Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes/Trivia

== Trivia ==
* Director Wes Ball's pitch for the film was "Apocalypto (2006) with apes." 
* The story is set about 300 years after War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). 
* Director Wes Ball explained that he was initially worried about joining the franchise, believing that a direct sequel to War for the Planet of the Apes was "unnecessary" and "unimaginative" since "it would be unfairly sort of compared to that perfect trilogy that came previously in the last 10 years." Once the director landed on the idea of jumping ahead in the timeline that's when he became more comfortable with the idea of helming the next installment. He explained "so, we came up with this idea to stay in the same universe. We're still a part of Caesar's world, but we're cutting many, many years later, after the fact, were you get to really explore what's become of Caesar, what's become of his legacy, his ideas." Ball also shared that the film essentially acts as both a sequel and a prequel, bridging the gap between the previous trilogy and the original 1968 movie. Ball explained: "we find ourselves sort of in the middle, honoring where we came from with this great reboot that happened with the Caesar trilogy, and start making our way to that '68 version where apes are talking and have democracy and all this crazy stuff. So, that was kind of the approach that we took." 
* Raka calls Mae Nova, stating that apes name all humans Nova. Nova was the name of the mute human adopted by Maurice in War for the Planet of the Apes. Nova is also the name of Taylor's human mate in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes. 
* This film is not a reboot and is set after the previous trilogy. 
* War for the Planet of the Apes star Andy Serkis has hyped this venture to titular planet of the apes, praising director Wes Ball and declaring that his sequel, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, will "blow people's minds." 
* Noa has the same birthmark on his chest that Caesar had in the previous three films
* The symbol on the necklace that Raka has is the window design from Caesar's bedroom in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) 
* While in the US government bunker, the apes come upon a doll that goes "Mama" in the same voices the doll that Taylor found in the 1968 film which increases the realization that humans once were the dominant species of Earth. 
* Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set 300 years after War for the Planet of the Apes in the Southern California area. Raka's residence is set underneath the ruins of LAX. The clan of Noa reside somewhere within the Los Angeles basin. Proxima Caesar's clan reside near the remains of the Coronado Bay Bridge near San Diego, CA. The observatory is heavily implied to be the Griffith Observatory, based out of the Hollywood Hills. This is a nod to the original film saga as the Los Angeles basin is the setting for Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The first films in the "Caesar trilogy" were also set in and around San Francisco and the nearby Muir Woods National Park 
* The scene with a scared Mae hiding in the tall grass is shot in the same way as the scene of a scared Taylor hiding from the gorilla hunters in the 1968 film. She even runs up a log to avoid the gorillas as Taylor did. 
* VFX supervisor Erik Winquist who has worked on all three previous series emphasize the latest installments realistic depiction of the Apes and their world with improved technology. To create a visuals, the animators at Weta FX put in substantial work, resulting in over 946 million thread hours for rendering. Winquist said, "as far as the evolution of the technology goes, I'm feeling very proud of where we currently are. When I go back and look at some of the scenes from 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' it looks so primitive to me now. And at the time we thought that was the pinnacle that was so great. But it's great to see the technology continuing to improve the believability and realism not just of the appearance but of their performance as well. And what we, our animators, are able to achieve is quite breathtaking." 
* After landing the lead role of Noa, Owen League spent days at a Florida ape sanctuary, where he got up close and personal with primates, except for the orangutans which he said smelled terrible, saying "our evolutionary predecessors were stinky guys." 
* Noa and his family are of the same species as Caesar, suggesting that they may be his distant descendants through Cornelius, the youngest of his family and the soul survivor of it by the end of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). This gives further thematic symbolism to Noa's ideological and physical conflict with Proximus Caesar, the ideological opposite of everything Caesar envisioned apes were despite using his mythological legacy for his own ends 
* Wes Ball began work on this film after the cancellation of his Fantasy Adaptation of the Comic Series "The Mouse Guard" following the Disney's Fox. acquisition. Director Matt Reeves (who directed the previous Apes films) was set to Produce, Ball would reunite with his Maze Runner co-star Thomas Brodie-Sangster, and feature Planet of the Apes' Caesar, Andy Serkis. 
