The twist ending of "Planet Of The Apes" (2001) explained
Time on Earth and time on the Planet of the Apes run in opposite directions.
- Pericles the ape leaves the ship Oberon first and travels through the storm.
- Leo follows Pericles through the storm.
- Eventually the Oberon follows Leo.
Because time on the other side of the storm is running in the
opposite direction, the three travellers arrive in the opposite order to
that in which they set out.
- The Oberon arrives first and crashes. Its ape cargo swarm out and
populate the planet, creating the Planet Of The Apes. Thousands of years
pass.
- Leo arrives next, eventually locates the ruins of the Oberon.
- During the climactic battle scene of the movie, Pericles finally arrives too.
Now we have everybody on the far side of the storm, and we move into hypothesis.
- Leo returns to Earth in his pod, through the storm.
- Hypothetically, some time later, the apes develop space travel and follow Leo through the storm.
Because time runs in opposite directions, again the travellers arrive in opposite order:
- The space-travelling apes land hundreds or thousands of years before Leo: in fact, hundreds or thousands of years in Earth's past. They conquer Earth and it becomes a new ape planet. HISTORY CHANGES.
- Leo arrives much later (but still in what is technically his own
past because the movie starts out some time in the future). He discovers
a regular Earth but it is now populated by apes.
Because time flows in the opposite direction on the other side of the
storm, you can effectively travel through time by going across the
storm, waiting around for a while, and then coming back, thereby
returning before you left. Leo is back on Earth, but history has been
changed and he has no way home.
Regardless of how good the rest of the movie is, this is a pretty
cool and sophisticated model of time travel, and the final reveal makes
complete sense, as well as being a mind-boggler in the best spirit of
the original. I am led to believe that nobody involved in its production
- even the director - actually understood the twist ending. I believe
the only person who actually "got it" was the original script writer,
and the twist was simply left in by everybody who looked at the script
after him, each reader reasoning that the twist was still good even if
he, personally, didn't understand it.
As a side note, 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. In
fact, this makes a great deal of sense: it would mean the storm simply
connects two different periods in time rather than two distinct solar
systems which both happen to have Earthlike planets in.
-> Relating: Planet of the apes 1968 ; Beneath the planet of the ape 1970 ; escapes from the planet of the apes 1971 ; planet of the apes 2001; the rising of planet of the apes 2011 ; the dawn of planet of the apes 2014