For the record, the 2001 movie has approximately the same twist as the original novel, though there was only one instance of space-travel in that, so it doesn't have the time-travel explanation. (And it also has a framing device, with a fairly predictable "tomato surprise" at the end, which isn't present in either film ...)

I hadn't pondered the 2001 Planet of the Apes in a while. I was pretty much satisfied with it, being a time travel nut myself. Instead of opposite directions I assumed the cloud has some sort of "center point" in time such that the further you are from it, the further on the other side of it you'll come out. I supposed it works out the same, because relative to that point, time is moving in opposite directions (even though it's objectively the same direction). Have you needed to explain this to someone in particular?

Now do Primer.

>there is no reason why the Planet Of The Apes can't still be Earth-in-the-distant-future, as it is in the original flick.

If the Planet of the Apes were the distant past, it would make even more sense. Instead of requiring a hypothetical ape to develop space flight and travel through the storm, the entire Planet of the Apes just sort of sits around and eventually turns into our own.

Seconded on Primer.

He alread did Primer. http://qntm.org/?coffin

The script was actually sent to us in this way as a warning by the far future, but fell in the hands of the would-be first script editor.

Now I feel dumb, because I already read the post on Primer. Ok, do (...sound of Googling...) Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. If that's too easy, contemplate new ways of using time travel to drive a story while maintaining that paradox is strictly impossible (I hypothesize that there are few if any ways besides the comedic usage in Bill and Ted's).

The chances of a different species on essentially a different planet having exactly the same buildings, cities, monuments, culture etc. is pretty much zero though.

Because time runs in opposite directions...
The Primer explanation was done because you suggested it.
:þ

I thought the ape astronauts and the human astronauts simply switched places of their respective timelines.

Still doesn't make sense; the fact that the apes arrived hundreds of thousands of years in the past doesn't at all explain why they would recreate human society and architecture down to the finest details. Coming back to find Earth populated by the apes? That I'll buy. The idea that they've recreated Washington, D.C.? Not so much.

"Still doesn't make sense; the fact that the apes arrived hundreds of thousands of years in the past doesn't at all explain why they would recreate human society and architecture down to the finest details. Coming back to find Earth populated by the apes? That I'll buy. The idea that they've recreated Washington, D.C.? Not so much."

- there could still be explanation about this matter. in the movie, if you can remember, the electromagnetic storm sends out all the earth's television and radio broadcast out to space which the space station Oberon eventually intercepted(which could have been all stored for log purposes).in the film, Oberon was shown to still be working despite of its very old age and its computers(and stored memories) are still accessible. we can conclude from these that the apes have studied and learned all the human cultures, architecture etc etc and have recreated it since they arrived hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

:]

That is a very good twist but there is still one problem...

The statue at the end was dedicated to Thade...but when Leo left the 'Planet of the Apes' he left it in harmony with humans and apes living together and Thade was locked away with no way of getting out without Leo's hand. How could the statue be in memorium of a disgraced ape who would have died from thirst within a few days in his prison??

I was thinking the same thing...also, why is he dressed and groomed like Lincoln? I was sitting there thinking...so apparently the apes went through the exact same timeline as humans...Roman empire...British Empire...American Revolution...American civil war..And yes, the apes could have very well seen the images transmitted in space, but the apes also loathe the humans, so one would think they would try to do things in complete contrast to them in the years to come.

"but the apes also loathe the humans, so one would think they would try to do things in complete contrast to them in the years to come"
That's pretty much the core of the movie: the behavior of apes towards humans. They loathe humans but they eventually make the very same mistakes that humans do: corruption, bad leadership, racism... it's irony working here.
I found this movie to be very enjoyable when not deeply compared to the original classic. When I watched the ending immediately knew it was Earth since the beginning, the Lincoln-esque statue of the ape-leader just depicts the rise of Thade after escaping from prison and the ignorance of apes for letting him take control again. It's genius here because compared to the original, Heston's upset about humans ignorance that led to human civilization destruction; here's we have Leo being surprised (and upset) about APES ignorance because they knew Thade was a soab and HUMANS as well because they couldn't keep their word and being in peace. Burton set apes and humans at the same level in this ending; in the original humans were the "stupid" since the beginning...
Does somebody notice Lincoln :slaves: Statue => Thade: apes: Statue analogy? Does this mean humans tried to enslave apes in this hypothetical past after their peace agreement? Looks like no one likes to yield and change...