* In terms of the VFX, director Wes Ball was particularly proud of the 33 minutes of full CG (a franchise first) particularly the immense amount of simulated water. The highlight is an action scene with rushing water in a weapons silo. "We flooded a converted parking garage with CG water, and I had the actors put 20 lb sandbags on their legs and walk through the stage so they pretend that like they were in water. That was crazy amount of data. Petabytes and petabytes and petabytes. And we tried very hard to keep a grounded kind of cinema language to it all." 
* This is first film in Planet of the Apes film series to be distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 
* Wes Ball revealed that he will offer the entire "Kingdom" as a rare before and after Blu-ray bonus feature consisting of raw dailies and complete a performance capture and VFX. "These are true storytellers at work here. I want to show that off and celebrate it." Ball said. 
* Kim Seoung-seok, a senior facial modeler at Weta FX, noted the new film required more complex and sophisticated skills to create the apes. He said, "s300 years have passed, apes have evolved to be more intelligent and use verbal language more. Civilization has been created, as well as the conflicts within that. It's technologically complex but our work excelled in implementing this." Sun Se-ryul, the motion capture tracker of the film, hinted that the apes expressions will have more detail, she said, "we needed a lot of photos for the detailed work. We found a type of orangutan (with the look we wanted) in a zoo in Germany and took photos of him to work with them. A lot of different types of technologies were used. We worked delicately, mainly around the face, and related technology has advanced. In those aspects, you will be seeing slightly more realistic apes." VFX supervisor Erik Winquist added very hopes the film's advanced VFX will help invite viewers to its world and enjoy the fictional story, saying: "what I hope that audiences get from this film is very quickly just immersed into the story and the characters and stop thinking. And hopefully, they're not about the technology and that they're watching visual effects. I hope that audiences just get swept away by the narrative and the incredible performances that we got from our actors and our animators and just really have a fun ride because quite a fun adventure story." 
* Trevathan mentions to Mae that out of all the texts and books he reads to him, Proximus is most interested in Roman history, and has primarily modeled himself and his ideal Kingdom after the various figureheads from it. Proximus likely took a shine to this particular era when he found out one of the Romans most famous and influential leaders was Julius Caesar (who of course, the apes own Caesar was directly named after). 
* Proxima's kingdom is located along the Southern California coast. This is the same general area that the beach scenes of Planet of the Apes (1968) were filmed. The rusted out ship hulls are a tribute to the famous rusted out Statue of Liberty. 
* The feral humans are all either wearing a fur bikini or a loincloth like in the original film. 
* According to visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist, reboot will set a new tone and and aesthetic changes to the series. He stated: "the previous three films were heavy both aesthetically and in tone. They were a bit bleak. We were talking about an apocalypse. So this film gives us an opportunity to go way into the future beyond that and find ourselves a brand new cast of characters. It allows us to take on a different tone. This is a fun adventure story that anesthetically looks very different from the previous films. The cinematic language that we use is very different from those of previous films. So it was a great opportunity to try a new look and a new field for a familiar franchise." 
* The movie was originally set to be released on May 24, 2024, but then it was moved two weeks earlier to May 10th. 
* The fact that the film is set 300 years after the previous one is only established in supplementary materials and interviews. The film's opening only mentions a far more vague descriptor of "many generations". 
* In an interview with Empire, director Wes Ball made the comparison that in the prior movies, we saw the apes in their "Stone Age", but in this movie, we will see them in their "Bronze Age" whereas before they were organized hunter-gatherers, now they have more permanent settlements, wear clothing, use metal tools, and have a more developed culture with religion and a writing system. However, their actual depiction in the film would put the apes in something more akin to their "Chalcolithic period" as some clans are still using stone tools, and other than salvaged human artifacts, ape metalwork is mostly copper. 
