Zaius, after confessing that he has long been aware of man's reputation as 'the harbinger of death,' permits Taylor and Nova to continue into the Forbidden Zone, provided that they never return with evidence of their superior human culture. Zaius and threatens to kill him unless he orders the soldiers to retreat. The group travels to the Forbidden Zone, a vast, deserted territory in which Cornelius had found human artifacts during an archaelogical dig, including a human-shaped doll that says 'Mama.' When they are pursued by the ape militia, led by the war-like gorillas, Taylor seizes Dr. Deeply resentful of the infringement upon their freedom of thought by the orangutans, the intellectual ruling class of the ape planet, Zira, Cornelius and their young assistant, Lucius, help Taylor and Nova escape. Zaius, an orangutan, is outraged by Taylor's unexpected abilities and demands that he be silenced by a lobotomy. Taylor eventually regains his power of speech and is able to communicate with the apes.

Intrigued by the possibility that man may be the missing link in the evolution of the ape, Zira and Cornelius spare Taylor from experimental vivisection, intending to mate him with a female captive, Nova. Taylor, although aware that he is a prisoner in a society where humans are treated as beasts, persuades the sympathetic chimpanzees, psychologist Zira and her archeologist fiancé Cornelius, that he can speak, read and write. One of the astronauts, Dodge, is killed and his body placed in the simian museum of natural history another, Landon, is subjected to a frontal lobotomy the third, George Taylor, who has been rendered speechless by a throat wound, is placed in a hospital cage. They are set upon and captured by uniformed riders on horseback, who, much to the astronauts' horror, turn out to be sentient gorillas. After finding the female of their quartet dead, the three male survivors cross the barren wasteland of the planet until they encounter a tribe of mute sub-humans living amidst lush vegetation. While traveling some 2,000 years through time and space, four astronauts crash-land on an unknown planet.

Planet of the apes full movie