Headscratchers / Escape from the Planet of the Apes

• In the first film, it is noted that while the astronauts have been away from Earth for centuries due to time dilation (Taylor even notes that the men who sent him on the voyage are now dead). But here, the President says that Taylor's ship has been missing for two years. As though he were expecting it to return within his own lifetime. What's going on?
  • Funny thing about relativistic acceleration: it produces a one-way event horizon behind you. If you accelerate at 1 g away from Earth space, after one year you will no longer be able to ever receive signals from Earth (until you stop accelerating away from Earth), but Earth will still be able to receive signals from you, albeit greatly red-shifted. It is, of course, possible to red-shift a signal so great that our receivers can't detect it. Evidently, the President was surprised that the ship hadn't checked in in two years.
• The events of the first two movies take place in post apocalyptic New York, however, this one takes place in Los Angeles and it appears that Conquest... and Battle... take place in the remains of a Southern California city as well, possibly future Los Angeles. The implication in Battle... is the ape village being constructed will eventually become Ape City from the first two movies. How is this possible, considering New York and Los Angeles are 3,000 miles apart?
  • On that note, how did the topography of the [former] NYC area change to look like Southern California cliffs? C'mon, an atomic bomb can't do that, no matter how much you worship it.
    • The 1960s of Taylor's time were devising nuclear weapons powerful enough to destroy the entire planet. Presumably their lesser nukes were powerful enough to alter the axial tilt of the planet, and change the coastlines of whole continents.
  • Conquest was filmed in LA, but the location legend at the beginning of the movie only says that it takes place in "North America". Since Armando is the head of a travelling circus, it isn't too far-fetched to assume that they are in New York or in some nearby city.
• When the president likens the situation with Milo to Herod and Jesus and Dr.Hasslein says Herod doesn't have their facilities. What sane human would compare themselves to the man who attempted to kill Jesus?
  • Because even if it is an unflattering comparison, their situation is almost exactly the same. Both are rulers, both have given a prophecy that their rule will be threatened through the birth of someone important, and that threat can only be stopped through the prevention of said child growing up, and a decision has be made soon, but the differences are that Jesus had been born before Herod found out and Milo had not been born yet: and the consequences of said birth will lead to subjugation of his entire species, the destruction of the planet, and that the birth can be prevented without killing the mother. He could easily have compared himself to the Pharoah and the situation of Moses, but that's not any better. Also from the President's perspective Caesar is not Jesus, but rather a time-displaced uplifted animal, but he would be a Jesus-figure to the other apes when they come to exist.
• The humans learn that in the future, apes will talk and treat humans like animals. So they want to prevent Cornelius and Zira from having descendants as their descendants would probably be talking apes. They fail. But does this mean that Cornelius and Zira are their own ancestors?
  • No, because the origin story they told (of an ape slave who one day said to humans what had been said to him a thousand times over - "no") is different from what came to be after they traveled back in time - their son Milo/Caesar became the savior of the apes instead.
  • Probably not. Other chimps evolve by the time of the next film, after all.
  • And their son, Milo, who becomes Caesar in that next film, loses his son by the time of the fifth and final Ape movie. It doesn't say he and his wife had more children.
  • On another point, it strains credibility (to say the least) that Dr. Milo would be able to (a) find out which lake in the Forbidden Zone Taylor's ship was in, (b) find out where in the lake the ship was, (c) bring boats to the lake capable of raising Taylor's ship, (d) raise Taylor's ship from the lakebed, (e) figure out how to use its vastly superior technology and get it working again, including refitting its blown hatches , and (f) launch it, all in the short period of time shown in the first two movies, just in time to escape the Earth's destruction. Of course, without that rather huge implausibility there'd be no movie, so...