Continuity mistake: The first exterior shots of the spacecraft in the desert lake show the spaceship's hatch door already gone... before the astronauts blow it off with an explosive charge minutes later in the movie.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Plot summary
Starring: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans
In the year 3978 A.D., a spaceship with a crew of four crashes down on a distant planet. One of the crew members had died in space and the other three head out to explore the planet. They soon learn that the planet is much like their own. They then find the planet is inhabited by intelligent apes. One of the men is shot and killed and the others are taken to the apes' city. There, one undergoes brain surgery and is put into a state of living death. The other (Heston) befriends some of the apes but is feared by most. After being put through ape trial he escapes with a female human native (Harrison) to the planet. After helping his ape friends escape a religious heresy trial he escapes out into the wilderness with the female. There he learns the planet might not be so distant after all...
More mistakes in Planet of the Apes
George Taylor: Take your stinkin' paws off me, ya damn dirty ape.
More trivia for Planet of the Apes
Question: What caused the original nuclear devastation depicted in the movie?
Chosen answer: World War III.
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Answer: I think that this is meant to be a mystery. Taylor/Charlton Heston, an astronaut, leaves a world set somewhat in the future after 1968 (when the movie was made) but still recognisable to cinema-goers at the time, to travel through a "time vortex" to arrive in a world in a distant future, which has changed beyond recognition. Taylor meets the orangutan Zaius/Maurice Evans, and Zaius hints that he has some idea of what had happened, but Zaius' knowledge is either limited, or else Zaius is not going to tell Taylor (or his fellow apes) the full story. At the end of the movie Taylor discovers that, at some point between his leaving his own time and arriving in the "Planet Of The Apes", the world had been devastated by a nuclear war, but I think that the exact time, causes of, and course of this nuclear war are deliberately left as a mystery. Sometimes I think a bit of unresolved mystery actually improves a story, and I think this is the case here.
Rob Halliday