Many movies contain morals, but this one has three. 1) Nukes are very, very, very bad. 2) Never, EVER get Charlton Heston really angry. 3) Good movies should not have sequels that suck.

The film kicks off with a recap of the last few minutes from the original. Then Charlton Heston is attacked by magic fire and falls through a solid rock wall. Sometimes, life is like that.

We now shift focus to this film's main character, a SECOND astronaut, sent to find Charlton Heston. He went through the same time warp and also crash-landed on the Planet of the Apes. The next forty minutes or so is a remake of the first film, with the new astronaut stripping down to a loincloth, growing a beard (he looks a LOT like Heston at this point), running from the gorillas, hanging out with Zira and Cornelius, and meeting Nova, the girl from the first movie, who has Heston's dog-tags.

Meanwhile, the gorillas are preparing to go to war against someone, presumably the humans. There's a training montage thrown in here somewhere in which the gorillas make ready.

Finally, our current hero sets off with Nova to find Charlton Heston. They evade the gorillas and make their way through and ancient subway tunnel, then find the Evil Telepathic Mutants. These are a bunch of whack jobs who live in a technologically advanced underground society and worship a nuclear missile. Our current hero is sent to their dungeon, where he meets up with Charlton Heston. These two bearded, loin-cloth-wearing astronauts figure out that the big nuke is an experimental prototype that was designed to annihilate the entire planet, kind of like the doomsday weapon from "Dr. Strangelove."

The gorillas march to battle, held up only momentarily by about half a dozen chimpanzee hippies with banners who chant "Freedom! Peace! Peace and freedom!" Unphased, the mighty simian army heads out to Evil Telepathic Mutant land, where they get visions of flames and a big statue of the Lawgiver bleeding. They press on anyway and start kicking mutant butt when they get underground.

The hairy naked astronauts escape, but Nova gets killed. This seriously pisses off Charlton Heston.

The apes are fooling around with the nuke. The astronauts reach the nuclear cathedral. Then, in the most inexplicable ending ever, Charlton Heston desides to take revenge on the world for killing Nova by detonating the nuke. Then comes the end narration, which says that now Earth is gone. The end. The political implications of all this are presented about as subtly as a swift kick in the groin. Nukes are bad. Militarist fundamentalists are bad. War-protesting hippies are good.

I rate it about two turkeys, mainly for the peacenik chimpanzees.