* While the other humans wear pelts, Mae wears a fitted top and trousers, hinting at the technology and sapience required to make such garments. 
* This is the first film of the series to be released in IMAX format. Previously, War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) was re-released in 2017. Director Wes Ball stated that the film deserved to be seen on premium formats. 
* Director Wes Ball likens the film to "The Bronze Age" for apes. To him, it's more historical epic than futuristic sci-fi adventure, asking the eternal question: can human and ape peacefully coexist? "I always love that so much time had passed that erased all evidence of our existence in the '68 film. And then you uncover all of this haunting past of the world that once was that we got to play with here. They couldn't do that in the previous three movies. They were about the end of the human world; ours is about the beginning of the ape world." 
* Proximus is Latin for "recent" or "close to" and sounds similar to "proxy" and "proximity", he presents himself as the second coming of the apes mythic messiah. 
* For the role of Proximus Caesar, Kevin Durand took inspiration from charismatic speakers, like life coach Tony Robbins, tech billionaire Elon Musk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in his years serving as governor of the state of California. Schwarzenegger almost starred in a reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise in the 1990's. 
* The Eagle Clan has complete dissociated itself from Caesar's legacy and the common history of apekind, which is reflected in the fact that they are shown to be developing a truly indigenous ape culture and society instead of one derived from human civilization. This is reflected even in their personal names, as unlike the coastal clan that still uses human names (Proximus, Silva), Eagle Clan uses names not derived from human ones. 
* Proximus Caesar is interested in the Roman Empire, referencing Adam Rifkin's old pitch for a distant sequel to Planet of the Apes (1968) that would show Apes living in a Roman like civilization, described by him as a "Sword and Sandal epic" like "Gladiator in ape costumes" also a homage referencing the apes inexplicably having Latin names in the original series. 
* The idea of ape leadership scavenging human knowledge and presenting it as their own to justify their power goes at least as far back to Sam Hamm's 1995 script for a Planet of the Apes reboot. 
* First installment in this series to be made without Andy Serkis 
* This is the first Planet of the Apes films without the involvement of Chernin Entertainment C logo in the poster, following its parting of the ways with Disney. This is similar for two Searchlight Pictures films, however, Chernin will be still as an executive producer and the credits will remain. 
* Proximus' speech about man growing proud, notes that humans once possessed the ability to "speak across oceans" before losing it along with their sapience. The end of the film reveals that there are pockets of humanity that managed to retain their intelligence, and with Mae's efforts, manage to re-establish that very asset, reactivating radio communication across the globe. 
* Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes began production in October 2022. Principal photography on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was conducted at Disney Studios Australia in Sydney, under the working title Forbidden Zone. On February 15, 2023, Ball announced the end of filming with a BTS video from the sets of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. 
* Development began in April 2019, following Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox, with Ball attached as writer and director that December. Much of the script was written during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with casting commencing in June 2022, following the script's completion. Teague was cast in the lead role that August, with the film's title and additional casting revealed in the following months. Principal photography began in October 2022 in Sydney and wrapped in February 2023. 
* Instead of having to painstakingly create every single lip sync and facial tic, the animators and artists focus their time on crafting the depths of emotional nuance that the AI solver tools couldn't handle. This lets them do more careful and detailed work they might have been possible when these earlier stages had to be done by hand. 
* While most of the AI tools that have garnered concern online are trained by pulling thousands of pieces of art posted on the Internet by artists who haven't given their permission for that use and subsuming their styles and elements in order to build its vocabulary, Weta Digital tools are trained in house, solely on the studio's own work, according to visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist "there's so much gray area around copyright ownership, and 'where do they scrape all this information from?' right? The places where we're using machine learning in our pipeline, the algorithm essentially is being trained on our information. It's being trained on our actors, it's being trained on the imagery that we're feeding it, that we've generated. Not imagery from wherever." 
