Dr. Zaius: Don't go looking for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.
George Taylor: Take your stinkin' paws off me, ya damn dirty ape.
George Taylor: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Planet of the Apes (1968)
3 quotes
Starring: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans
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.
Trivia: During breaks, the ape makeup couldn't be removed. It is interesting to note that the chimps naturally hung out with other chimps during breaks, the gorillas natually hung out with other gorillas, and the orangutans naturally hung out with other orangutans.
Question: What caused the original nuclear devastation depicted in the movie?
Chosen answer: World War III.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
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