Planet of The Apes Ending (*** Spoiler***)

Cafe Society
41

"Explain how everyone survived the NUCLEAR EXPLOSION that Leo triggered on the Oberon to defeat the apes INCLUDING the apes right in front of the explosion!

Explain how the apes in the couple of thousand years since Pericles’ time got so much taller."

What makes you think the explosion was nuclear? Although I agree that the movie suddenly got lame when the apes who had just been blasted 100 yards into the air are merely “groggy” after they crash back down to the ground.

As for the other question, the log Mark Wahlberg finds indicates that the scientists on the Oberon used the apes to keep themselves alive for some time before the revolt. Evidently, in order to survive, they began much more aggressive genetic engineering, arriving at the apes we see in the film. This manipulation might have had other side effects, such as a drastically supressed birthrate, explaining why the humans were able to out-breed the apes.

As for all the other plot holes, all bets are off if a story involves time travel. Maybe in the year 10,500 a ship transporting horses to the Intergalactic Zoo hits the same storm and lands on POTA before anyone else gets there. Maybe Thade travels back in time and helps the South win the Civil War by giving them AK-47s. Maybe Thade is actually Wahlberg’s and Helena Bonham Carters descendent from the time they got it on .00005 seconds after the Big Bang.

42

that I totally hated this movie.

Where to begin.

I’m going to forgive the horse plot hole. For that I’ll suspend my disbelief.

But…

Thade had one emotion. So did every other character with the folowing exceptions.

The slave trader was great but when the best thing in a movie is the comic relief it is a bad sign.

Marky Mark and the human chick had no emotions. If you going to cast someone like her because she is a hot chick than at least give her some skipier clothes.

Marky Mark is also the worst pilot in history. His chimp can land better than he ever does. Plus those little pods sure get great gas mileage. My god it lifts off the PotA after the chimp has been sailing around then after going throught the time-storm it flys from Saturn to the Earth in less time than it takes for him to use up the oxygen in that little thing.

Why on PotA when you are trying to sneak out of Apeville would you run through people’s houses?

The space ships power and computer and hand print doors all still work? There is no sand in the door tracks? The fuel in the third tank hasn’t broken down over the thousands of years?

Why don’t the human decendants have any knowledge of their past?

If you lived on PotA and there were a bunch of Apes after you and you knew they all were afraid of the water how hard would it be to find an island to live on?

Why did the chimp’s pod have a gun in it? Would you give a gun to a monkey?

Why didn’t the Apes follow them down that tunnel as they were leaving the city? He clearly saw them go in there but after killing off Kris K they just stand around and do nothing.

What happend after those two apes show Thade the broken branches in the Jungle? Thade dosen’t find the first pod because it is submerged in the water and all apes are afraid of the water and any way he can’t swim.

I don’t think that was a Nuclear Explosion just a bunch of rocket fuel but how did some apes get blasted back 100s of yards but some a lying right in front of the where the blast came from. So why are they alive? And why wait till they stir to give the order to run down and kill them. Kill them while they are stunned!

Why do all the humans want to follow Marky Mark? He gives the least motivational pre-battle speech in movie history.

Bleah I say Bleah!

bleh

43

The crew of the Oberon weren’t colonists. They weren’t looking for a place to land and make a new start, they were a space station not meant for landing.
I didn’t like the movie very much. I agree that it had too many plot holes to be acceptable as part of the unexplained, and the only good part of it was the makeup.
The humans escape, all of them, so they hide in the space station overnight before they start planning a defense/attack???
Humans outnumber apes 4-1 and they still only win because Marky Mark’s chimp comes back?
A blast from a presumably large nuclear reactor just sort of blows back the first row of apes, without burning them to cinders or injuring most of them in the least?
The human chick had no distinguishable benefit to the movie at all. She always had a stupid look on her face, a cross between “I am a defiant human” and “Why is he hitting on her and not me? Why why why?!?!”. She wasn’t even very pretty. Her oversized lips bothered me. No doubt she will be cast in several stupid movies to come.
I wasted $7.50 to see this and the only good thing about it was the costumes. And the popcorn.
[sub]Alright I had Buncha Crunch too…they were really good…[/sub]

44

Well I assumed it was a nuclear explosion since Marky Mark said the station was nuclear-powered and what he exploded was what powered the station.

45

I swear it sounded to me like they were all saying CMOS. I was half expecting the twist ending to be that their Adam Ape was a computer. :slight_smile:

Arken, the mayday was from the Oberon itself, an image from their future somehow reflected back through the electromagnetic storm. This is revealed by the fact that the first thing Leo sees when he fires up their log is the same face giving the same mayday.

Also, am I the only one who noticed that the “mark of the humans” was the Oberon’s insignia sans wings?

46

Isn’t ‘Seamus’ supposed to be pronounced ‘Shay-muss’ anyway?

I didn’t think it was a computer, but I did think it was an acronym. I didn’t think CALIMA was an acronym, but then I thought it was spelled Kalima until I they showed it, so go figure.

47

In the movie, doesn’t Thade kill those two apes? IIRC, he pulled a pair of funky lookin’ blade-thingies from behind his back, and thumps them. Then, he tosses the two bodies into that pond, knowing that no other ape will find them down there, because no ape would enter the water. You see the two bodies when Marky Mark jumps in and swims down to his sunken pod.

