The official trailer for Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes arrived in 1970, announcing the first sequel to the landmark original with a film that descended literally and figuratively into darker territory, taking its story underground to reveal a civilisation of mutant humans who worship a doomsday bomb beneath the ruins of New York City and pushing the franchise's satirical concerns about nuclear annihilation to their most uncompromising conclusion. The trailer's most striking quality is its register of subterranean dread, establishing from its opening frames that this is a sequel determined not to repeat the pleasures of its predecessor but to take the franchise's thematic scope somewhere genuinely unsettling. Post understood that the sequel's obligation was not to deliver more of what the original had provided but to follow the franchise's satirical logic to its most demanding conclusion. The film's decision to end with the literal destruction of the planet, one of the most nihilistic endings in mainstream Hollywood history, is hinted at with enough clarity to signal the film's intentions without fully revealing the scale of its ambition. James Franciscus's new astronaut, searching for the missing Taylor, gives the sequel a fresh perspective through which to rediscover the ape world, and the footage of the mutant human civilisation, with its worship of nuclear weapons and its grotesque parody of religious ritual, gives the trailer a visual strangeness that makes the sequel feel like a creative escalation rather than a repetition.
First Impressions
The trailer opens in a register of unease that the original never quite reached, its imagery darker and its sense of consequence more immediate. Where the first film presented its satirical world with a kind of cool intellectual distance, this footage feels closer to dread, signalling a sequel that has moved the franchise's concerns from the philosophical to the visceral. The overall impression is of a film that has understood the original's argument well enough to take it somewhere the first film could not have gone.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer introduces the mutant humans and their subterranean civilisation with images of real strangeness, presenting a society built around the worship of nuclear weapons with a satirical directness that gives the sequel a distinctive and uncomfortable edge. The footage hints at a film using its science fiction premise to make pointed arguments about the human capacity for self-destruction with a bluntness and moral seriousness that the original, for all its intelligence, did not quite attempt.
Music and Sound
Leonard Rosenman's score develops the sonic language established by Jerry Goldsmith's original with a darker and more overtly apocalyptic register, reflecting a sequel that has moved from satire toward something closer to nightmare. The trailer uses the music to amplify the footage's sense of subterranean dread with skill, conveying a film operating in a register of genuine darkness and giving the marketing a sonic identity that matches the escalation in ambition the sequel represents.
Most Memorable Moment
The reveal of the mutant humans removing their human-seeming faces to expose the radiation-scarred tissue beneath is the trailer's most viscerally disturbing image, a moment of body horror that distinguishes the sequel from the more straightforwardly satirical original. It is an image of real audacity for mainstream studio filmmaking of the era, and the trailer uses it with a dramatic directness that makes the sequel's escalation in darkness feel entirely justified.
Trailer Verdict
A trailer for the darkest and most uncompromising entry in the original series, a film that concluded with an act of total annihilation that remains one of the most nihilistic endings in Hollywood history. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is a film of genuine ambition and considerable bleakness, and this trailer captures its essential qualities with images of subterranean horror and apocalyptic consequence. Post promised a sequel willing to follow the original's logic to its end. The film made that end feel inevitable.