Planet of the Apes

Corrected entry: When Taylor is in Zira's office, he has written on several notes. You can see the handwriting is completely different to the note he wrote "My name is Taylor" on earlier. (00:45:30 - 00:46:15)

Casual Person

Correction: The writing may be different because in the cell he had to hurry before getting beaten and having the materials taken away. in the office, he could take his time and thus write in his natural style.

Corrected entry: Taylor got shot in the neck. Before his neck is bandaged, his neck is shown to have blood on it, but no bullet hole from where the ape shot him. (00:34:15)

Casual Person

Correction: No bullet hole because the shot severely grazed his neck. If he had been shot through the neck, there's an almost certainty he could have bled out, or paralyzed.

Movie Nut

Corrected entry: When Cornelius and Taylor are talking over the canyon, the river at the bottom is obviously a photograph. The whitecaps don't move at all.

Correction: Firstly, it's normal for the "white caps" in rivers to not move as they're caused by the interaction between rapidly flowing water and stationary obstacles. The "white caps" won't move unless the obstacles move. Secondly, if you watch the river between the cliffs as Cornelius says, "You can't ride along the shore at high tide," you'll see several birds flying back and forth. This may well be a process shot with the actors superimposed on a filmed background, but it's certainly not a still photograph.

Corrected entry: When the astronauts first found life, the flower, there are 3 backpacks. Subsequent scenes while walking through the desert show the 3 men with the 3 packs. However, in the scene where the astronauts are going through the canyon, and are being observed from above, the first astronaut, Dodge no longer has his pack which contained food and water.

Correction: Shortly before the shots where he no longer has the backpack, there is a distant shot of the astronauts standing at the top of a mesa. You can see (in the Blu-ray version at least) that they leave the backpack behind. If it contained their food, this makes sense. They have been traveling for several days and it is established that they only have supplies for three days.

Corrected entry: The wound on Charlton Heston's neck is never more than a little bit of red paint smeared on his skin. The plot suggests he was shot in the neck with a gun, explaining why he cannot speak to defend himself (though it was unrealistic, since he couldn't even utter any sounds). Understandably, this movie was made in 1968, so special effects and makeup were limited, though you would expect them to put more effort into the illusion of a gunshot, especially for something so critical to the plot.

Correction: If the bullet entered his throat and didn't exit (i.e. was lodged in his larynx) it would leave only a very small entry wound, and would prevent him from making any sound. Once the bullet was removed, even trying to make sound would be very painful.

Corrected entry: If any disaster were to occur such as what happened here, the Statue of Liberty would be the first thing to go. Yes, it stood up in Day After Tomorrow, but Roland Emmerich knew that it wouldn't in real life. In reality, the statue isn't all that strong; even in a gust of wind, the arm of the statue sways 8 feet from side to side. And yet all of the buildings are gone in whatever horrible disaster occurred, and the flimsiest structure in New York outside of a billboard is still standing.

Correction: So the statue couldn't have been encased in layers of ash like Pompeii? Gradually buried then uncovered in its current position for Taylor to find? It's been renovated a few times since erected, it couldn't have been structurally strengthened before the war? It's also possible that it's just the top half of the statue sticking out. It's highly unlikely, yes, but not impossible.

Grumpy Scot

Corrected entry: The raft was barely big enough for three people, so they wouldn't have been able to fit Stuart (and supplies) if she had lived. (00:10:30)

????

Correction: You're assuming it was the only raft on board. Most likely they had 2, in order to hold 2 persons each plus supplies. One may have been damaged or deemed unneeded because of Stuart's death.

Corrected entry: This film is based on a satirical novel by French novelist Pierre Boulle. The satire of the film was against institutions and people of the 20th century.

megamii

Correction: How is this trivia? Pierre Boulle's novel is listed in the credits as the source material.

Corrected entry: In the scene after the hunt when all the humans are being rounded up, we see a group of gorillas posing for a photo with there feet on a stack of dead humans. If you watch the scene unfold as the camera passes over the pile of people someone in the stack moves their legs just in time to be picked up by the camera.

Correction: The humans may not be dead, only dying.

Corrected entry: All of the evolutionary and geographical changes are supposed to have happened within a 2000 year period? It would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years for those changes to occur, no matter what the nature of the catastrophe that had befallen the Earth.

Correction: In the fourth movie of the series, the apes had already been brought into the servitude of humans. They had been taught mundane duties such as filing, delivering messages, serving food\drinks and so on. Only the best and brightest were kept and the rest were executed. They had even begun to speak by the end of the fourth. Evolution had a nice helping hand from humans in picking the genetically superior apes. Once the apes were in control, they aided in the de-evolution of the human race (in the 3rd movie, it was shown that a group of intelligent, mutated humans did survive). As far as the geographic\climactic changes, we really have no idea what happened in that 2000 year period. How many nuclear weapons were released? Were there any other outside influences adding to the changes(meteors, earthquakes, volcanoes.)? Or was that even New York shown at the end? The statue of liberty may have been moved after destruction.

