A Nineteen-Sixty-Eight film allegory…

*

The final scene…

*

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…

Continue reading at France&Vincent