* When it was time to get into character, Owen Teague would only have to spend 15 minutes getting the motion capture dots put on his face and putting on the suit, he stated: "then I go on set, and usually Elaine, our movement coordinator, would lead us through a warm-up, and that was it. It became a ritual for me, that was my day. We would shoot 10 hours and eat five more meals before you're burning so many calories that you just have to keep up. And then I'd go home, have dinner, take a shower, go to bed. That was my life for six months, and it was really actually quite wonderful." 
* Director Wes Ball was asked about the technological advancements used in the film compared to the franchise predecessors. The director spoke on the lenses used in the film and the approach to using anamorphic lenses which the prior three films did not use. "It feels like one of those old movies from the '70s that you watched, so the lenses are kind of crappy on the sides." Ball said. Additionally, Ball spoke on the LUT (Lookup table) used for the film saying: "Even our LUT is based on an old Agfa film LUT. I hadn't even heard of it before. So it's this old 70s thing that does this really great thing to the skin tones, so it has a feel like it's this whole movie from decades ago even though it's the most cutting edge best visuals effects you've ever seen." 
* For the faces of many ape characters, visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist said that the AI solver tools might manipulate digital 8 models to roughly match the actors mouth shapes and lip synching, giving the faces the vague creases and wrinkles you might expect to form with each word. (Winquist says Weta Digital originally developed this technology to map Josh Brolin's Thanos performance onto a digital model in the Avengers movies.) after a solver works its magic, the Weta artists get to work on the hard part, taking the images the solver started, and polishing them so they look perfect. This is, for Winquist, where the real artistry comes in, he explained: "it meant that our facial animators can use it as a stepping stone, essentially, or a trampoline. So they can spend their time really polishing and looking for any places where the solver was doing something on an ape face that didn't really convey with the actor was doing." 
* Owen Teague spent a lot of time watching and studying primates while preparing to play one and even ended up mimicking their eating habits. In fact, he and the rest of the cast ate so many bananas on set that it eventually became a running gag. Teague revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly "I had a routine because I was in this every day for six months. I would get up two hours before call. I would do my warm up, I would do my breath stuff, and vocal work. And then I would eat something, I would eat usually a banana. It's a running joke in the cast that we all love bananas. I need breakfast which was eggs with avocados everyday, not more bananas. Although those would come up throughout the day." 
* Wes Ball mines the 1968 sci-fi classic to rework "The Hunt" sequence (including a shout out to Jerry Goldsmith's eerie theme by composer John Paesano) bringing Noa and Mae closely together during a thrilling escape in a field of tall grass on horseback. He also paid homage to "The Forbidden Zone" with the ape scarecrows (echoing more Goldsmith score) and "The Cave" (with the familiar talking doll recreating the ama" audio track from the original). At the same time, Ball also interjects allusions to "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" and "Battle for the Planet of the Apes" he even admits that there are plans to do with sequel to the '68 original "it's in our sights, it's on the horizon, but there's a long way to go. And there's no push on anyone's part to do that. So, if I had my choice, you wouldn't remake the original. You would build up to that, and then you start over, you'd go back and watch that '68 and just let this franchise in." Ball said. But without time travel: "Would people accept that today? I struggle with that but anything's possible. Those movies go into some wild territory: mutants praying to nuclear weapons. That's a cool idea. Do we literally do mutants? I don't know. But taking the underlying concept behind it, we will play with all those ideas. We borrow from all of it, so we hopefully feel like we're a part of this long legacy" Ball said. 
* Director Wes Ball had high praise for Weta FX the visual effects company that he will also worked with for The Maze Runner trilogy. "They create miracles on screen." Ball spoke on the simulations used for the film, "there's a tremendous amount of simulation work in this movie that I think is fantastic they're doing things that haven't been done before." 
