MovieChat Forums > Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) Discussion > Did they ever explain how Apes got into ...

Did they ever explain how Apes got into wrecked spaceship????


In the previous film Beneath Planet of the Apes...Brent and co. enter the scene in what was clearly a wrecked space ship "computers trashed" and fuselage in pieces....


Taylor hits the Doomsday button and you get the cheesy monologue.....supposedly Apes are on their way Superman-style through time warp back in time????

Is that pretty much it?

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This question has been asked for 40 years and no one knows.

Swing away, Merrill....Merrill, swing away...

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Go on the Hunters Archive site and look in the Fan creations.There is an interesting story about Milo and Taylors ship.
It's titled Within the Planet of the Apes

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It's just one of those things you have to accept. The film series has great concepts, but they wrote themselves into a corner with beneath so that there would be no more films...and then decided they wanted to make more films! I for one will never understand why they tried to end the franchise after part 2 anyhow. Why do that?

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Whose idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have an "S" in it?

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They got this really smart Ape in to fix it lmfao

VideoVaganza!
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I love how the apes who claim to dispise technology still know how to make guns! LOL

Oh and drive school buses and I guess manufacture parts for said bus like gaskets and tires and sparkplugs and such cause after a thousand years those hunks of metal wouldn't run without lots of new parts. Oh, and GASOLINE.

That stuff does evaporate over time so you'd have to know how to pump, refine and process gasoline from the gunk in the ground. Oh my, Oh my, Oh my.

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Where on the first two movies do we see school buses? The only bus I saw was in the final movie which took place around 2004. And the apes have better technology than you think, but most likely the orangutan council is careful about which man-made inventions they should be allowed to introduce into their culture. Guns and fire hoses are about it.

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I've watched POTA and BTPOTA twice in the last week, and I don't recall any of the apes saying that they hate technology. I don't seem to recall technology ever really being talked about

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The orangutans knew that Man once ruled the planet and were doubtlessly aware of the advanced technology Man had created. But they despised humans and everything they stood for. So they only allowed the development of the inventions that they needed to survive.

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It is pretty unrealistic that apes could have fixed such advanced technology at all, lacking not only the know-how but the actual manufactured tools that would be necessary. But regardless, I like to imagine that the ship was fixable and that the astronauts would have most likely made repairs themselves had they been given an opportunity. I also like to imagine that Beneath doesn't take place right after the first film, giving Cornelius and Zira time to have been working on it unknown to everyone else for a long time. I also like to think that they somehow managed to retrieve Taylor's ship from the lake and used parts from Brent's ship to repair it. But again, it is just me making up excuses for gaps in logic! []

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Whose idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have an "S" in it?

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Yes.

Kramer: ...he was very impressed with what I do.
Elaine: What you do? You don't do anything!

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'Did they ever explain how Apes got into wrecked spaceship????'

Good question! Both Taylor's and Brent's spaceships are scapped in the Forbidden Zone! Taylor's ship sunk and Brent's crashes.

So ... how did Cornielisu, Zira and Dr. Milo find one a *working* spaceship?

Or ... if they find a trashed spaceship and how did they repair it ????

Beneath the POTA shows the whole planet getting blown up with no survivors.

Dudes we have plot holes. Huge ones.

Still Escape from the POTA is very entertaining.

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Cornelius explained that "Dr. Milo was a genius well in advance of his time". That doesn't say everything, but it's enough to work with. If you don't suspend disbelief, there is no film. And if one can suspend disbelief long enough to accept the idea of talking chimpanzees, it should not be a stretch to presume one of them was highly advanced -- the Thomas Edison of his species, if you will.

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The ship the apes arrived in 1973 in was a tiny version of the one we saw sink in the original movie. One of the other posters theorized that it could've been an escape vehicle contained within Taylor's ship (even though the authorities on Escape refer to it as the actual ship). That would've required less repair, but the major feat would've been finding a way to get it to launch.
Some posters insist tha only a week went by between the first two movies (since Taylor left the apes only carrying a week's worth of supplies), but it would make sense that more time passed before Taylor disappeared.
People have argued that he and Nova would've died in the desert if they were there longer than a week, but I suppose they could've come across a fruit-filled oasis or stumbled on the abandoned horses formerly belonging to the missing gorillas and commandeered their supplies.

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It seems longer than a week between the first two films. Because in BENEATH, Zira and Cornelius are now married and living in a home together. They have made peace with Dr. Zaius regarding their heresy trial. Also, it seems that General Ursus has more command over Dr. Zaius.

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Also the twelve gorillas had been sent into the Forbidden Zone and only one returned. Seems like a lot of action for a simple week.

