The film's story is about an astronaut crew who leave Earth on a deep space mission and crash land on a supposedly alien planet in the 40th century. Ony three out of the four crew members survive the crash and the survivors find the world to be home to a society of apes; including chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. These apes have the intelligence of human beings as well as the ability to speak and walk upright like humans. Humans in this society are treated like slaves and live in the wilderness without the ability to speak. At the end of the movie, one of the crew members finds the Statue of Liberty and realizes they were on Earth all along.