive, mute, humans. Soon after, armed gorillas raid a cornfield where the humans are gathering food. Taylor is shot in the throat as he and the others are captured. Dodge is killed and Landon is rendered unconscious. Taylor is taken to Ape City. Two chimpanzees, psychologist Zira and surgeon Galen, save Taylor’s life, though his throat injury renders him mute.

Taylor is placed with a captive female, Nova. He observes a society of apes with a strict caste system: gorillas are the military and labourers; orangutans oversee government and religion; and intellectual chimpanzees are the scientists and doctors.

Ape society is a theocracy which considers primitive humans vermin to be hunted, and either, killed outright, enslaved, or used in scientific experiments.

Taylor convinces Zira and her fiancé, Cornelius, that he is as intelligent as they are but Dr. Zaius, their orangutan superior, arranges for Taylor to be castrated. Taylor escapes and finds Dodge’s stuffed corpse displayed in a museum. He is soon recaptured and reveals that he can speak, which alarms the apes.

A hearing to determine Taylor’s origins is convened. Believing Taylor is from an unknown human tribe beyond their borders Zaius threatens to castrate and lobotomize Taylor for refusing to reveal his origins. Zira and Cornelius free Taylor and Nova and take them to the Forbidden Zone, a taboo region outside Ape City. Ape law has ruled the area out of bounds for centuries. Cornelius and Zira are intent on gathering proof of an earlier non-simian civilization – which Cornelius discovered a year earlier – to be cleared of heresy. Taylor focuses on proving he came from a different planet.

When the group arrive at the cave, Cornelius is intercepted by Zaius and his soldiers. Taylor holds them off by threatening to shoot Zaius, who agrees to enter the cave to disprove their theories. Inside, Cornelius displays remnants of a technologically advanced human society pre-dating simian history. Taylor identifies artifacts such as dentures, eyeglasses, a heart valve and, to the apes’ astonishment, a talking human doll. Zaius admits he has always known about the ancient human civilization. Taylor wants to search for answers. Zaius warns Taylor against finding an answer which he does not like. After Taylor and Nova are allowed to leave, Zaius has the cave sealed off to destroy the evidence, while charging Cornelius, and Zira with heresy…

‘Your teachers took the keys of knowledge and hid them from you.’

…Taylor and Nova follow the shoreline on horseback. Eventually, they discover the remnants of the Statue of Liberty, revealing the ‘alien planet ape’ as the planet Earth. Taylor falls to his knees, condemning humanity for destroying his world.

Given the last fifty-five years, it does not take much to glean what the makers of this film were getting at!