OK, just got back from seeing “Planet of the Apes,” which was generally entertaining and fun. However, the ending has left me befuddled.
OK, so I remember (and someone correct me if I’m wrong) that in the original PotA Charleton Heston discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, and that he’d actually gone into the far future where apes took over the earth. Check.
So in this one, Marky Mark… er, I mean, Mark Wahlberg goes through a wormhole of some kind and lands on the ape planet. At the end, he finds the wrecked space station and discovers that it crashed and their genetically enhanced monkeys took over, and eventually became the society he’s trapped in. During the final fight, the chimp he went looking for in the first place lands. He takes the pod, goes back through the wormhole, and heads back to earth. He lands at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., but - gasp! - it ain’t Lincoln! It’s Thade, the ape general he defeated in the final fight scene! He’s surrounded by ape police, fade to black.
So, um - WTF? Was he on earth the whole time, or was it some other planet? His ship’s date odometer said he was going into the future - was he actually in the past, on Earth? Or the future? I’m so confused!
I did not understand the end at all, but I saw it coming miles away. By the time the ape police were pulling up my whole family and I were yelling “Weak!” at the screen. Ruined the movie for me.
Thade was freed from the Oberon. Thade, knowing of humans use of technology starts building machines. He gets together a space vessel of some kind. Apes travel to Earth and defeat humanity. Marky appears later.
Thus the sequal in which Marky Mark will have to take Earth back from the Apes.
Still doesn’t explain why there were horses on the Apes planet, though…
Co-workers and I have been discussing this for the better part of this afternoon (what are we gonna do . . . work ?! sha) This is what we can figure :
Thade recovers the other pod from under the water somehow and perhaps get the little monkey (who knew how to fly it) to get him through the electrical storm and to Earth. Where he must land at least a hundred years prior to Walburg getting there because Thade is done up in Civil War era gear on that statue. I have not yet read the other thread, so I don’t know what this “three moon” stuff is about. I do know this much : Walburg left a brown planet, went back in time through the storm and arrived at a blue planet (looking an awful lot like Earth). So, I would nix the “same planet” theory. Also why would his equipment, which had Earths coordinates set into it, take him to a different planet ? Finally, you may remember that Walberg started the movie in 2029, but at the end that sure looked like a 1990’s setting (based on the cars, the clothing, ect.) In any case there is little doubt that a) Burton just had to go for a shock ending like the first “Planet” movie, and b) all of this will be explained in the sequel.
I think what the problem may be is that people are taking the ending too literally. We assume the electrical storm took him back to where he started, meaning he’s going to the Earth we know. The way it seemed to me is that the electrical storm isn’t just sending him through time and space, but possibly alternate realities as well.
If you think of it that way, the ending isn’t such a strain on the brain and you don’t need to mesh the ending with the rest of the film.
What I found ironic about the film though, is that in the beginning, the Davidson character complains about not being allowed to fly and says something along the lines of “Never send a monkey to do a man’s job.” Well, Davidson crashed his ship in both landings, whereas the chimp landed his perfectly fine, thankyouverymuch. Maybe now we know the real reason Davidson was told not to fly that thing…
In the novel, told in first-person, two Frenchmen fly to the star Betelgeuse and find the POTA and the older man is killed. The survivor makes his way back to Earth where he discovers that the Earth has been taken over by apes in his absence. (It took him hundreds of years, Earth-time, to make the round-trip at nearly the speed of light.) He gets back in his spacecraft and leaves Earth. During his wanderings, he writes down the story and sets it adrift in space. The second kicker comes when we find that the man’s story is being read by two chimps in their own spacecraft.
I hope the original novel is being re-issued, because it’s better than any of the movies. If the late Pierre Boulle’s name is not on the cover, then it’s the novelization of the current film.
It’s a great book–I actually used to teach it in college classes as an allegory/satire/irony lesson–and people should check it out. Not that long, and worth the time.
Just my 2 cents.
