MovieChat Forums > Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) Discussion > idea for how they were able to fly a spa...

idea for how they were able to fly a space ship..

posted 13 years ago by an-usurper
16 replies | jump to latest

so this is a really "lay-man's" idea for a probable explanation to the apes shuttling back to earth. it's quite rough but just an idea.

in the 1st movie, the ship with taylor and co. crosses a worm-hole and crash lands on a future earth.

this creates a tear in the space-time continuum. this weakens it, so that a similar occurrence is more likely (occurrence= a ship landing on this planet at this time(in the movie))

in the 2nd movie, let's consider that milo has been working on the ship and let's assume he's restored some functionality. how? i don't know. but its flux capacitor is lit.

the ship, built for light speed, has some sort of connection with time travel. the two are interrelated. the ship partially on is weakening the space-t.c.

at the end of the 2nd movie the detonation of the omega bomb, being that it isn't just a nuke, the power and energy from that is so great it creates a black hole/worm-hole and the ship passes through it arriving at earth for the 3rd film.

not a great explanation, but i'm still trying to think it through myself. i know it has holes galore, but there is just no way the apes could get the ship running, get fuel, and launch in any conventional way.

edit: or possibly the bombs energy is able to utilize the ships warp, or light speed drive and send the ship through a wormhole in the weakened space-t.c.

[–] wears-alan 13 years ago

Isn't that what happened anyway?
As for fuel, maybe it has fuel left in it. Think about it. If it hit a worm hole and ended up on future Earth, it hadn't actually travelled very far, it had fuel to get to Alpha Centauri or somewhere.

[–] wears-alan 13 years ago

[–] TheSolarSailor 13 years ago

Remember, though, that Zira speaks of being in orbit and seeing the Earth's rim melt, followed by a violent tornado. They had to have managed to somehow get the rocket airborne and into orbit before the world was destroyed, or else they would have died too. But the "tornado" Zira described could have possibly been the best way she knew to describe this worm hole you speak of. Not a bad working theory.

Your post did make me think of another "explanation" of sort in regards to Brent's ship coming to that same point in time. Maybe Milo powering on Taylor's ship created some sort of homing signal that drew Brent's ship to the same time zone? A big maybe! But I like there being something other than coincidence for another ship crashing right behind Taylor, right down to the same geographical locale on the huge planet we call Earth.

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

[–] wears-alan 13 years ago

Good call!

[–] Nomouth 13 years ago

Also, thinking it wouldn't have been too difficult for the brightest Ape mind (Milo) to figure a way to raise the ship. He figures out what happened and says in EPOTA, even though he doesn't understand all the "hows". He seems extremely intuitive. Air filled animal skins is where I'd start.

Taylor told them where they crashed and even pointed it out on Cornelius' map. And it's entirely possible that the Apes would have seen the ship coming in because it would have made a HUGE noise and comet-like trail from the heat of reentry. I also suspect once they got it dried out that there were checklists and flight manuals aboard, and on a bigger stretch, maybe some helpful voice controled computers started powering up and Milo may have been able to use them to figure out, if not how it worked, at least how to hit the "go" button.

____
I had a terrible case of midichlorians but I replaced them with some CGI butterflies.

[–] wears-alan 13 years ago

Check out "Within the Planet of the Apes". It's on the Hunters Archives website.

[–] Nomouth 13 years ago

I am familiar with that too. I used to frequent Rich Handley's site and his massive all inclusive chronology and traded a few email, before he published the book. He included everything from comics to novels to cartoons to every last movie to all of the tv eps. He had refs to "within" on the site and I thought it was pretty interesting.

____
I had a terrible case of midichlorians but I replaced them with some CGI butterflies.

[–] Fletcherj119 11 years ago

Brent tells the "Skipper" on "Beneath": "we were following Taylor's trajectory, so whatever happened to him must've happened to us".
He did say "trajectory" and not "signal".

[–] MuMu2525 13 years ago

There is no way to fill this particular plot hole. How such low-tech apes could repair and learn to fly a crashed and sunk spaceship in so short a time (or even at all) is too loony for words. It's nearly as bad as the eggs on the Sulaco in Alien 3.

[–] wears-alan 13 years ago

Have you read "Within.."?

[–] lokis_angels 10 years ago

I feel this explanation a bit of a stretch, since there is NOTHING in either three movies that hints at this. Since we know virtually nothing about the spaceship, or the time it was made (I feel it to be a bigger mistake to set the movies present day as actual present day) we can't know what the ship can do. It is technology we don't know or have. Even the stasisbeds, Taylor and his crew were in during most of the flight, is unknown to man at the moment.

I usually think, if it wasn't a problem in the movie, it shouldn't be a problem to the viewers. It would have been nice though to have a movie filling in some events from the crash of Taylor (or any starting point, from that moment) to the moment where an as good as ready to go spaceship is about to launch is revealed to us the audience.

[–] JamesA1102 10 years ago

Well said! 

It amazes me how some people obsess over minor details.

[–] dollvalley 10 years ago

Is it actually clear in some way whose ship C&Z used to escape in Beneath? I always though it would be more plausible to use Brent's, even though half of it it's burned, because I can't even begin to think how any chimps could retrieve that (and repair it without the gorillas ever finding them, seeing as it seems nobody can make a wrong step there and not be found out).

[–] Fletcherj119 10 years ago

Dr. Milo apparently did it all in secret. He wasn't being watched by the other apes.

[–] dollvalley 10 years ago

It must have been easy seeing doing it in secret seeing as he didn't exist in Beneath (right?) :)

[–] Fletcherj119 10 years ago

Just because we didn't see him doesn't mean he didn't exist. We knew Lucius existed, but we didn't see him in Beneath either.