Director
Franklin J. Schaffner
Leading Actors/Actresses
Charlton Heston/Roddy McDowall/Kim Hunter
Supporting Actors/Actresses
Maurice Evans/Linda Harrison
Genre
Science Fiction
Language
English
Awards
Special Academy Award for Makeup prior to Makeup becoming a regular category
Date of Release
April 3, 1968
Producer
Arthur P. Jacobs
Setting and Context
Earth in the year 3978
Narrator and Point of View
The film is primarily seen through the experiences of astronaut George “Bright Eyes” Taylor, although without a direct servicing of his misanthropic outlook upon humanity.
Tone and Mood
The film goes through a subtle tonal shift in which the mood gradually moves from one of dizzying vertiginous unease with a world that seems completely upside down to one of dawning recognition that the world is eerily familiar to one of shocking recognition that this world is and always has been our own.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Taylor. Antagonist: Dr. Zaius.
Major Conflict
Taylor and Dr. Zaius are locked in a conflict over Taylor discovering his destiny. Zaius is acutely aware that Taylor is from the past and what happened in that past. His primary job among the apes seems to be to keep them from realizing that they evolved from a civilization in which man ruled them and was their intellectual superior. While Taylor never seem to suspect for a moment that he has not traveled through space nearly as far as he has traveled through time, he does make a series of references about this planet being upside down from what he knows. Therefore, his side of the conflict is not so much about searching for destiny as having it suddenly thrust in front of him in a way that makes him question everything he thought he knew.
Climax
Taylor seeing that the head of the Statue of Liberty and realizing he’s been back home on earth the entire time.
Foreshadowing
"Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars…still make war against his brother?” Taylor's ponderous question posed to the spaceship's onboard computer diary in the opening scene.
Understatement
The revelation that Taylor has simply returned to earth after floating for thousands of light years is a classic case of understatement. Thousands of years of history is explained with just a very brief appearance of half of an iconic statue.
Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques
So innovative was the makeup for the film that a special honorary Oscar was decreed since, rather shockingly, no award for makeup existed at the time. In addition, while there is some debate over the precise and irrefutable truth of the claim, many have forwarded the proposition that the soundtrack for the film was the first atonal score in Hollywood history.
Allusions
The most famous allusion in the film is the recreation of the pictorial maxim of the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil statue.
Paradox
Taylor considers himself to be at the top of the hierarchy of human beings. He even goes so far as to assert that he became an astronaut in order to prove that there had to be something out there better than the human species. This utterly misanthropic man whose view of humans is roughly coincident with that of seeing them as mere beasts, however, somehow has the nerve to complain that being treated like an animal by intelligent apes is like living in a madhouse. There is most definitely something paradoxical about that irony.
Parallelism
The entire film engages a cosmological concept of parallelism by constantly paralleling ape society with human society for the purpose of satire. Common human tropes like “monkey-see/monkey-do” becomes “human-see/human-do” and “all humans look the same to apes” are engaged to reveal that human and ape societies are not really all that different.
