You maniacs! There’s something to be said for the fact that, despite featuring one of the most famous final reveals in cinematic history, the original “Planet of the Apes” follows a fairly straightforward plot (by “Apes” standards, of course) compared to what would follow in its footsteps. Three surviving astronauts crash land on Earth over 2,000 years after first launching in 1972, with Heston’s George Taylor convinced they’ve arrived on some alien world. Though first-time viewers spend almost the entirety of its runtime under the same impression, the very idea of time-dilation effects, space exploration, and time travel all provide our first real signpost of the wacky, sci-fi shenanigans to come. By the end of his journey, Taylor arrives at the horrifying conclusion that his home world has been taken over by an intelligent civilization of apes and humans now occupy their former place in the food chain. Basically, Earth circa 3900 AD is a bad, bad place for Homo sapiens. Simple enough, right?
The 1970 sequel “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” picks up where its predecessor left off, slowly building out this dystopian future to focus on militaristic apes bent on war, a mutant group of telepathic and nuclear bomb-worshipping humans living (where else) beneath the surface of the planet, and more information about the nuclear war in 1992 that led to all this in the first place. Things don’t improve much from there, building to a desperate underground battle between humans and apes to prevent the latter faction from setting off the Alpha Omega doomsday warhead. Mortally wounded and utterly fed up with the world, Taylor hits the detonation switch himself and blows up the entire planet … which you’d think would’ve ended the franchise once and for all. Not quite!