After their spaceship crash-lands on an unknown planet, Taylor and two other astronauts find themselves at the mercy of talking apes who are ruling the planet, while humans are primitive and unable to speak. The apes take them to their city, where they discover a shocking surprise.
When astronaut Brent crash lands on a planet ruled by apes, as he attempts to find missing fellow American astronaut George Taylor, he comes across an underground fortress guarded by telepathic humans and must find a way to save himself from the impending battle between man and ape.
After the world has come to treat apes like household pets, abuse and mistreatment of apes abound, leaving the intelligent ape Caesar to emerge from hiding to lead a revolution against the cruel humans.
When three talking chimpanzees arrive from the future to the present day in the US, they become the center of media attention after discovering that they're intelligent creatures. But when the government sees them as threats, they attempt to break free.
After ape revolutions and a nuclear war decimated civilizations, Caesar seeks to protect the survivors of both species, but the ape General Aldo has other plans in mind as he sets out to implement his nefarious plans to cause a civil war, as the surviving humans plot an uprising.