Headscratchers / Planet of the Apes (1968)

• Taylor breaks down at the sight of the Statue of Liberty nearly covered up in sand, screaming that humans blew up the world. He seems to mean atomic war. But the Statue is apparently intact. This in no way suggests nuclear war, or any kind of war.
  • Taylor in the sequel reveals that he was privy to the US military that they were working on nuclear weapons like the experimental Alpha/Omega bomb that were powerful enough to destroy the planet, so it stands to reason that they could have made weapons that would fundamentally change the environment. The Forbidden Zone he traveled through (which he now knows is near Manhattan) was also a sterile wasteland, which what he would expect from a nuclear bombardment. And don't forget that Doctor Zaius practically spelled it out to him in his rant when he called Man "a Warlike creature" and said "The Forbidden Zone was once a paradise. Your breed made a desert of it, ages ago." While you're right that Taylor can't be absolutely certain it was human-caused nuclear war, but he put two and two together from all the other clues.
  • Part of nuclear weapon research has been to kill people but leave buildings and other infrastructure in place. As well it can also indicate the Statue was far enough away from the blast to limit damage, but close enough for the radiation to kill.

• Where the hell did the apes get pressurized water for the hose they used on Taylor? And how did they manufacture the hose? Seems a bit advanced for their society, which might be equivalent to a few decades before the Industrial Revolution. The hose could have been salvaged from the ruins of a nearby city, but after 700 years, I'm not so sure it would be anywhere near usable.
  • Humans had comparable fire-hoses a few decades before their industrial revolution, but if we're already granting license for semiautomatic rifles (a late 19th/early 20th century innovation), we should probably let this one slide, too.
    • They had cameras, too. Although they were more like 1930s era cameras instead of contemporary 1960s style.
• How was the Statue of Liberty a sign that Heston was on Earth, and more importantly, how did he not figure it out from other clues?
  • How many planets would have a Statue of Liberty? He wasn’t trying to figure out if he was on Earth, but the Statue of Liberty made it obvious given other clues as well, not just the Statue.
  • Taylor suffered from a bad case of Late to the Realization.
• Why the hell was the torch from the Statue of Liberty far away from it when Heston and his human companion first encounter it, then suddenly back on the statue just before the end credits?
  • The torch was never separate from the statue. The audience is simply seeing an overhead view of their approach to the whole statue, first from the perspective near the top of the torch and then a second later from the perspective of the top of the crown. Taylor is walking in a daze, and it's only when he gets closer to the statue that he finally reacts. He probably saw the statue in its entirety from a long way away, but had to get closer before it finally dawned on him.
• Wouldn't the fact that the apes speak English be enough of a clue that it was Earth?
  • Before this film, audiences assumed aliens spoke English in nearly every speculative work... until it was subverted here.
  • Taylor, like Brent after him, also doubts his own sanity at various points in the film. We can probably assume that his unquestioning attitude is a direct reaction towards the total absurdity of his whole situation, i.e World Gone Mad. "Sure. Talking apes. Also talking apes that are speaking English, no less. Sure. Why not? I'm probably still back in my hibernation pod as my oxygen slowly drains out and this is all my Dying Dream. If it isn't, and is real, then I really need to learn more before I come to any conclusions."
  • Is it at all possible that the apes actually aren't speaking English? It's been a few years since I've seen the movie, but as I recall Charlton Heston is rendered mute as soon as he encounters the apes and then spends an undisclosed amount of time in captivity with the apes as his larynx recovers. Maybe he was really speaking the ape's language in the second half of the movie after learning the rudimentary parts of it by listening to them.
• Why doesn't it occur to any of the astronauts at the very beginning that they might be on Earth? The planet they're on has water and a breathable atmosphere, and they should be able to tell just by feeling it that the gravity and air pressure is about the same. That's not a dead giveaway of course, but it should at least raise the possibility that they might have landed back on Earth.
  • With how long they were in space, and the expectation they were never returning home, they would have no reason to think they were on Earth, but rather they were on an earth-like planet, which was their goal.
  • Also, they were in hibernation for a long time and when they weren't, the ship would likely not have earth equivalent air pressure and such. Even if they knowingly returned to Earth, it would feel somewhat alien.
• Earth has a distinctive moon. I guess Taylor never saw it?
  • It is plausible he saw it and noted the similarities, but that in itself would not necessarily tip him off if he was convinced he was elsewhere, which the narrative does indicate.
  • In the prequel novel Death of the Planet of the Apes it's mentioned that the moon was destroyed in the nuclear war. This is the same universe where nukes are designed powerful enough to really destroy planets.
  • One of Taylor's crew mentions that the sky has "cloud cover at night" and "that strange luminosity". Is it possible that the Moon was there but they just couldn't see it?
• How did humans lose their ability to speak?
  • Presumably they're never taught how to speak. They just punished if they speak so most probably never even try, if they can comprehend that. If a human doesn't gain access to certain things, like speech, before a certain age that part of their brain gets "blocked" off.
    • That might work for captive-bred humans that are punished for vocalizing as children, although even those ought to learn to understand others' speech by listening to their ape masters talk. It certainly wouldn't explain why humans living free in the wild would be unable to rediscover language.
  • Maybe at some point humans evolved not to speak due to a genetic bottleneck. Like a plague wiped humans that could speak, leaving only those who were mute who also had the immunity linked to the trait of muteness. This is the explanation given in one of the scripts for a Planet of the Apes remake. It's a bit of a stretch but this is Sci-Fi.
