Doug says that at the beginning, they say something about how the

electromagnetic field disrupts their instruments but still, not particularly

made clear that you need to throw that data out entirely.

Anyway, Doug's reading is that when Marky goes into the electromagnetic

field, he goes *backwards* in time, and the space station, following him,

goes even further back. The place he lands on is in fact Earth, and the

ship colonizes the planet with this band of intelligent monkeys while humans

still don't have it together. They Marky comes along and frees the humans

but doesn't kill Thade. Then, after he leaves, Thade escapes and leads the

monkeys to rebellion and the monkeys take over again. When Marky heads back

into the storm, he goes back into the *future*, but it's a future that

happens after the monkeys reassert their control.

Problems? Well yes, many, not the least of which is that Thade, running

around in leather armor all his life, was not likely to have converted his

wardrobe to that of Ape Lincoln. Thade just didn't strike me as a hat

person unless it was a helmut. Also, you would have expected the humans to

be more primitive, not speaking etc. if the apes had caught them at a

evolutionary disadvantage. The idea that apes would have built Washington

DC the same way we did is highly unlikely and then there's the problem of

the spaceship clock. But I think a story with only 4 or 5 major logic holes

is better than the stuff we came up with, which had 7 or 8 major logic holes

and involved more radical departures from the idea of time and space as we

My English professor once admonished the class to "build analysis from the

text, not from the imagination." (He said this in response to one student's

suggestion that, in TURN OF THE SCREW, the sexually repressed heroine was

neither a) seeing real ghosts nor b) imagining the ghosts, but possibly: c)

One of the other characters was scaring her with large, cardboard cut-outs.)

Doug's analysis of the end of POTA presupposes the following:

A) The movie is "mistaken" about whether Marky is going forward in time at

the beginning.

B) Later, the movie is, oops, wrong again about whether he is going back in

time at the end. (I mean, they went so far as to include a shot of a totally

ridiculous "year" display on the dashboard... and we're supposed to think,

"I'd better assume the opposite of what I'm being told"?)

C) The movie is further mistaken about Marky's having homed in on Earth using

his navigation equipment, as we see him do, and travelled there from

somewhere else (ergo, not Earth).

D) The crew of the space station forgot to mention (in their extensive

remarks on the video record Marky finds) that there were already humans on

the planet when they landed. Nobody says anything about other humans.

('Course, where they really went wrong was trying to "land" that space

station in the first place.)

Basically, Doug's explanation forces us to completely disregard what few

facts the movie gives us, and make up two or three more to boot.

Friends, the answer is simple: Some doofus thought, "Ape Lincoln." And they

just did it. They just did it, because they didn't care. They didn't care

that it makes no sense at all, that it betrays what scant integrity the movie

manages, despite its clunky dialog and muddy action and cheap self-reflexive

gags and supermodels, to cling to right up to those last moments. They just

did it, because they are cynical Hollywood hacks who know that those first wee

kend grosses are all that matter and the audience is a buncha chumps. Or

chimps, as the case may be.

Helena Bonham Carter and the make-up designer were the only two who were

really on board for this operation, and I salute them. And if the DVD

includes the edited scene in which Marky and the chimp get busy, I guess I'll