Just my two cents...

I watched it for the first time last night. The planet he left (Planet of the Apes) cannot be Earth, it has too many moons/satellites. They can clearly be seen as he flies away from the planet...

Since the scrip was not understood by the director and writers of the 2001 remake of the movie, they placed more moons just for the fun and/or addition graphics. I just don't see it being a distant planet, but rather a distant time. If the apes invented space travel, why was the statue of thade in the new planet? Thade would had died during the time they spent inventing space travel. You might argue that thade was they're liberator, but still, why would thade be wearing Abraham lincon style clothes? (sorry english is not my original language)

Surely if Thade had gone back in time further back than Leo and reconstructed Human society he would of been slowly lost in the sands of time because the civilization would be so small when he was idolized. My theory behind this is that even now our statues and idolizing of heroes only dates back around 200 years at the most and I am British so please dont make some sort of statement about America only having been a country for 240 years haha.

Also i think your debate is very intelligent but i think you put too much faith in the screenplay/director/studio because to be honest i think it was a terribly written ending that was thrown together with little explanation.

It probably would of been better if you had written it :).

Does everyone seem to think that time moves strictly linear? its a movie so we can put ANY idea into motion. the storm skews (not sure if spelled correctly) time correct? YES. therefor, it doesnt just mean "linear" like everyone here seems to think. the idea of each group appearing on "earth in the future" in reverse due to when they actually entered the storm is perfect. but at the end of the movie, the same does not apply. he entered the storm at a dif. location, angle, speed, time, everything was dif. not only that, but can we not assume that he was moving sideways in time? that instead of moving backwards or forwards in time, he was moving to another dimension where "society" took a dif. path than the one we live in today? "their" history obviously came out dif. than ours. this is how i view it even tho i hate the ending. there r so many loopholes in this movie its aggravating. yu can hate my idea if you want or yu can like it. but yu cant "deny" it because its 1. a movie.. and 2. their are talking apes. that pretty much leaves any idea open for possibility. :)

To address an earlier comment:

The whole movie may have been about how the apes loathed the humans, but at the very end, we see a transition in the character of Thade where he goes from sniffing the human weapon to attempting to use it to holding it just like a human, with a sinister look on his face.

In the end, Thade embraced the powerful weapons and ideals (destructive) of the humans (or so he thought), and this was his downfall.

Had he escaped, I have no doubt he would have fully embraced human history as he was taught that human inventions and culture brought unstoppable power.

And to address another earlier comment: to assume that the planet of the apes was an old earth and that the people who made the movie messed up and just added a few extra moons is no different than assuming that the people who made the movie messed up and made an ending that shouldn't have been there in the first place. You either accept what the producer's made, or you don't, but you can't accept half of it and twist (or discard) the rest to support your beliefs.

I'm shocked that no one thought of this, and now that the new movie is coming out, no one will believe me that I thought of this without regard to the new movie. When Leo goes through the old logs, they say that the apes were smarter than the humans thought, and they overtook the humans and destroyed them. Earlier, the female chimp (main character) said that maybe Leo's zoo chimps could speak but just chose not too due to the way humans treated them.

Why could there not be the same bloodline of the chimp that betrayed the humans on the ape planet that would also betray the humans on earth? And with genetics and such, I don't see it as too much of a stretch that the chimps would carry the family name Thade or something.

Btw, just to add, the whole movie is flawed. I mean, the old general ape talks about how monkeys are slightly above humans in the social order, and one of the councilor members looks like an orangutan.

But all apes came to the planet from the human spaceship. All of the primates on that ship were either humans or chimps. The ships video log even said the planet was barren didn't it? So where did all this stuff come from? There should only be 2 species on the planet: chimps and humans. Not orangutans and monkeys.

It's one of those movies that has a lot of errors and there's not really a good way to explain everything. But it is/was a good watch.

has anybody thought about this? its like the back to the future two movie when you think about it. first time he traveled through the storm he went into the future which would be his future, then the second time he went into the storm he went into the past which would be the apes past. doc brown explained what im talkin about in back to the future two after old biff took the sports almanac and went back to his past via the time machine. just food for thought.

I like Foxx(es?)(lol) idea. it would make sense but then again why would the apes have the same history as humans?

or matched the monuments of the humans for that matter like some of the posts above talk about

Most are assuming that the General Thade went back in time hundreds and thousands of years. Why couldn't he have gone back in time much later, lets say 1900 - changing the statue of Abraham Lincoln to himself?

