The official trailer for Don Taylor's Escape from the Planet of the Apes arrived in 1971, announcing the third entry in the franchise with a film that reversed the original's premise with real ingenuity, sending Cornelius and Zira back in time to contemporary Earth and using their displacement to generate both comedy and tragedy of genuine emotional power in a register entirely distinct from anything the series had previously attempted. The trailer's most striking quality is its lightness, presenting a film that has understood the need to refresh the franchise's formula after the apocalyptic nihilism of Beneath and has found a more intimate register for its satirical concerns, one that places the audience's sympathy entirely with the ape characters and uses their fish-out-of-water situation to deliver some of the franchise's most charming and most heartbreaking moments. Taylor understood that the third film's obligation was not to escalate the darkness of its predecessor but to find a new angle on the franchise's central argument, and the decision to reverse the original's premise, placing intelligent apes in the position of bewildered visitors to a human society that mirrors the one that had oppressed their kind, generates a dramatic irony and an emotional complexity that the trailer conveys with warmth and skill. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter reprise their roles with a charm and intelligence that the footage captures well, and the images of the two chimpanzee scientists navigating press conferences, shopping trips, and the pleasures of contemporary American life give the trailer a wit and humanity that make the film's eventual turn toward darkness all the more devastating.
First Impressions
After two films defined by captivity and catastrophe, the sight of Cornelius and Zira being feted by the American press is genuinely disorienting, and the trailer leans into that tonal shift without apology. The comedy is real, the warmth is earned, and the footage makes no attempt to signal the darkness waiting in the film's second half. That restraint is the trailer's shrewdest quality: it sells the relief of the premise reversal without betraying the cost.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the film's central conceit with charm, presenting Cornelius and Zira's celebrity status and their gradual discovery of the threat their knowledge of the future poses to the humans around them with enough clarity to convey the film's dual nature as both comedy and tragedy. The footage hints at a film that will use its lighter first half to make its darker second half all the more devastating, and the trailer conveys this tonal complexity with a skill that makes the creative pivot feel entirely earned.
Music and Sound
Jerry Goldsmith returned to score Escape from the Planet of the Apes with a more playful and emotionally varied palette than his work on the original, reflecting a film operating across a wider tonal range than any of its predecessors. The trailer uses the music to convey the film's lighter register while hinting at the darker emotional territory ahead, giving the footage a bittersweet quality appropriate to the film's ultimate concerns and signalling a composer fully in command of the tonal complexity the material demands.
Most Memorable Moment
The sequence of Zira and Cornelius navigating the pleasures of contemporary American life with wide-eyed delight, from press conferences to shopping trips, is the footage's most immediately charming passage, establishing the film's comic register while making the audience's investment in the characters' fate immediate and personal. It is a sequence that gives the franchise's satirical concerns a human face and real emotional warmth, and the trailer uses it with a lightness of touch that makes the darkness to come feel all the more consequential.
Trailer Verdict
A trailer for the most emotionally complex and tonally varied entry in the original series, a film that used its ingenious premise reversal to deliver both the franchise's most charming moments and some of its most genuinely heartbreaking. Escape from the Planet of the Apes is a film of real craft and emotional intelligence. Taylor promised a franchise capable of reinvention. The trailer made that reinvention feel like a relief. The film made it feel like a trap laid with the kindest of intentions.