* Wes Ball spoke about the size of the data used for the movie, "just a simulation data, the cache file that they render for this stuff, it's 10-11 petabytes of material. That's more than The Way of Water, is what I'm told." It's not know how much data was used for the movie in total, however Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) used 18.5 petabytes of data. 
* Noa's name is two fold: firstly, it continues the biblical parallels from the previous trilogy. While Caesar was compared to Moses both helping to free their enslaved peoples and leading them to a promised land he could never enter, Noa it's similar to Noah helping to save his people from a great flood. Secondly, Mae's first on screen words is her shouting 'NOA!' calls back to Caesar's first word in the previous trilogy being a big "NO!" 
* Visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist sat down with Polygon ahead of the movies release and discuss the ways AI tools were key to making the movie, and how the limitations on those tools still make the human element key to the process. Revealing that some of the most important machine learning tools were called "solvers." Winquist explained "A solver, essentially, is just taking a bunch of data, whether that's the dots on an actor's face or on their mocap suit, and running an algorithm. It's trying to find the least amount of error, essentially trying to match up where those points are in 3D space, to a joint on the actor's body, their puppets body, let's say. Or in the case of a simulation, a solver is essentially taking where every single point in the water sim, say was in the previous frame, looking at its velocity, and saying, 'Oh, therefore it should be here in the next frame' and applying physics every step of the way." 
* The first trailer received 75 million online views within the first 24 hours. 
* Wes Ball envisioned the Noa/Mae story as a new trilogy, and he's already mapped out the next two films as they grapple with carrying on Caesar's legacy. He believes the franchise remains as timely as ever, considering our divisive times. "There's so much story to tell. What I like about the franchise is that these movies hold up a mirror to our society, the things we're going through, and we get to look at ourselves and see humanity through these apes' eyes." Ball said. 
* Visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist describe the incredible complications of the various water scenes, one takes place on a bridge over a raging river, and another involves a massive flood of ocean water. According to Winquist, Avatar: The Way of Water's water solver was key to getting these scenes off the ground, because it allowed the effects artists to simulate how the water would respond to certain elements, like the ape characters and their hairy bodies, without fully rendering those scenes in a computer. This allowed art directors a chance to tweak the scene before the rendering took place, making quick adjustments possible. Previously, computers might have needed nearly 3 days to fully render all the CG details on a scene before the effects team could watch the results, tweak the algorithms, then start the process over again. That me this kind of CG scene virtually impossible to refine in the way the Weta team could with this movie. But for all the ways AI technology improved essential on the film, Winquist still sees it as nothing more than an empty tool without the artists who guide it and pin down the finished product, Winquist said: I don't want to overshadow the human element. I've seen approaches where the facility has really gone in deep on the machine learning side of things, and it feels like that's where it stopped. I see the results of that, and I just don't believe that voice coming out of that face or whatever. The thing I find we're so successful with is that the artists are ultimately driving the finished scenes, using the machine learning stuff as a tool, instead of the answer to the problem." For Winquist, the human element will always be key to producing something great and artistically interesting. He said: "ultimately, machine learning tools can only regurgitate what they've been fed, I don't know. Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I just don't know if there's ever a point where that stuff can meaningfully make a movie truly engaging. A piece of art that somebody is going to want to actually sit down and watch. The thing I always go back to is, why should I bother to read something at somebody couldn't be bothered to write? Whether it's words or whether it's images." 
* The AI solver tools, which visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist and his team built and refined on each movie that Weta Digital has worked on, enable the studio to take on more ambitious projects and seems that they could have in the past. Flr instance, the massive set piece at the climax of the film is a scene Winquist isn't sure they could have done without the team's newest generation of water solver software. Those tools unsurprisingly were refined during production on Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Winquist notes that the work was a step up from the water scenes in War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), "we would have struggled. I would say if we had not done those previous films, there would have been a big push in R&D to get us up to scratch." Winquist said. 