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So Dr. Milo is a genius, the Thomas Edison of his time. That's nice. What *resources* does he have to work with for flight? Same as everyone else, that is to say none at all. In the POTA movie the apes have not even discovered flight yet, let alone *space* flight.

Remember in POTA according to Cornelius, "*Flight* is a scientific *impossibility*!" I guess Cornelius didn't get the memo that Dr. Milo discovered not only flight but space flight at that in his spare time. Even if Dr. Milo somehow did this wouldn't Dr. Zaius want that? Oh yes he would!


Even if Dr. Milo somehow discovered *space* flight *and* somehow kept that a secret from *everybody*, how did Dr. Milo find a working spaceship? Both Taylor's and Brent's were trashed. Dr Milo has no technology to repair even if he has the know how to do the repair as the technology needed simply does not exist.

It's far too much to ask for. It's why he gets killed off. So much for Dr. Milo.

I will agree that Escape From the POTA is solid afterwards Dr. Milo's death but this is just too much to accept.

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So Dr. Milo is a genius, the Thomas Edison of his time. That's nice. What *resources* does he have to work with for flight? Same as everyone else, that is to say none at all. In the POTA movie the apes have not even discovered flight yet, let alone *space* flight.


Then don't bother to even watch ESCAPE anymore if you can't get past it. What else can I tell you?

Remember in POTA according to Cornelius, "*Flight* is a scientific *impossibility*!" I guess Cornelius didn't get the memo that Dr. Milo discovered not only flight but space flight at that in his spare time.


Cornelius also said humans can't write, even though Taylor wrote. Give me a break with Cornelius' stubborn disbeliefs in the first scenes of PLANET.

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The apes made it out of the atmosphere. So obviously Milo found a way.
The orangutan Coucil wouldn't allow any technological advances. If an ape did demonstrate that flight was possible, the scientist would probably be charged with heresy. Such are the workings of the council.
The last thing Milo would do with his discoveries would be to inform Dr. Zaius. He obviously did his spaceship recovery in secret, probably with the help of other apes who agreed to work in secrecy.

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So Dr. Milo is a genius, the Thomas Edison of his time. That's nice. What *resources* does he have to work with for flight? Same as everyone else, that is to say none at all. In the POTA movie the apes have not even discovered flight yet, let alone *space* flight.

Bingo. The scientist apes in original POTA were amazed by a paper airplane, for God's sake.

There's some very good acting in ESCAPE, but the plot/script is just stupid.

Even the all-time greatest of "super-genius" apes could never have salvaged, repaired and re-launched Taylor's space ship... Not with the technology and resources of the planet as depicted in the original film.

Never.


"Send her to the snakes!"

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Bingo. The scientist apes in original POTA were amazed by a paper airplane, for God's sake.

There's some very good acting in ESCAPE, but the plot/script is just stupid.

Even the all-time greatest of "super-genius" apes could never have salvaged, repaired and re-launched Taylor's space ship... Not with the technology and resources of the planet as depicted in the original film.

Never.


I feel sorry for your not being able to suspend disbelief to enjoy a charming and touching film like ESCAPE FROM THE POTA. The whole idea of apes being able to speak at all in the original PLANET OF THE APES is actually an impossibility, yet you accept that for purposes of that film and its story. Also, Taylor's flight in POTA occurred in 1972, and was a physical impossibility as well according to our present-day capabilities ... so why do you allow your imagination freedom there?

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Even though the ship was computerized, there had to have been some form of text manuals lying around that Milo could've studied.

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Even though the ship was computerized, there had to have been some form of text manuals lying around that Milo could've studied.

How did the apes (all three of them, at most) even find the ship to begin with? Do they have scuba gear?

How was the ship raised from the bottom of the lake? That would be a major operation, requiring a salvage vessel large enough to bring it up mostly intact. (Dr. Milo's secret Pocket Navy, I suppose!)

How was the electronic circuitry repaired? The computers? Did Dr. Milo insta-invent metallurgy, soldering guns, resistors, capacitors (and on and on and on and on...) Did the apes completely fabricate new tools (of which they had no prior knowledge) to make these repairs possible?

How was the (miraculously repaired) ship fueled?

Exactly how was it physically launched from the surface of the planet back into space?



"Send her to the snakes!"

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Those are all legitimate questions - one poster brought up that the ship we see Cornelius and Zira climb out of is considerably smaller (and a different design) than the one we saw Taylor helming, indicating that it could've been an escape craft tucked away inside the larger ship which would've survived intact underwater. As for launching it, who knows?
And I've always believed that Milo had to have had help by other apes who were working in secret; it must've taken the power of many horses to raise the ship.