The person who suggested a link between the 2001 and 2011 planet of the ape films - The 2011 film is a reboot starting with a fresh continuity, based on the concept. So they wouldn't be linking the original series or the remake in this proposed film series.

Please allow me to shed some light on this matter. The 2001 version of the planet of the apes was based exactly how the novel was written... Anyways at the end of the 2001 remake we see General Thade trapped in the ship, the same ship that carried the ancestral primates (such as Semos) that would soon populate this unknown planet and evolve into smarter beings, now Thade would learn much from what the humans left behind such as technology and human history and how to use time travel... all from what is stored on the computers which is located in the room he is trapped in,... he makes use of his time while being trapped learning as much as possible... when he is then set free by one of his close companions (i mean c'mon all his monkey pals just gonna turn on the guy) He is set free and somehow some way finds or builds a space ship and set his coordinates to planet earth to seek revenge.. NOW since we are dealing with time travel.. Leo leaving the planet doesn't mean he'll arrive first.. Thade arrives on earth before leo does, and upon his arrival in the 1900's he uses all his knowledge in history and technology to manipulate the next 100 years of history in favor of the apes and Concurs the planet... some time passes when Leo finally arrives back earth where he finds his planet concurred by those dam dirty apes. All thanks to Thade which is in-scripted on what is the Lincoln Memorial.

I just saw this movie again, and I've read a bunch of these theories but I think it could be much simpler.
Assuming this even HAS an explanation (it could have just been an entertaining ending), we can make one assumption about time:
Due to the order in which the ships arrived, the storm must bend time in a way that the order of what goes through it reverses.
Either that or whenever something passes through it, the next thing goes back further.
Either way, if Leo went back to his time first, then the apes, lets say 300 years later, used the technology left by the broken ships to go back in time through the stom, they would have been sent back even further in time.
Lets say Leo is from 2050. The Lincoln statue was built in 1920. That means the Apes could have gotten to Earth AFTER 1920, taken over the ALREADY EXISTING civilization (notice the police cars, guns, helicopters, etc. are all the same. If they were built for apes they would probably be bigger and whatnot) and just changed everything human to ape. For instance, changed the statue and the background of the statue to something ape-like. All statues and shrines, maybe even documents would be changed akin to what happens in the book 1984 by George Orwell. This makes the assumption that the General talked his way out of prison and brought his ideas back upon the apes.

What do you think?

Here guys check this out
http://pota.goatley.com/prophecy/timeline.htm

Ok, after watching the film and reading all of your explanations for the ending I can conclude sometimes film makers screw it up.

There are two things we know for sure: the planet Leo arrives in at the beginning of the film is not earth, as it has several satellites; and the planet he arrives in at the end is indeed earth, since you can clearly see South and North America (and Saturn too, although that's upon reentering our solar system).

You talk about Thade going further back in time than Leo, conquering the planet and mimicing our technology and cities via the spaceship's log... I can buy that, although I think it is only too poor for someone who's paid for making films (if that was really mr. Burton's intended explanation, which I doubt). But let us stick to this possibility: the problem now is how he managed to get to earth. Some of you think he used the mothership (I will pretend I didn't read the thing about monkeys developing spacetravel during Thade's lifetime or fixing Leo's pod), and so you assume a monkey who is not able of pointing a gun properly, flew a wrecked spaceship which looked, by the way, like the head of Liberty's Statue (and a gruyere cheese too), through an electromagnetic storm and ended up in earth at some point in time during the Independence War, had sex with some apes, gathered an army out of his offspring and managed to conquer the earth only to be cut in stone wearing Washington's outfit...

No, this is just a bad ending for what had been a great film, and that's all. I have decided there is no plausible explanation because Burton himself couldn't explain his own shit if he tried.

By the way... in the planet which clearly was not Earth monkeys rode horses. Yes. Horses. Those animals, native to Earth, which some of you will say were in the spaceship for experiments on the effect of zero gravity on horse shit.

