**** This has spoilers **** This is a great film, and has been a victim of it's own success. The 1968 film is first a great story. Second it is a great allegory about our society. Third it is a great drama. Fourth is a great example of story telling. You are first introduced to main character on board an futuristic spaceship that can travel near light speed. Then you are led to think they crashed landed on a desert planet on the way home. At this point you find out the main character hates human society. He became an astronaut to find something better than man. Then you find that the primitive humans seem to populate the planet, and the astronauts think they will be running the place in six months. Then you find out apes run the planet and treat humans as we treat apes. As the astronaut learns about the ape society, he begins to yearn for the human society he hates. We also see parallels that comment on our own. You can see Rod Serling's hand in the script. The twist at the end - that the planet is Earth in the distant future makes the astronaut hate human society, that he has just begun to want, even more.
If you follow the story of this film, all the sequels are impossible. The people who launched the space mission would never had sent the rescue mission of the second movie, because they would have know the spaceship would return in the future when they all were long dead. In this film they hint that the human society destroys itself, and then their trained ape servants took over.
If you follow the story of this film, all the sequels are impossible. The people who launched the space mission would never had sent the rescue mission of the second movie, because they would have know the spaceship would return in the future when they all were long dead. In this film they hint that the human society destroys itself, and then their trained ape servants took over.