* Wes Ball had two things going for him in directing the film, his love of the original franchise which he first watched on TV as a kid in the '80s, and his admiration for Avatar, whose virtual production and performance capture prowess he leveraged with the help of Weta FX. He explained: "something I've always wanted to do is play in that Avatar style and do it here, where there is no camera, there's no lights, there's no set really. And you have to create that in the computer with really talented artists. And I had a great time doing it." Ball got a taste of the tech working with Weta on the shuttered "Mouse Guard" adaptation of David Petersen's graphic novel (a casualty of the Disney/Fox merger) "that's where I met those guys and Andy Serkis [who was said to star and who served a special consultant on Kingdom] he was really important to me and helped the actors kind of get into their headspace. They had never done this before." 
* Kevin Durand had a small role in 1999's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, where the Planet of the Apes franchise was referenced in a joke. 
* Kevin Durand was in the vampire movie Abigail (2024) alongside co-star Dan Stevens who was in the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) in which the main villain is a giant ape Skar King. 
* Proxima Caesar is reminiscent of another bonobo from the previous reboot trilogy: Koba. He was power hungry, and wanted to go to war with humans, as much so as to eradicate them from the Earth altogether. Both were also not fond of trusting them, based on their experiences: (Koba was experimented on by them, while Proxima meeting two humans capable of speech and problem solving could lead to an uprising to his clan and other ape kind). Both would also meet their demise the same way: being dropped off a ledge by a fellow ape; in this case, a chimpanzee. 
* The final scene's implication that even by the time of this film no cure for the mutated Simian Flu has been found, and that those pockets of humanity that have retained their intelligence and technology are forced to remain confined to hermetically sealed environments to avoid contamination by the virus helps explain their inability to rebuild their civilization or reclaim the planet from the apes despite their technological superiority. They are literally trapped in their archologies, with only the handful of individuals like Mae and Trevathan being able to go on scouting missions, due to apparently being The Immune. Which also helps explain why reestablishing satellite communication would be such a big deal for these people: after centuries of isolation, it will finally allow them to start working together, at least as far as exchanging information goes. 
* The death of Proximus Caesar is reminiscent of the death of Julius Caesar. While Julius Caesar was stabbed approximately 20 times by a group of Roman senators, Proximus Caesar was stabbed numerous times by the talons of the birds summoned by Noa.
* The first word spoken by a human in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) is "Noa." The first word spoken by an ape in the first film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) is "No." 
* According to Freya Allan the film originally had a much darker ending in the scene where Mae visits Noa she's holding a gun behind her back in case he is out for revenge for the apes that died in the flood. It comes across as a precautionary measure but Allan revealed that the implications of the scene were originally going to be much more sinister, Mae went there specifically to kill Noa. Allan explained: "in the scene that I shot, Mae was going there to kill him because he scares her. His intelligence scares her. Mae doesn't want to kill him, but she feels she has to. Originally, you actually see her pull the gun on Noa, but his back is turned to her. And so you think, 'Oh my God, is she about to shoot him?' Mae is crying as she's doing it. And then she doesn't. The minute he mentions Raka's name, she puts the gun down. But then in the edit, they wanted it to feel more subtle, and I honestly way prefer what they've done with it. It's so much smarter and really allows you to think more. So it becomes a very emotional goodbye, one with tragic, lingering doom." 
* Mae tells Noa that she is seeking a book allowing "humans to speak" which Noa thinks this means that Mae means a paper book that will reveal knowledge on how to make nonverbal humans intelligent again. Mae really means an encryption disc that will allow for mass communication. Which of course is another way of giving humans the ability to communicate. "Allowing Humans to speak" given the current devolution of those infected with Simian Flu, becomes another way of Mae saying that she intends to return humanity back to the era where they were the ones with the capacity to talk and apes were not their intelligence superiors, hinting at her underlying (and somewhat understandable) fantastic racism against apekind, Kuma she has only even known as oppressors for scavengers of humanity's legacy who bastardise said works for their own benefit, like Proximus. Even bonding with Noa at best only seems to make Mae recognize him as "a good one" of his kind, and even then she still brings a load of gun to their final meeting in case he turns violent against her, which Noa seems to sense and is further disappointed in her for. 
