Planet of the Apes 2001

[MECooper84]

Can you explain the ending of Planet of the Apes 2001? I have heard that the audience was "not supposed to understand". Is this really the case?

[jellyfish]

I thought the ending was really hard to understand. I don't know if this is what Tim Burton wanted or whether the script was so poor, that was the result. It shouldn't have been difficult to come up with a twist to the ending as good as the first, the Statue of Liberty lying in ruins while Charlton Heston howled at the insanity of man. The new film chose to use a suitably iconic American landmark, which hardly differed at ll from the original book by PIerre Boulle. I thought the new film tried hard to emulate the dramatic ending of the 1968 version, but failed. Planet of the Apes was Earth which had been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust while the astronauts were trvaelling through space. Heston was the last man left.

[gilf]

If you read the book by Pierre Boulle you might understand but in context of the film it makes no sense whatsoever. In the book the man travels from earth to a planet near beetlejuice, were he discovers a world populated by monkeys. He goes on a dig with some chimps and they discover artifacts which show man was once the dominent race, they the are able to read the wild mens brains and reveal supressed information about when man ruled the planet but Monkeys through mimicry learn to speak and take over and man goes back to the forset and loses all sense of intelligence. Anyway the man gets off the planet and goes back to earth and its 2000 years in the future (the book explains why basically due the Einsteins theory of relativity) and it ends the same as the film. But in the film none of these themes are explained in the same way.

[David0601]

Ok. The ending is very simple to understand. Leo was on earth the entire time. He was only in the future. When you saw the statue of Thade as Ape Lincoln, you were confused. He somehow went back in time and helped dominate the planet. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is different. Caesar leads the apes to dominate the planet. Tim Burton's version is another story. Thade was locked in that cage and somehow got out. There he escaped the planet and blasted into space. He made to earth before Leo did and took over the planet by leading the apes. I love planet of the apes.