  • Human speech is not itself an evolutionary trait. The only evolutionary aspect of it is having a mind capable to relate specific sounds or symbols with concepts, reproduce them to convey the concepts in context-related circumstances, and develop as a society an unified code for all this. Vocal folds help, but if we had a brain and lacked them, language may have taken another form. Or not. A common mistake is to think of evolution in a deterministic way, as if intelligence had to lead to civilization, because in our case it did so. Whales and Dolphins are even more intelligent than humans and there is no whale civilization, humans left in the wild for generations may stay as savage animals and never recreate civilized traits again.
    • Human speech actually is an evolutionary trait. A growing child will instinctively seek language cues wherever they can be found. If there are none, they develop a rudimentary language of their own, but in absence of interaction with peers it will never develop beyond basics. Most of the world's sign languages evolved by chance when deaf children were put together in special schools, for example. The only solution to the scenario presented by the movies is that a genetic mutation wiped out this capacity through a viral infection, or something. Also, while very smart, possessing different languages and rudimentary cultures, cetaceans don't have human level of analytical intelligence.
• In the first movie the apes say flight is impossible, but what about birds? If they actually took the Earth aren't they supposed to exist?
  • They probably mean 'a machine that allows an ape to fly is impossible'. Not counting the legend of Icarus, humans said pretty much the same thing for many centuries.
• In Planet of the Apes, it's made pretty clear that knowledge of the past prior to the Lawgiver has been suppressed. So how does Cornelius know about the story of Aldo saying "no" to his human masters in Escape?
  • Because it's stated somewhere that as an archaeologist, Cornelius had access to scrolls that were kept from the rest of the population.
  • A better question is why does Cornelius say that Aldo's defiance against his human captors is celebrated in his time, when in the previous films the apes treated the sheer idea that humans were sapient as blasphemous?
    • Maybe the story of Aldo was just a story, and interpreted as such. Like "A long time ago, there was a magical kingdom of talking humans, and these talking humans kept apes as pets and enslaved them, much like what we do with humans today. Then one day an ape named Aldo said 'No.' " It's only when Cornelius meets Taylor and goes back in time does he realize the story of Aldo was based on actual events. In the case of the orangutans, it is clear that they knew all about the true history, and were working to keep it secret, and so any evidence of humans talking is considered blasphemous. Gorillas of course, don't need to think about these things, and so it's easy for them to believe that all humans are dumb and have always been dumb.
    • More likely the creative team just ignored things & told a story they liked. In-universe it could be handwaved as a Timey-Wimey Ball
• Where is that Statue of Liberty? It looks like it's washed up on the north side of somewhere but its facing South. Did it float over to Manhattan and flip around?
  • The coast changed during the millennia, the statue (semi)collapsed and the remainder was buried in new sediment. This is not that strange: there are many cities in the Mediterranean that had ports in Roman times or before, and now are landlocked.
  • The nukes probably also altered Earth's axial tilt and produced other climate changes. East Coast climate now resembles a hot and dry West Coast climate.
  • Or maybe it's not the real Statue of Liberty at all, but what's left of a replica that was built for a movie set or theme park on the West Coast.
    • No, it is the Statue of Liberty, because it is found close to the buried remains of New York in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
• What the hell was the mission objective? 700 years traveling over 99% the speed of light. Where the heck were they going and what did they EXPECT to find when they got back?
  • From the best I can figure it was supposed to be a one-way exploration trip and would involve one woman and three men setting up a new life in space...and the woman died in the flight. Yeah, I don't think you could set up a self-supporting Earth colony with a gene pool like that. And if it was planned as a one-way trip, it doesn't really make sense for Brent to be on a rescue mission.
  • Perhaps a test to determine whether humans could survive relativistic travel at all. Although they wouldn't necessarily tell the crew that.
• Why is the doll such condemning proof? Humans make ape toys that talk after all.
  • The idea is not that they can't do it, but that they wouldn't do it. We can make ape toys that talk, because for us the idea of intelligent and civilized apes is fictional but not blasphemous.
  • There's also the fact that, from what we see of ape society, it's probably more technologically advanced than anything the apes make themselves which would raise questions about where it came from.
• How could Taylor think, even for a moment that he's not on Earth? To have the exact same plants and animals, 24-hour days, the same continents (didn't he ever look at a map?), and intelligent creatures speaking English on a foreign planet - the chances of that are nil. If he was willing to believe all that, the Statue of Liberty should not have been a proof. If the foreign planet has the same species, language, etc., it might as well have the same statue.
  • It's been 2,000 years and Taylor hadn't found out how humans had fallen until towards the end. He probably thought that before the fall, we'd discovered faster ways to travel and had colonized another world, transplanting everything. The timing might be iffy, but it's certainly possible under the Sci-Fi banner for it to have happened and still lead to the movie.
    • But if they transplanted everything, again the Statue of Liberty does not work as a proof that it was Earth all along. Why couldn't they transplant that?
  • As low as the odds are it's fairly common in Sci-Fi for other planets to be strangely similar to earth. Everybody in the universe often speaks English with no official explanation why.
  • Those are all excellent clues, but the idea that an astronaut would never look at the moon or the constellations seems even stranger. Then again, if he jumps to his 'blew it all up' speech the first time he looks up, the movie's kind of short.
    • His ship was set to travel hundreds of light years away from Earth and was already a long way away when he went into cryosleep, he probably never considered that it would somehow turn back and land on Earth by itself. As for why he didnt recognise Earth he never saw the Ape dominated Earth from Orbit, he woke up after they crash landed, and if I remember correctly they mention they can't see a moon.