* The trailers for Caesar's trilogy always had a tendency to frame him and his actions throughout like he was an aggressor against humanity, leading the apes to eventual subjugation over them, either reluctantly or intentionally. The trailer for this film highlights Proximus' villainy -intentions for conquest, aggression's against peaceful ape tribes and hunting humans -whilst also framing the inquisitive Noa being confused, then horrified, then vocally objecting against Proximus whilst being inter-cut with scenes of him defending, protect and working alongside the "smarter then most" Nova/Mae. This is in fact the same type of manipulative editing, making us see Noa as a "good ape" for defending the helpless, defenseless and "innocent" Mae from Proximus' ambitions, whereas in the actual film, she is a lying, manipulative Unscrupulous Hero who lies constantly to the good-intention-ed Noa to get him to help her in her mission, kick-starts the climactic confrontation with Proximus' forces in a manner that leads to the deaths of his soldiers and innocent slaves alike, and ends the film having set in motion events to potentially allow the remaining intelligent humanity to regroup and enact another destructive ape/human war, out of a belief that her kind "deserves" their old way of life back, even if it would come at a cost to Noa and his people. Just like Caesar is really The Hero of his films made out to be the villain because said films are made by humans and for humans, Mae is actually something of a Big Bad Friend to Noa in the end, but the film makes her out to be a Damsel in Distress that is reliant on his aid and goodwill to survive. 
* Noa's climatic confrontations with both Silva and Proximus have him (somewhat unintentionally) following Caesar's 'Ape Shall Not Kill Ape' tenant (albeit in a technical sense) even if Noa does so because he knows better than to confront either one in their element of simplistic animal violence. With Silva, he's clearly outmatched and instead chooses to use his greater agility and the environment to lure him into a position where his bigger bulk works against him, leaving him to drown from the rising waters. With Proximus, he instead chooses to overcome his demonstration of his "right to rule" between them through violence, by instead appealing to the Eagle tribe's traditions that Proximus is ignorant of, his surrounding tribe members taking up the war call that Proximus believes is merely harmless chanting in support of Noa at first until the eagles start bombarding him, attacking him in a manner that stops him from using his natural advantages and again takes advantage of their environment to push him to his demise. This refusal to directly kill his own kind contrasts with Mae, who does deliberately and very vengefully kill Trevathan in a manner not unlike that of a unevolved animal, squeezing the life out of him with her bare hands. Her primary reason for doing so being outraged at Trevathan exposing 'human' secrets for the apes to monopolize hints at her underlying fantastic racism against apekind which, along with her brutal murder of her own species, marks her out as being less heroic than Noa, leading up to the ending reveal that she's actually something of a big bad friend to him, believing humanity deserves to be the dominant species again even as her action show her to be more savage and less enlightened than Noa. In fact, Noa's spiritual enlightenment is the entire reason he was able to overcome Proximus, and by the end of the film he too has wised up to Mae's manipulative character, even if he wishes they could still be allies. In contrast, Mae's experiences don't seem to have changed her outlook at all, and in fact seemed to have reinforced them, with her at best coming to think of Noa as an outliner amongst his savage kin, and even that is conditional, as shown by her carrying a concealed gun to their last meeting, prepared for violence even if Noa seems disgusted that she'd think so lowly of him.
* When the surviving humans finally make contact with other humans using the restored communications technology, the voice on the other end says they are from Fort Wayne, Indiana. In the original Planet of the Apes film, Charlton Heston's character Taylor tells Dr. Zaius he is from Fort Wayne, Indiana. 
== Goofs ==
=== Factual errors ===
* Despite being a bonobo, Proximus Caesar's design is clearly that of a regular chimpanzee.
Category:Trivia facts