This movie was just plain wierd. I’d like to ask the question that if these apes were so damned advanced, how come they didn’t have relatively sophisticated projectile weapons? For a society with gold inlaid body armor, I didn’t see a single bow, arrow, atlatl, or even a sling. . .

Tripler
It’s all monkey business to me. . .

48

Oh, man, the Calima thing.

I was going to bring that up but I couldn’t find a way to kindly say, “A space probe whose name gets covered up by some some gunk and everybody calls it by it’s “new” name without ever thinking to clean it off? How V’ger.”

I was trying to be nice, but now I’m at work and don’t care as much.

:smiley:

49

Just out of curiosity, are real apes afraid of water? I thought at least chimpanzees enjoyed the occasional dip…

50

I was wondering the same thing about apes. I thought they could swim. Then again, I only ever see them at the zoo, and they’re usually just sitting there or playing in the trees. Even if they don’t normally swim, aren’t their bodies similar to ours? If we can swim, why can’t they?

Also, can horses swim that well? I looked it up online, and apparently they can swim, but some vets feel that it is against their nature (found at this site). Granted, this is hardly thorough research. I just looked it up out of curiosity. Anyway, in the movie, Marky Mark says that horses are “great swimmers” and can carry people (or apes) across the water. Can horses really swim while carrying a person?

(Okay, I guess that was pretty off-topic, but it does relate to the movie, and I’m curious.)

51

The scientists at Project Quantum Leap assure me that chimps can’t swim.

Of course, they also assure me that I can travel in time, so I’m not sure what to think exactly.

52

A couple of minor observations:

  1. My take on the “rocket” defense was that MM and friends piled a bunch of rocks in front of the thruster and then he started it with the remote control so it acted like a cannon/shotgun. When the apes were blown back one could see similar sized stones landing all around them. I don’t think the intent was that the rocket was nuclear, although I originally thought that.
  2. The Oberon did not intentionally follow MM into the cosmic storm; there were several scenes showing a monitor indicating that the storm was moving toward the Oberon and would eventually engulf it.
  3. I talked this over with a co-worker and we came up with the same theory that seems to be the consensus here except that we couldn’t figure out the horses or how Thade and his medieval pals could figure out how to travel back in time (even with the pod and Pericles, an experienced pilot) and take over a planet of several billion technologically advanced people.
  4. A few more hints about the identity of the middle-aged man sending the distress call would have been welcome.
  5. The final scene was a disappointment only because it had absolutely nothing to say about the rest of the movie (unlike the classic last scene of the original) but was merely a teaser for a sequel. And if it really was thrown in by the director as a lark, I doubt it will be explained in the sequel to anyone’s satisfaction.
53

You people let the thread die!

You did it!

You finally did it!
DAMN YOOOOOOOOU!

DAMN YOU ALL TO HELLLLLL!

54

Tripler

Yeah I know he killed those two but why? I mean all they could do is say we say something and found some broken sticks. Nobody was going down to Marky Marks ship.

55

Oh, my bad. I thought you were asking how they got into the water.

In any case, I figure that Thade knew about the myth of Semos, and wanted to keep the “return of the Messiah” to himself so he could play his power cards. . . Think about it, if all the apes knew that their “God” had returned, do you think they’d really pay any attention to Thade anymore? He’d lose his power, just by lack of attention.

Tripler
That’s all I can figure. . .

56

My opinion: There’s no point in trying to make head or tails of something that wasn’t made to make sense. I suppose that ending was just put there to make people wonder, I’m sure nobody involved actually thought it through or justified it in any way.

The horses don’t make sense either, they probably just tried not to think about that when they put them in the movie. Were there horses in the original? (I haven’t seen it!)

The other thing that didn’t make sense was that blonde girl… While all the other humans were grubby and sickly-looking, she was in full makeup, with perfect shiny hair (obviously dyed!) and not a speck of dirt on her face. No personality either. I mean, to a point we expect a movie like this to have some sexy, scantily-clad, dumb-blonde type, but this time they really overdid it! I mean, surrounded by all the dirty, injured people with matted hair and grimey faces, she looked like she was glowing or something!

Believe it or not, though, I did like this movie…

57

Here you’ll find an interesting story that was on NPR some weeks ago about monkeys being unable to swim and why that proves that the reporter’s daughter is smarter than a chimp. What it has to do with the atrocious PotA, I’m not quite sure. What I would like is for someone to explain to me why Ari and her breatheren weren’t so gung-ho about the whole “Horse’s Rights” Movement, which seems to me like a logical next step in the evolution of any civilized ape culture.

FM

58

I think Estelle Warren comes by the “no personality” part naturally.

59

Well, I can’t speak for the POTA milieu, but the reason there isn’t a horses’ rights movement in this thread is that the horse seems really, really dead right now. Why people persist in beating it I don’t know.

60

This is nothing, manhattan. I could direct you to some threads on some other message boards (yes, Virginia, there are message boards other than this one) where people with way too much time on their hands have written novel-length treatises attempting to fill in the unexplained space between Apeworld and the Mysterious Climax. Comparatively, the members of the SDMB are much, much more level-headed than that, for which I am eternally thankful.