Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes Ending Explained
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place “many generations” after the last movie–we’re talking hundreds of years here–and so it gets to establish a new franchise status quo for how things are going on Earth. We learn about the new way of things through the eyes of Noa, a small-town chimp from the “Eagle Clan.” This young ape is thrust into a much larger world than he ever knew existed after a brief encounter with a human leads to an armed group of masked apes invading his village and killing or kidnapping everyone in the name of Caesar.
Noa, left for dead, barely manages to survive and sets out on his rescue mission–and he meets and is forced to team up with an orangutan named Raka, who tells Noa about the real Caesar from the past, and that human from earlier, a young woman named Mae. Mae is a rare human who can talk, it turns out, and her people were also killed by those masked apes.
The bad apes belong to the forces of Proximus Caesar, a would-be king who’s trying to break into an old human vault that he thinks holds the key to further ape evolution–he’s been kidnapping other apes so he can use them to try to force open the massive vault door, but he’s not having any luck on that front. But Mae’s got a big secret that will make her a major wild card during this conflict. But before we go on from here, a warning.
WARNING: The remainder of this article contains many spoilers for the plot of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, including its ending.
For a while, Mae tries to pretend to be a stray who’s out for revenge against Proximus like Noa is, saying that she wants to keep Proximus from getting the tech from the vault because he’s clearly a bad guy who will do bad things with it. But eventually it becomes clear that she has a bigger plan. She, too, wants to get inside this vault, but unlike Proximus she knows exactly what’s in there that she wants, and she knows how to get inside. But she needs the apes’ help to do it, because the path requires some serious climbing that she’s not equipped for on her own.
They succeed, and get into the vault, which has long been abandoned by whoever lived there. As the apes wander about, Mae goes after her target: an encryption key for communication satellites. And then they open the vault door from the inside. Proximus is right there, of course, since his whole army has been parked outside the door for months, and it’s then that Mae enacts the other part of the plan: setting off the explosives on Proximus’s barricades that are holding back the ocean tide, flooding the vault with Proximus, Noa and Noa’s pals inside. They escape through the secret entrance from before, and it’s there, on the edge of a cliff, where Noa and Proximus have their final showdown. Proximus, alone because his forces are still at their camp, delivers another soliloquy about this new age of apes, but Noa and his people aren’t hearing it.
Instead, Noa sings a song. He’s calling to the clan’s eagles, who had followed them here during their captivity–while he didn’t have an eagle of his own, his late father’s eagle has been hanging around keeping an eye on Noa. And it’s the eagles who end up actually defeating Proximus Caesar, knocking him from the cliff to his death.
From there, Noa and Mae part ways, each returning to their respective homes. And it’s here, at the end, where we finally learn what Mae’s deal was–she took the key from the vault and returned it to an ancient satellite facility full of humans, and they used it to bring satellite communications back online. And they quickly make contact with other humans. As Mae had told Noa earlier, what she wanted from the vault would help humanity speak again, in a sense.
This is where the movie ends. It’s a fascinating stopping point. With comms back up to some degree, we’ve got humanity on its first upswing of any kind in a long time, and the death of Proximus Caesar would conversely leave some kind of local power vacuum among the apes–there are likely tons of small villages like Noa’s, but large-scale powers like Proximus’s army would be few and far between.
So what happens now? The remains of human civilization we saw didn’t look like much of a military force, but who knows what kind of fun stuff, or fun people, they’ll gain access to with communications satellites operating again. The big question here is a topic that is broached repeatedly across the course of the movie: Could the apes and the humans just live together in peace? Maybe, but by the end of the film, Mae has held her cards so close to the vest that Noa doesn’t trust her–she didn’t trust Noa enough to keep him in the loop, and was clearly content to sacrifice him when she flooded the vault. This whole adventure was not the best basis for a lasting peace.
That said, this ending doesn’t really point to or set up any specific future storylines. It’s the sort of ending that allows for a lot of new possibilities without forcing them to go in any particular direction with the next one. The whole world is open here. Just keep in mind that we’re probably not heading toward a world in which human civilization makes a lasting comeback–though we should note that the original film series ended with an ape-human peace treaty in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, so who really knows where this thing will end up?
Does Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes have a post-credits scene?
There are no bonus scenes after or during the credits. Once the credits start rolling on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the movie is done, and there’s no remaining content to see. But there’s nothing wrong with sitting through the credits as a little gesture of appreciation for all the hard work that was required to bring this CGI extravaganza to life.