And the worst of this is that this shocking ending was unnecessary, because the paradox of the creation of this "planet of the apes" was already a shocking revelation in itself... although it is true that all of us could see that coming...

fuck i just sat up all night reading this it was a good read but fuck that last comment mad me giggle and proves that this movie is horse shit but i loved rise of the planet of the apes

After watching the 2011 film its very hard not to revisit the 2001 movie. Firstly, visible the moons suggest that the Planet of the Apes could not have been earth. (Which is why the 2011 film makes no sense as the intelligent apes on POA originated from the space research and not from testing of some medicine). Everyone seems to forget that we are dealing with TIME and time travel. Look at it this way it only took humans a couple hundred years after leaving the medieval times to be able to develop space flight. The apes on the POA could take their merry time (a few hundred years perhaps) and develop their very own space and have no need for the research station , well maybe they took some data e.g. the coordinates of the ships home world. Then guess what happens when they go exploring. That very storm. ( I mean, why would the general go after Leo years late; that makes no sense. What would make more sense is after exterminating all the humans on their planet theyve decided that they should go take over Earth). BUT the problem I have with the movie is ...where did so many humans come from on PAO. Decendants of the researches is implausible as from the video logs onboard the Oberon it is highly suggested that the apes killed all the humans onboard shortly after crash landing. Oh did anyone realize that the MAYDAY distress they were picking up on the space station when Leo was trapped was actually their own distress call in the future. I think the ending was great... there will be continuity. They shouldnt have made a "prequel" which answered what no one asked. A sequel was what was needed that would answer: How did Thade and his ape friends reach Earth and what did they do to the humans... (deevolved them perhaps)

Let's keep it in mind that Thade was the only ape that knew about the Delta Pod in which Leo arrived. During the time he spent imprisoned inside the ship he may have found data about the pods like how to operate them. After he was released, he might have gone after the pod and set it's course back to the storm, which caused him to crash-land on Earth before Leo and maybe lead a revolution that allowed apes to take over human technology and make our world theirs.

But even then there are mistakes. For example, the squad cars in which the ape police arrives are Crown Vics. I don't think the Thade took over the planet in less then 50 years, so that's something to think about lol.

First of all, let me start by saying I don't believe one single person, besides the script's writer, involved in the production actually understood the ending. Second, your theory seems to fit very well, and I will stick to it. Now here is the fact on which I think the movie's ending did not made any sense: Thade was trapped in the ship, and their civilization was in the early beginning, meaning, even if he somehow guided the apes to earth, the years passed would never allow him to be such a important figure as LINCOLN,because the newest generations would be the ones that matter, meaning THADE would never be as important as he is portraited in the end.
THEREFORE, I think the movie is, most of all, a strong critic to our society (in paradox, they even open the possibility that JESUS was an alien). So my theory is, they never left earth, they just time traveled and changed the course of our planet, (where humans, with their capacity to fuck up things, made apes their slaves again, and somehow THADE got to earth in another ship and freed the slaves (due to the inscription). Other than that, I dont see another possibility.

Why can't everyone just accept the fact that the filmakers did not think it through properly and could not come up with a decent, logical ending.

I think all they had to do was end it as Leo was entering the storm again. I watched the 2001 POA for the first time tonight, and said aloud, "I hope they end it here...I don't want to see what kind of corny B.S. they put as an ending."...and I was right. The movie was great and so much of it was interesting and thought provoking, but the end was...for lack of a better term, goofy. There's just no good explanation for it because I'm sure, as many of you said, it was thrown together and tacked on as an afterthought. Its probably one of the biggest reasons a sequel wasn't and hasn't been made...no one knew where to go with it. That's why the new movie took such a different approach. It didn't try to explain anything. It was simply a new idea based around an old story

Ok correct me if im wrong but i just watched the 2011 movie and a space shuttle had left earth and got lost in space (it showed a breif newspaper clipping and a tv news article saying so). Do you think that its possible that the space craft in the movie is the one that leo was in??? and maybe when he returned to earth at the end of the 2001 movie that it was over run by apes because all the humans died off in the 2011 movie due to the virus they created and all the apes took over as it did not affect them?? Its been a good few yrs since i saw the 2001 movie so i could be mistaken with what i believe is tieing the 2001 and the 2011 movies together..

The 2001 Planet of the Apes has an amazing amount of holes in it. I mean, yeah, it was entertaining, but you will never be able to define the end. Even Tim Burton himself said that the end wasn't suppose to make sense. He set it up for a potential sequel that he would "rather jump out of a window" then to make.

The ending was really something.

Whomever wrote the film was proclaiming they either do not believe in the grandfather paradox or time travel through stellar phenomena will cause you to enter a parallel reality.