Official trailer
The Statue of Liberty rising from the sand tells you in one image that Taylor was on Earth the whole time, and that we did this to ourselves. Few science fiction films deliver a complete thematic statement that efficiently, and that ending is the reason this one stays in the conversation.
Everything the film built, the role reversals, the species hierarchy, Taylor’s progressive humiliation, arrives at that image with complete structural justification, and the image delivers a force that the preceding film prepared for and fully earned.
My rating: 7 out of 10. Good for its time, honest instead of dismissive, with a great ending and Charlton Heston’s well-suited performance. The rating accounts for a film that’s very much a product of 1968 in ways that both help and limit it fifty-seven years later.
I enjoy this film most for Heston and for that last shot on the beach, and I’m patient with the rest. The stretch in the ape city feels like a stage play to me, and the satire lands like a lecture I’ve already heard. The ending hits so hard that I forgive a lot on the way there.
The Role Reversal and What It’s Doing
The film’s central conceit, placing humans in the subordinate role typically occupied by animals in a society that treats them with the same casual cruelty humans routinely apply to animals, is conceptually sound and was provocative in 1968. The ape society’s hierarchy mirrors human social stratification with uncomfortable precision: the intellectual chimps, the militaristic gorillas, the patrician orangutans. The scientific establishment that refuses to acknowledge evidence contradicting its assumptions about human intelligence. The religious authority that treats heterodoxy as threat. The political class that prioritizes order over truth.
None of this is subtle. Planet of the Apes was never trying to be subtle about its social satire. The directness is part of the design, Franklin J. Schaffner wanted the parallels legible. In 1968, against the backdrop of civil rights, Vietnam, and the intellectual ferment of that cultural moment, the directness was suitable. The parallels read as sharp instead of heavy-handed to an audience that was actively examining its own society’s assumptions about hierarchy and the arbitrary basis of power.
Fifty-seven years later the satire reads as somewhat blunt, the unavoidable cost of historical context changing around a film. The ideas are simply no longer surprising. That changes the experience of encountering them.
Charlton Heston as Taylor
Heston is perfectly cast as Taylor, and the quality of his casting deserves acknowledgment. Taylor is a cynic, a man who left Earth because he found humanity disappointing and expected to find it equally disappointing in whatever else the universe contained. He’s not a hero in the conventional sense. He’s a misanthrope who gets exactly the confirmation he was looking for, at a scale and with an irony that goes beyond anything he imagined.
Heston plays Taylor’s cynicism as settled conviction. He doesn’t enjoy being right about humanity. He simply expected it, and the film confirms it in the most complete way available. His famous line at the end, “You maniacs!
You blew it up!”, comes out as bitter vindication more than despair, and I think that reading is what makes the moment work for me. He knew all along and just didn’t know how completely.
The physical performance is also worth acknowledging. Taylor spends much of the film caged, mute, subjected to the scientific curiosity and casual cruelty that humans routinely apply to captured animals. Heston plays that subjection, the helplessness of a capable person reduced to an object, with a conviction that makes the role-reversal more than conceptual. You feel the indignity in ways that a less physically committed performance wouldn’t communicate.
The Ape Society in Detail
The film’s world building is sketchier than later science fiction films by considerable distance. The ape society is established through a limited number of locations and characters instead of through the accumulated detail of a world that exists beyond the frame. The city feels like a set, which it is, instead of like a place that continues beyond what the camera shows.
This is partly a budget limitation and partly a 1968 production sensibility that didn’t require the immersive world building post-Star Wars science fiction assumed as a baseline.
The film gets away with the sketchiness because the concept is strong. I don’t need to believe in the ape society as a civilization. I need to believe in it as a mirror, and I do, even while the sets look like sets to me. That thinness is a big part of why I stop at 7.
John Chambers’ makeup work is impressive for 1968 and earned an Honorary Academy Award. The apes are recognizable as simians while being expressive enough to support performance, a balance that’s harder to achieve than it looks, and one that the film depends on entirely. If the makeup failed, the concept failed. It doesn’t fail.
The Ending
The Statue of Liberty rising from the sand is one of cinema’s perfect ending images. It works because Schaffner withheld it, kept the location ambiguous throughout the film, let Taylor and the audience assume they were on an alien planet, and then in a single shot delivered the answer and everything the answer means at once.
The image requires no explanation. Taylor’s reaction, from incomprehension to recognition to devastation, plays across Heston’s face in real time, and the audience goes through the same thing with him. The twist tells us where Taylor is and what the film was about all along: human hierarchies, our own capacity for violence, and an answer we already knew about how intelligence treats lesser beings. That shot gives me chills, and I’d put it up against any closing image in science fiction.
It’s the kind of ending that can only work once, the second viewing of Planet of the Apes is a completely different experience, knowing what the ending means as it builds instead of discovering it at the finish. But the first viewing delivers something that great endings rarely provide: the sense that the film was always heading exactly here, that the destination was built into the premise from the beginning, and that arriving at it feels both surprising and inevitable.
Does Planet of the Apes still hold up?
Planet of the Apes gets its 7 from me on the strength of the ending and Heston. The premise was sharper in 1968 than it reads now, and the world building was adequate for its time and looks thin by current standards, so the parts in between don’t hold me the way the beach does. I’d happily watch the last ten minutes on their own. The ending is science fiction at its best, and the film that builds to it is good without being great.
