Astronauts crashland on a planet where intelligent apes of three species rule over human savages. One astronaut is killed, one lobotomized, and the survivor (Heston) is put in a zoo. There follows a long middle sequence whose satire, alternating between sharp and heavy-handed, suffers from an attempt to have it both ways: sometimes ape society - in its racism, its snobbery, its casual cruelty - is seen as a reflection of our own excesses; yet sometimes the humans are seem as crass and insensitive alongside the apes, who perhaps have made a better fist of things than we ever did. After unsuccessfully trying to persuade his captors that he is an intelligent being, the astronauts is befriended by two chimpanzee scientists (McDowall and Hunter) who accept his story; with their help he escapes. The final sequence has him fleeing to the Forbidden Zone with a female "savage" and - in a wonderful image (perhaps inspired by Hubert Roger's cover for Asimov's Science Fiction magazine Feb 1941) - coming across the half-buried Statue of Liberty projecting from a sandy beach. He realizes that he is still on Earth but in the far future, having unknowningly passed through a time-warp.
