Loosely based on French author Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes, 1968’s Planet of the Apes was released to critical acclaim. Even those critics who disliked the film claimed that it was fun to watch, and it was this very “fun” factor that allowed it to germinate into an entire franchise. Later movies drew further and further away from the original, but fans still remember the impact of the first installment.
Although the novel’s ending was reflected better in the 2001 remake starring Mark Wahlberg, the conclusion of the 1968 film remains one of the saddest in movie history. Considering the looming dangers of nuclear war, especially with so many incompetent world leaders in the 2020s, Planet of the Apes ends on a note that feels dangerously relevant today. And it seems even more powerful in the subversive context of humanity’s (mis)treatment throughout the film.
Planet of the Apes Quickly Shattered the Illusion of Human Privilege
Planet of the Apes‘ title was designed as a thematic misdirection, a red herring to convince viewers that the heroic astronauts were actually stranded on a different planet. Hundreds of light-years from Earth, George Taylor and his co-astronauts, Landon and Dodge, come out of a 2000-year-long migration on what they believe to be a separate solar system. The desert landscape offers a vaguely post-apocalyptic vibe, which becomes clearer as the film continues.
The men immediately make themselves at home, a glimpse of the human arrogance that’s rapidly dismantled. Taylor, Dodge, and Landon strip naked and splash around in a pond, only to discover that they’re not actually the first sentient beings on this new world. The Garden of Eden metaphor collapses entirely when they discover a race of superintelligent apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas persisting in a species-based caste system.
Viewers back then weren’t as jaded, so few considered the possibility that the astronauts had been sent there as a reconnaissance mission for colonization, much like what happened on Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. Although these goals and intentions are never expressed, they aren’t sidelined by the apes’ mistreatment of the astronauts. On the contrary, the primate society’s behavior reflects the colonizer mentality of many real-world governments, casting hateful aspersions and even murdering humans for being different.
And yet, Planet of the Apes doesn’t have its human characters respond to violence and prejudice with more of the same. While Landon and Dodge become helpless examples of the ape’s thoughtless brutality, Taylor desperately attempts to prove his intelligence because he believes it to be the most important link between the primates and himself. It’s a deeply anthropocentric view that also frames humanity as a single race, unified by the virtue of sentience alone.
As the film nears its conclusion, Taylor discovers the relics of an ancient human civilization, recognizing objects like dolls, eyeglasses, and dentures, all identifiable by viewers in 1968. When asked how an advanced civilization on the planet of the apes was destroyed despite its greatness, Taylor considered zero options that laid the blame on his race — “wiped out by a plague, some natural catastrophe, a storm of meteors.”
It wasn’t even his world, or so he thought, but Taylor was extremely certain that the humans there were once great. The protagonist only considers the real possibility after the reading of the so-called 29th Scroll, which begins with “Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn,” and only gets more anti-human from there. All these mysteries propel Taylor into Planet of the Apes’ ending, but his search for answers soon turns to ash in his mouth.
Planet of the Apes Blamed Humanity for Causing Its Own Extinction
Planet of the Apes was based on a script written by Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone and the brain behind some of its most devastatingly profound episodes. Since Serling’s screenplay necessitated an increased budget, another screenwriter (Michael Wilson) was tasked with the rewriting. Thankfully, the final version — attributed to both Wilson and Serling — maintained the original twist ending.
Every iteration of the story, including the source novel, showcases the apes’ contempt for humanity, a feeling nurtured over the course of many historical eras and generations. Most of them never pay heed to Taylor’s pleas, signifying the depth of their belief in human arrogance and destruction. But the protagonist remained determined to root out the cause of the primates’ bigotry.
Perhaps Taylor wanted to understand how a thriving civilization could collapse on an alien planet and transfer that knowledge toward safeguarding his own. Or maybe he felt curious about the arcs of evolution that seemed to defy the paths taken on Earth. Whatever thought train he took derailed the moment he saw the Statue of Liberty, corroded by centuries of erosion and neglect.
Only it wasn’t just a deteriorating pile of metal; it was the symbol of everything that Taylor stood and argued for at the ape councils. The Statue of Liberty represented Taylor’s unified vision of humanity, a welcoming beacon of modernity that immediately distanced itself from the warriorlike violence implied by the Colossus of Rhodes — “not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land.”
To see the Statue of Liberty cast aside on the shores it once hailed as free, broken in half and covered in sand like poet Percy B. Shelley’s Ozymandias, was a slap in the face of all humanity. The apes were always right, from the very start — it was humanity that grew so large and greedy that a catastrophic outcome became inevitable. And, more upsettingly, it wasn’t some distant, extraterrestrial offshoot of the species; these were the same stock that Taylor came from.
Betrayed by his own species and separated from his time by thousands of years, George Taylor could only wail at the sight of humanity’s gravestone. The joy of returning home was eclipsed by the horror of his realization that humans “finally really did it.” Taylor’s misplaced optimism was annihilated in this moment, as he aimed his first words of true anger at his ancestors: “You maniacs! You blew it up. God damn you, God damn you all to Hell!”
Planet of the Apes kept the revelation until the movie’s final frames, ending immediately after showing the destroyed Statue of Liberty. Viewers were left to bask in Taylor’s shame and guilt, emotions that vicariously extended to genuine concerns about the real world. Released just a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a film indicting humanity for the nuclear apocalypse made a particularly powerful statement. Today, that fear has magnified tenfold.
The Planet of the Apes Franchise Weakened the Original Ending
1968’s Planet of the Apes was followed by four sequels, but they’re mostly forgettable except for introducing Caesar, who remains the franchise’s most iconic character. Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes were arguably cash-grab attempts to capitalize on the first film’s overwhelming success.
The 2001 remake by Tim Burton may have been more faithful to the original novel, with the concluding plot twist being just as shocking as in Planet of the Apes. Then again, it’s not just the shock value that matters. Unfortunately, the reboot trilogy also went through a complete overhaul, recontextualizing the conflict between apes and humans as existential. The threat to humanity came from itself, from an artificial virus that unleashed an extinction-level pandemic, but the entire situation was triggered accidentally.
The aims of the scientists developing this Simian Flu Virus were seemingly noble, and it just happened to escape their control. This soon became a lesson warning against meddling with nature, whereas the misfortune itself was the result of coincidence. The reboot trilogy relieved humanity of the burden of bringing about the apocalypse, vaguely suggesting that the actions of some admittedly misguided individuals shouldn’t be used to condemn the whole race.
The 1968 movie made no vague assumptions — it clearly and firmly declared humanity as the true villain of the world. There were always good people around in the reboots, but they focused more on improving ape-human dynamics in an attempt to share the world with the newly sentient primates. Meanwhile, Planet of the Apes stuck to the depressing conclusion created by Rod Serling, in which humanity doesn’t even exist anymore.
Six decades later, the movie continues to endure because it rejects absolution. The final shot of the Statue of Liberty doesn’t mourn a lost world as much as blame those who destroyed themselves and each other through arrogance, violence, and unchecked power. Planet of the Apes transforms science fiction into a moral reckoning, forcing viewers to confront the uncomfortable idea that human extinction might one day be the consequence of our combined actions.