Rlvlk

Corrected entry: In the scene where Taylor is on trial, and first starts talking, the three seated officials assume various poses - the one on the left with his hands over his eyes, the middle one with his hands over his ears, and the one on the right with his hands over his mouth. A nod to the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys.

Correction: Not a "nod" but a very specific, and obvious, joke.

Corrected entry: This is a mistake between the first 2 Apes films. In the beginning of the first Apes movie as the ship is sinking Taylor looks at the Earth time chronometer and it says 11-25-3978 as the date. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes Brent tells his skipper that the year is 3955. They were following Taylor's trajectory and Brent does meet Taylor but according to the second film Brent got there 20 years earlier than Taylor.

Correction: The chronometer on the space ship could easily have malfunctioned, after all, the suspended animation chambers malfunctioned also. None of the characters is able to confirm the date, because first of all they didn't even know they were on Earth, and second, the apes calculated time differently than humans.

Corrected entry: At the beginning, when the hatch is blown on the ship, you can see both windows blow off the ship and a piece of the nose by the window almost blow off. Looks like the special effects department got a little carried away with the explosives.

Correction: It could have been the NASA engineers that built the capsule that put too much explosives in it or the surrounding structures could have been weakened from the trip.

Corrected entry: At the end of the movie when Taylor is shooting the Apes one of the chimps protests, and as he does you can see a hole in his costume, where you can see his Human thumb.

Correction: I have watched the entire ending sequence several times, zoomed in at every point where an ape does anything that even resembles a protest, and cannot find a human being's thumb.

Corrected entry: Early in the movie right after the 3 astronauts run from the rolling boulder they are sitting down under another rock (taking a breather) and Landon is speaking to the other two guys. You can tell from the long camera shot that there is no way he could be speaking those lines with that kind of thought and emphasis because he is in the middle of wrestling with his backpack and sitting down at the same time he is supposedly making some grand observation about their predicament.

Correction: He flips his backpack off quickly, asks if they are okay, lights a cigar and then goes into his "grand observation". At no point is there a moment when you couldn't have been able to wax eloquently while doing the things he's doing. I also zoomed in on the entire scene and saw no instance of any audio/synch problem.

Corrected entry: At the end of the movie, just before discovering the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, the horse and riders are traveling along the beach. If you look closely, you can see a parallel set of hoofprints in the sand. Apparently the surf didn't wash away the evidence of a previous take.

Correction: Those aren't hoof prints. That's the mark left by the water and bits of seaweed left by a higher tide.

Corrected entry: Amazing that the apes' dwellings are all carved out of rock, but they have a functional brass water hose fitting in the veterinary lab, and metal bars in the outdoor 'jail'.

Nicki

Correction: Dr Zaius explains at the end "they" (the government) knows the true history of the apes and implies he knows the fate of man. How he used technology\science to kill himself. It is not a major stretch of the imagination to believe that the apes decided what technology to keep and which to discard.

Rlvlk

Corrected entry: Throughout the POTA movies, chimpanzees are portrayed as peaceful pacifists, while gorillas are prone to violence. Later scientific discoveries prove (at least in some respects) the reverse: while gorillas are the more peaceful apes, getting violent only to protect their families or territory, chimpanzees have been found out to eat meat as well, attacking and dismembering small animals and even monkeys.

Correction: But these are not today's apes, they have been through an evolutionary process and changed. We are not the same in behavior as Neandertals or Cro-Magnon man. Since gorillas are stronger and not quite as smart as chimps, they have been relegated to the more brute force roles and overtime become more militant, while the chimps being brighter and lingual have become less aggressive.

Myridon

Corrected entry: The astronauts should had immediately realized they were back on Earth, at the beginning of the movie, if they had only gazed at the Moon or constellations in the night time sky (even if it was the year 3978). Naturally that observation would have made that a different movie.

Larry Koehn

Correction: A comment is made very early in the movie about the thunder and lightning with no rain and how there is a strange luminescence but no moon, which would make the stars invisible too. The climate and night sky may have been drastically changed by whatever has happened in the years since they have been traveling.

ChiChi

Corrected entry: Early in the movie, Taylor yells for someone to "blow the hatch before the power runs out". The hatch is blown, and seconds later the power goes out. As everyone abandons the ship, Taylor looks over at the digital "Earth Time" clock to note the date (11-25-3978). With the power out, the clock obviously wouldn't have been illuminated.

Correction: As with modern VCRs, the clock could have had a lithium battery apart from the main energy source.

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.

More mistakes in Planet of the Apes

Dr. Zaius: Don't go looking for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.

More quotes from Planet of the Apes

Trivia: Taylor's first name, George, is never mentioned in the film. He is referred to only as "Taylor."

More trivia for Planet of the Apes

Question: At the end he sees the Statue of Liberty on the beach. How did the statue get there from Ellis Island?

Answer: He's in the same location as Ellis Island. Thousands of years have resulted in significant changes geographically.

Answer: The statue was destroyed during the nuclear war at some point in the past. The remnant of it had washed ashore to where Taylor finds it.

Bishop73

More questions & answers from Planet of the Apes

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