First of all we need to remember from the Planet of the Apes the sky is seen different from earth. Don't you remember seeing a couple of bigger moons? The message received by astronaut confirms that because the ones who were looking for him crashed in an UNHABITED PLANET. This was no earth at all!
Burton didn't want to explain the reasons of the ending in his comments in the DVD. He just says suggests no further explanation is needed concerning where and when. To him it was important the questioning after the movie of being out of place just like the original movie. In that original movie we saw no explanation whatsoever. We were cheated during 2 hours thinking -like Heston- he went to the future 2000 years and landed in a planet near Orion constellation. Other astronaut thought the star was too bright to be Belatrix. We were deceived because in that original film there were clouds at night and thunder and lightning but no rain, no shining moon visible. Later on when we see the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand we understand there was a nuke holocaust and then we try to figure out the answer and then we see the loose ends and the Forbidden Zone thing was the radioactive area. There were no sequels at that moment to explain the smart apes got wiser and humans got evolution in reverse because of the atomic war. We get to know more in the sequels.
So, Burton's ending was to make us think and surprise us all. Burton got what he wanted because we are still thinking and he used the same formula. The Statue of Liberty was not seen immediately. We saw Heston from a distance and superior angle, something of a bent metal is shown. We don't recognize the torch. We just think about that when we see the crown and then the Statue half-buried. In this sense is Whalberg the one who sees something odd. We saw the Lincoln Statue from behind and we see the human arm. Then the shadows allow to see the thing in detail...it was general ape.
Thade could be like Cesar character who taught the rest of apes how to rebel against humans. We could imagine a sequel (open possibility Burton reveals in his commentaries) general Thade having offspring of his own. After all, all that ape civilization IN ANOTHER PLANET was due to genetic manipulation humans did on human apes and eventually landed in the un-habited planet. Semos ape-god was another genetically manipulated chimp just like Pericles was. The apes would consider that like the return of Maya Quetzalcoatl god!
Also, there's additional problem the pod clock doesn't show any future date but the time goes backward! That's why we were shocked and people are forgetting this important thing. Like him we thought he was going to past just like Taylor/Heston thought he went to the future in another place but was just the future of his own planet.
How can we explain that? Maybe a parallel earth. Perhaps in fact Thade chimp knew about man's history and managed to get back to Lincoln's time or even before and altered history with his own descents and enough time and several generations. But the fact is all that landing was in another planet and then Whalberg lands on altered earth. There are 2 different scenarios here.
A scene I would love to see applied to the film would be this:
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link to upload.wikimedia.org]
In the original film we saw a wrong explanation: genetic mutations made apes smarter and humans got backward-evolution or involution. If we bomb flies with gamma rays they won’t turn spiders nor scorpions just like antibiotic resistance don’t make bacteria E.Coli become Shigella or Salmonella. No Darwinism here. Burton’s solution was genetic manipulation of chimps. In real life there are uncommon human beings:
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link to fotolog.terra.com.br]
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link to fotolog.terra.com.br]
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link to fotolog.terra.com.br]
So these scenes are not so bizarre after all!
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link to fotolog.terra.com.br]
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link to www.geocities.com]
Now, if you consider scientists are trying to make chimps have human vocal chords or mingle with jellyfish genes to make them bright green like neon-light and do other bizarre chimeras, well if the thing goes like this maybe Popul Vuh Mayan Bible was right telling us about ancient humans converted into monkeys and once again times goes round and round and round.
Brazil