The film is replete with allusions to major events of the 1960s and the period's race relations in particular. He discovers a bizarre world where apes rule over humans. In the movie, Charlton Heston plays cynical astronaut George Taylor, who arrives on an unknown planet two thousand years after he left Earth on a deep space mission. The original Planet of the Apes debuted during the most turbulent year of the postwar period, 1968.
In doing so, the film demonstrates how the Apes saga has evolved from the racial conflicts and Cold War anxieties of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the fears of the early twenty-first century.
With its depiction of the tensions and misunderstandings that lead to war, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes continues the series' nearly five-decades-old commentary on contemporary events.
