So, I just saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which got me to reading the wikipedia summaries for the five originals (I haven’t seen any of them). One thing I don’t understand is this:
So, after the earth of the future is destroyed at the end of the second movie, Cornelius and Zira escape and travel back in time to 1973 San Francisco, right? So how is it that when their son leads a rebellion and establishes a new society on Earth, that he manages to follow an alternate timeline? That is to say, it seems like in his timeline, Cesar builds a society where apes and humans peacefully coexist. However, in the first movie, apes dominated over man, and theoretically this is the same planet.
I hope this question makes sense . . . I know I worded it a little confusingly. Also keep in mind I’ve only read the plot summaries on wikipedia, so maybe there is something I’m missing.
Not sure if that is sarcasm . . . but if it is, yeah, granted this is sci-fi, but usually even within their universes there are some rules that sci-fi works follow, and I genuinely find this piece of time-travel confusion perplexing, even in a series of movies about apes ruling man.
I think the idea is that the ape couple traveling back in time changed history, so that instead of the distopian ape dominated world that Heston finds in the future, Caesar was able to create a joint ape-human society. Presumably, without Caesar, the apes would’ve taught themselves to talk anyways, but their revolt would’ve been more anti-human.
Its been forever since I watched them, but I think this is actually explicit in the last film. Caesar has a recording or letter or something from his parents that inform him of what will happen if the apes enslave the humans, so he makes the effort to keep the more radical apes from taking over.
Yes snarkasm. The first movie was reasonable sci-fi for the time, but still a bit campy from the start. The sequels were gut busting self parodies of the theme.
First movie, Chuck Heston goes to the PoA, and it was Earth all along.
Second Movie, You MANIACS! You BLEW IT UP! Aw, damn you! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
Third Movie, apes go back in time using Chuck’s spaceship, and are killed except baby ape.
Fourth Movie, baby ape grows up, founds the Coalition to Liberate Itinerant Tree-dwellers.
Up until this point, we’ve got what appears to be a neat closed timeloop. Apes go back in time to create the Planet of the Apes, from which apes go back in time to create the Planet of the Apes.
However, the ending of the Fifth Movie implies that the original setting of the First Movie will be averted. Humans and apes will coexist in Peace. Groovy, man.
Who says that the whole Planet of the Apes cycle has to be a cycle? Why can’t time travel result in a different future? And so the setting of the First Movie never happens. These movies are extended Twilight Zone episodes, so they’re a kitchen sink of all kinds of weird tropes.
When I was a kid, I assumed that Battle for the Planet of the Apes (the one where it seems Apes and Humans were getting along) was just earlier in the Timeline from the first movie and events unseen by us between the two movies lead to Apes dominating Humans and things for humans generally getting worse and worse.
Agreed. I could be wrong, but I recall the final scene of “Battle” showing the lawgiver having his happy story time with all the peaceful little ape and human kiddies - then it pulls back to the statue of Caesar and shows a tear running down from his stone eye.
I figured this pacific interlude was just step one on the road to the eventual tragedy that was the Planet of the Apes.
It would’ve taken much longer too. According to Cornelius in Escape after dogs & cats went extinct and apes replaced them as pets it took a century for them to transition to slaves and another couple centuries to the revold to happen (led by an ape named Aldo, who was the first to say “No”). Conquest showed this took less than 2 decades (I like to think that genetic material from Cornelius & Zira’s bodies was used to genetically engineer larger apes to use as slaves; thus speeding things up).
Harder to explain is that in the first 2 movies rank & file apes are unaware of their origins or that they used to be slaves for humans. Certain apes, like Dr. Zaius, with access to the secret volumes of the Sacred Scrolls know the truth. Now in between Return and Escape it’s entirely probally that Zaius gave Cornelius access to those scrolls, explaining why he & Zira know the truth. This doesn’t explain his lines about it common knowledge in ape society or Aldo’s first words being celebrated in the form of a major religous holiday.
Yep. There are blatant continuity violations between the movies, so expecting a consistent theory of time travel is a bit optimistic.
Or how about when Taylor talks about their secondary mission–if the primary mission failed, they could create a new society. Yeah. With three men and one woman, you’re going to populate a new planet? Did mission control bother to tell the poor geologist woman about this secondary plan?
A second mission is sent into space, trying to trace Heston, and vanishes.
Apes arrive from the future u8sing one or other of the two spaceships. They eventually get killed, but their baby survives.
A plague wipes out all cats and dogs.
Humans genetically engineer apes to be their pets and slaves
baby ape now all grown up becomes their leader.
Humans and apes co-exist. (Film series ends here)
Nuclear war breaks out. Most of Earth destroyed. Damn them all to hell.
Survivors revert to a primate-ive society. Surviving apes gain the upper hand in the aftermath.
Hundreds of years pass. Statue Of Liberty gets covered by sand. Much history and technology is lost. The ape leaders know that men were once their masters, but they keep it a secret.
Arrival of Heston’s spaceship.
Arrival of second spaceship.
Apes hunt and kill Heston to prevent the secret of the past being discovered. As Heston dies his cold dead hands detonate bomb alpha-omega, thus destroying all life on earth. Meanwhile ape scientists steal one of the spaceships for a test flight. They see the Earth being destroyed just as they enter the timewarp.
And there we have a self-consistent history, without diverging timelines.