25 Years Later, I’m Still Thinking About The Marky Mark ‘Planet of the Apes’ Ending
It’s pretty hard to defend the 2001 Planet of the Apes reboot. In both style and aesthetics, this Tim Burton film hasn’t aged that well, and if you fire it up today on streaming, it feels like a direct-to-cable sci-fi movie from the 1990s. And yet, when I saw Planet of the Apes in the theater on July 27, 2001, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Specifically, I couldn’t stop thinking about the ending of the film, which, superficially, is a huge homage to the 1961 Pierre Boulle novel of the same name. This ending — spoiler alert — doesn’t reveal that the titular planet of the apes was Earth all along, but instead, upon returning to Earth, one astronaut discovers contemporary Earth is now ruled by apes.
I’ve been thinking about this twist ending for 25 years, and apparently, I’m not alone. If you dip into Reddit, you’ll find a discussion thread that’s been going on for at least 13 years. And those of us who saw the film in the theater back in the year 2001 have been dealing with this gorilla-sized headache for much longer.
Here’s the thing: As time travel twist-endings go, the final moments of the 2001 Planet of the Apes represent the most potential for what is, a deeply flawed movie. And, in fact, the whole reason many of us Apes fans are still thinking about this ending has less to do with not understanding it, or that notion that we can’t come up with an explanation. It’s simply that any hypothetical sequel to this movie, which would’ve explored its paradoxical ending, would have made this middling reboot film retroactively, and automatically, better than it is.
The 2001 Planet of the Apes ending problem
The zany ending of Planet of the Apes (2001).
20th Century Studios
Okay, here’s how the timeline of 2001 Planet of the Apes works. In 2029, Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is an astronaut working on a space station called Oberon. A weird temporal storm shows up (not unlike the J.J. Abrams “lightning storm in space” from the 2009 Star Trek reboot), and the astronauts send a chimp named Pericles into the vortex thing, because the paradox in the movie is reading the script. Leo ends up on a planet which is not Earth, but a literal planet ruled by apes. However, the movie eventually reveals that not only has he traveled through space, but also time. He doesn’t know it, but the Oberon space station crash-landed thousands of years before he did, because of timey-wimey action. Ergo, all the humans on the planet are descendants of the space station crew, and the apes are descendants of the genetically enhanced simians that were also on the space station.
This is not a problem. The movie explains all of this just fine. But what happens at the very end is unexplained. Leo heads back in time and space to what should be contemporary Earth, only to find it transformed and ruled by apes. Specifically, the Lincoln Memorial now has the face of General Thade (Tim Roth), the primary evil ape from the “future.” This ending evokes a moment toward the end of the original novel, in which the human explorer, Ulysse returns to Earth to find it ruled by apes.
But one time travel detail is omitted. WHEN AND HOW did Thade return to the “present”?
A Random Planet of the Apes DVD Insert Confirms a Time Paradox
Essentially, the only way the paradox of the movie makes any sense is that we assume two things are true: First, that there are two divergent timelines here: The “original” one, which created the paradox and thus created the planet of the apes. And a second, an Apes-rule-the-Earth timeline, and that can only exist because of sideways time travel from the first timeline.
Oddly, again, the 2009 Star Trek reboot provides a useful comparison: Spock Prime and Nero didn’t change the past; they accidentally created a new past, one which relies on the future of the first timeline to exist in the first place. This is exactly what happens in the 2001 Planet of the Apes, which has one crucial addition: The first timeline also exists because of a time paradox; Thade et al. are the result of the Oberon traveling through space and time. This means without the first timey wimey series of events, Thade couldn’t exist at all to steal a space pod and go back in time and make yet another paradox in which Earth was “always” ruled by apes.
But did he? To be clear, the movie never states this outright, so we have to look to other sources. Enter: forgotten physical media!
An insert in the 2001 DVD version of Planet of the Apes (see screenshot above) suggests that yes, “someone or something arrives on Earth many years before Leo.” Basically, whoever worked on the DVD insert in 2001 decided to fix a plot hole with a fun diagram and a great rhetorical question.
If we accept that Thade did steal a pod and end up on Earth of the past to create a new Apes-centric timeline, then, in some ways, we were robbed of what could have been a great sequel. Like the classic series of films, Planet of the Apes has always been about accidental time travel. And an early 2000s sequel to this film, which took that paradox seriously, could have been delightfully bonkers. Or, if you will, it’s too bad this version of the franchise never went bananas with time travel again.
