It is the year 1973 when colonel Taylor's spaceship which had been missing for the past two years is found floating in the water off southern California. When the US military brings the ship to shore and opens the hatch, three beings in astronaut suits emerge from the ship. The military leader starts to salute the astronauts but then has to stop himself when he is surprised to see that the three are apes. The three who emerged from the ship are none other than three chimpanzee intellectuals Zira, Cornelius, and Dr. Milo. It is soon revealed that Dr. Milo was a chimpanzee scientific genius way ahead of his time. Dr. Milo was able to salvage and repair the spaceship which had previously brought Taylor to their ape world. The three apes had escaped from their world using the spaceship just before their earth saw its demise in the previous sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes. When they left their world, the year was 3,955 A.D. What is so good about this movie is once again the fascinating story. Particularly interesting is Cornelius' revelations from the apes prehistory concerning the rise of apes and the start of the fall of human kind. While sympathetic to Zira and Cornelius, the movie does a good job in showing how humans in 1973 would be shocked and disturbed by the visiting apes' revelations of a future where apes rule, and humans are primitive animals who are experimented on and hunted for sport, and how the earth comes to an end. Consequently, the movie's characters are not black and white one dimensional good and bad people. Is Dr. Hasslein a cruel evil person who wants to eliminate the apes, or is he merely protecting the humans from a cruel and tragic future?