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So yes, it could be presumed it was a smaller escape craft. Or we can presume there was enough fuel. Presume that all that needed to be done was to push a few buttons, and that no major electrical things were damaged to the point of re-activation. Somehow Milo got help from other apes who were sworn to secrecy, and who all wound up dying when the planet was blown up. Some half-ass launch pad was devised ... all this taking months, with Milo and crew beginning as soon as the ship was said to have landed.

All this trying to nail down explanations is moot, and beside the point in simply enjoying the movie. I can easily just figure it happened - it was do-able.. as stated in the film, Dr. Milo was "a genius well in advance of his time"; he studied the ship in secret from the moment it arrived, and "half understood it, which was enough for us to escape when war became inevitable".

Why get hung up on it, and prohibit oneself from experiencing a mainly good science fiction story? Somehow, Milo was a genius (like Edison, like Franklin, like Einstein)who figured it out and made it happen. He did it - it happened. Onward with the fun...

When I watch the old classic Frankenstein and Wolf Man films, I just accept that one genius scientist was able to create life from the dead... and that perhaps a man can become a werewolf. Why deprive yourself of the basic enjoyment once you get past that?

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I'm not depriving myself - it's fun to speculate. But it's the posters handing out negative vibes who shouldn't be dwelling on it.

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I'm not depriving myself - it's fun to speculate. But it's the posters handing out negative vibes who shouldn't be dwelling on it.


I wasn't referring to you, Fletcher. I was talking to people who pick on the movie for this and cannot enjoy it because of it.

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Yah. Tell 'em.

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Does it really matter? The ship is just a plot device to get the apes back to the 20th century. The specifics about how they did it is irrelevant to the main story. Worrying about the details is failing to see the forest for the trees.

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Does it really matter? The ship is just a plot device to get the apes back to the 20th century. The specifics about how they did it is irrelevant to the main story. Worrying about the details is failing to see the forest for the trees.


Well said. Everyone here knows it is a lgaff in logic, but it is easy to acknowledge the issue as a mistake or whatever and go on to enjoy the film anyhow. It's hilarious that some people will get so hung up on something like this that they can't enjoy an otherwise good film. I mean, I like ALIEN 3 even though the magic egg that kicks off the story is an impossibility as far as series continuity goes. Oh well, it is what it is. Aside from the egg mistake, I like the film. Planet of the Apes sequels always seem to retcon something (well, I don't recall if Conquest or Battle did any retconning).

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Whose idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have an "S" in it?

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I'm not sure, was it in tv-series or comics, that Taylor returned to that lake and eventually he dragged their ship on shore. He then repaired it/ constructed new one to return home. It took several years and Zira and Cornelius assisted him. Milo Helped design and calculations etc. In the beginning of Beneath Taylor sends Nova to get Zira and Cornelius to watch or possibly come with him in his return home. Ship was probably designed to travel to another star system, but it just traveled in time and so fuel tank was almost full.

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I'm not sure, was it in tv-series or comics, that Taylor returned to that lake and eventually he dragged their ship on shore. He then repaired it/ constructed new one to return home. It took several years and Zira and Cornelius assisted him. Milo Helped design and calculations etc. In the beginning of Beneath Taylor sends Nova to get Zira and Cornelius to watch or possibly come with him in his return home. Ship was probably designed to travel to another star system, but it just traveled in time and so fuel tank was almost full.

NO.

It wasnt me, it was the other three. Hang them!

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What I would like to know, and is WHEN and WHY would the three apes decide to fly away from the POTA? This should not be a suspend-your-disbelief kinda thing.
Also, can someone explain why the Alien 3 egg should be impossible to happen?

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What I would like to know, and is WHEN and WHY would the three apes decide to fly away from the POTA? This should not be a suspend-your-disbelief kinda thing.

Oh that's an easy one. It was decided the moment the studios wanted another apes movie.

Also, can someone explain why the Alien 3 egg should be impossible to happen?

There are lots of explanations.....all fan theory though.


It wasnt me, it was the other three. Hang them!

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Simple, the Mutants salvaged the ship as a curiosity and worked on seeing if they could get it to fly, perhaps as weapon against the apes rather then their Alpha Omega bomb. They no doubt could get into Taylors mind and no doubt he has enough of a conception of it mechanics to make some repairs, at least enough to get it flying.

Milo found it because the Mutants worked on it outside as they didnt really know if it might go off in their faces, when he found on the shore where their mind tricks did not work to make it appear hidden, it had bee dried and repaired to a certain extent. Part of the half Milo understood was maybe buttons that said booster, first engine or something to that effect and a green button that meant liftoff or at least not something dangerous like red button would.

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the Mutants salvaged the ship as a curiosity and worked on seeing if they could get it to fly


If the mutants salvaged the ship, why would they doubt Brent when he told them he was an astronaut?

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I doubt that the mutants ever ventured from their caverns.

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Very true!

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