It's been parodied time and again — most hilariously as a musical on The Simpsons— but the film remains an entertaining and well-constructed adventure, a hair above the numerous sequels and spinoffs it spawned.
If concerns about white nationalism and immigration have taught us anything over the last several decades, it's that white Anglo-Saxons are increasingly scared of losing their status as the dominant force in the United States. Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes satirizes that anxiety, telling the story of an astronaut (Charlton Heston) who crash-lands on a planet in which apes are the dominant species, having adopted a human-like intelligence and speech, only to discover that (gasp!) the planet is a future version of the Earth he's always known. It's been parodied time and again — most hilariously as a musical on The Simpsons— but the film remains an entertaining and well-constructed adventure, a hair above the numerous sequels and spinoffs it spawned.