Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes May Be Hiding A Massive Twist In Plain Sight

I’ve had this theory since the “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” Super Bowl trailer. Mae’s intelligence and evident ability to speak are glaring hints. Humans lost their ability to speak and think during “War for the Planet of the Apes” thanks to a new strain of the Simian Flu, so maybe she’s from a time before that disease decimated mankind. But why does this mean time travel, you say? Maybe she’s just an unusually smart human who’s learned to speak English by observing the apes do so — human see, human do.

What convinced me was a more subtle detail: Mae’s outfit. She’s not wearing the cave-man rags that the other humans are, but a (dirty and wet) tank top and a pair of jeans. Somehow, I don’t think any Abercrombie & Fitch stores survived the ape-pocalypse; what if Mae is wearing modern clothes because she’s from our present, and the apes’ past?

This would make her the reboot series equivalent to George Taylor; the “Kingdom” trailers also suggest she meets Noa while fleeing a hunt, the same way Taylor first encountered the apes in the original 1968 film. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” had a background shot of a TV reporting about astronauts leaving the Earth; this was just an Easter egg, but many fans have speculated this was telegraphing an eventual remake of the original.

“Kingdom” could be flipping the first film’s twist; the presence of time-traveling humans is the shocker, not the initial premise. Since we’ve spent a trilogy of films learning how the world became this way, we don’t need a fish out of water entry point into it like the original “Planet of the Apes” did. There could be some solid dramatic irony, where we know the planet is Earth but Mae doesn’t.