Headscratchers / Planet of the Apes (2001)

• Seriously, what the hell was up with the ending? So Earth is inhabited by apes now? Huh? Why is there an Ape Lincoln?
  • They're counterparts. I wonder what Ape Lincoln did; Did he free an ape race from another?
    • The website claims that Thade simply went back in time using the other pod and started an ape revolution on Earth, freeing them from humans. That, of course, would cause the Grandfather Paradox. If humans never build the Oberon, then it never crashes on the other planet, and Thade's ancestor Simos never establishes an ape society.
    • It would not create a Grandfather Paradox. Leo returned to Earth on October 26, 2155, while he left Saturn's orbit in the year 2029. The ape revolution could have happened in those 128 years.
    • Um... no it couldn't. At all. Did the Apes demolish the human statue of Lincoln and put an identical Ape one in its place? At the latest the Revolution must have took place by the mid 1800's.
    • Not entirely impossible scenario. The apes, well, ape humans a lot. They could easily just replace human monuments with their own and leave everything else as is.
    • The Lincoln Memorial wasn't built until the 1930's. The Apes could have demolished the statue at any time, and replaced it with their own. Human civilizations did/do that all the time (the Egyptians were notorious for retconning their own history!)
  • An even bigger question for the 2001 remake: the apes and the humans on an alien planet are easy to explain, as they survived the crash of the Oberon. Where the hell did all those horses come from???
    • Only two possible explantations. Either the alien planet just happened to have horse-like creatures on it...or the space station had, for whatever reason, experimental animals that included horses in addition to the experimental apes.
• Umm... if humans outnumber apes, can talk, and have opposable thumbs... why are the apes in charge again?
  • They're Apes. Strong, easily angered, sapient apes. Humans appeared to have lost their knowledge for weapons a long time ago, leaving them vulnerable.
  • Do they really outnumber the apes? The prequel comics mention that most of the Oberon crew was killed in the crash. The survivors were forced to defend themselves against intelligent Big Creepy-Crawlies, so they enhanced the apes. That didn't turn out well.
  • But why do the apes treat humans like animals? In the original movie it made sense, since humans had ape-like intelligence, but in the remake they are sentient beings, they can talk and think and so on. If they consider the humans inferior, they can just make them inferior-class citizens. Enslaving them makes sense; treating them like non-sentient beings doesn't.
    • You could ask the same to the pre-Civil War South.
• How would a single talking chimp with no concept of modern technology set up an ape revolution, considering this would require genetically-engineered apes, which we only saw on the Oberon. The originals actually make it clear that apes are everywhere thanks to all the other pets dying out. The remake doesn't mention anything like that.
  • Moreover, why would a future space mission bring a bunch of apes along in the first place? Even if they're genetically-engineered to be smarter, there's nothing they can do that a robotic drone couldn't, and the latter wouldn't be a drain on the Oberon's life-support facilities. The only reason apes were ever sent into space in the first place was to confirm that anthropoid brains would still function in space; once they knew it was safe enough for humans, orbital bio-research switched to smaller organisms that were lightweight, harmless, and easy to maintain.
• Nothing explains how the horses came to the planet.
  • Or, for that matter, how the ape population grew as large as it did when there are relatively few apes on Leo's ship. However, it's implied from the ship's log that the surviving scientists used genetic manipulation to make the apes what they became in the film. It's possible they increased the breeding process as well.
  • Even that wouldn't account for the presence of gorillas and orangutans, which are substantially larger than chimps and thus, a very poor choice for a space mission where food, water, oxygen and living space are all at a premium. Not to mention that sending apes to space is already Zeerust, as NASA quit using non-human primates as soon as they were sure it was feasible to bring humans back safely.
  • They had apes they were experimenting on in the station. They also had horses that they were running experiments on. There. It's explained.