Planet of the Apes

In 2029, aboard the space station Oberon, Leo Davidson works closely with apes who are trained for space missions. His favorite is a chimpanzee named Pericles. As a deadly electromagnetic storm approaches the station, a small space pod piloted by Pericles probes it. Pericles's pod heads into the storm and disappears. Leo takes a second pod to find Pericles, despite lacking authority to do so. Entering the storm, Leo loses contact with the Oberon and, in 5021 A.D., crashes on a planet called Ashlar. He learns that the world is ruled by intelligent apes who treat humans as slaves. Leo meets a female chimpanzee named Ari, who protests the mistreatment humans receive. Ari decides to buy Leo and a female slave named Daena to have them serve as servants in her father Senator Sandar's house. Leo escapes his cage and frees other humans. Limbo, an orangutan trader in captured humans, sees them but is taken prisoner to keep him silent. The murderous General Thade and his gorilla junior, Colonel Attar, march ape warriors to pursue the humans. Leo discovers Calima, the forbidden, holy temple of "Semos", the first ape, whom the apes revere as a god and believe will someday return. Calima turns out to be the remains of the Oberon which had crashed on the planet's surface and now looks ancient. According to the computer logs, the station has been there for millennia. Leo realizes that when he entered the vortex, he was pushed forward in time, while the Oberon, searching for him, was not, crashing on the planet long before he did. The Oberon's log reveals that the apes on board, led by Semos, organized a mutiny and took over the vessel after it crashed. The human and ape survivors of the struggle left the ship, and their descendants are the people Leo has encountered since landing. The apes arrive and attack the humans gathered to see Leo, though he evens the odds by using Oberon's last fuel fragments to fire a final blast at the first wave. The battle stops when a familiar vehicle descends from the sky: the pod piloted by Pericles, also pushed through time and having just reached the planet. When Pericles lands and the undamaged pod opens, the apes interpret him as Semos, and hostilities between humans and apes suddenly cease. Pericles runs into the wreck of the Oberon and Leo runs after him, followed by Thade. Thade fights Leo and Pericles until he takes Leo's gun and tries to shoot him. Leo sees that Thade is within the pilot's deck and closes the automatic door, trapping him inside. Thade fires the gun repeatedly at the door, but the ricochets create sparks that scare him, and he huddles under a control panel. Deciding to escape Ashlar and return to Earth, Leo gives Pericles to Ari, who promises to look after him. After saying farewell to Ari and Daena, Leo climbs aboard Pericles' pod and travels through the same electromagnetic storm. Leo crashes in Washington, D.C., on Earth and looks up at what appears to be the Lincoln Memorial, only to find it now memorializing Thade. A swarm of police officers, firefighters, and news reporters descends upon him, but Leo sees that they are apes and realizes that he is on an ape-dominated Earth.

Plot from Planet of the Apes (2001 film)CC BY-SA 4.0