Set in a bleak 1991, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes depicts a North America transformed into a fascist police state. Following a space-borne plague that wiped out all cats and dogs, humans turned to apes as pets, eventually evolving the relationship into a rigid system of institutionalized slavery. The world is defined by cold, brutalist architecture and a society reliant on simian labor for menial tasks, maintenance, and domestic service.

The societal dynamic is one of extreme class divide and racial allegory, where apes are conditioned through Pavlovian torture and monitored via centralized registries. Earth functions as a series of sterile, high-surveillance urban hubs where the human authorities maintain control through militarized police forces and constant biometric identification of the ape population. This version of 1991 diverged from our timeline in 1973, following the events of the previous film where talking apes from the future arrived in the present, though the broader collapse of civil liberties reflects 1970s anxieties regarding urban decay and authoritarianism.

The film’s central prediction of a global pandemic altering human-animal relationships mirrors modern concerns about zoonotic shifts, though the result—mass extinction of specific domestic species—did not occur. Its depiction of pervasive surveillance and the use of centralized computer databases to track subjects bears a striking resemblance to late-20th-century digital record-keeping. While the film correctly anticipated the militarization of civil law enforcement, its vision of a simian-led revolution remains a thematic metaphor for the civil unrest and racial tensions of the early 1970s rather than a literal technological or biological forecast.