Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now playing in theaters, which means key plot details have begun to find their way online.
In a new interview with THR, star Freya Allan discusses the ending and how the original conclusion played out very differently - and quite a bit darker!
Major spoilers follow.
During the climactic battle, Mae (Allan) makes a fateful decision to blow open the floodgates and destroy the human tech Proximus was trying to get his hands on, killing hundreds of apes in the process. Later, she travels to Noa's Eagle Clan village to see that her friend survived - but she's not taking any chances!
In a chilling reveal, we see that Mae is holding a gun behind her back in case Noa is out for revenge for the apes that died in the flood. It comes across as a precautionary measure, but Allan reveals that the implications of the scene were originally going to be much more sinister.
“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,” Allan recalls. “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.”
There are plans for at least two more Apes movies, so if Kingdom is a success at the box office, we will get to revisit these characters down the line.
Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise, set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is directed by Wes Ball (the Maze Runner trilogy) and stars Owen Teague (IT), Freya Allan (The Witcher), Kevin Durand (Locke & Key), Peter Macon (Shameless), and William H. Macy (Fargo).
The screenplay is by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds) and Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (Avatar: The Way of Water) and Patrick Aison (Prey), based on characters created by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver. The producers are Wes Ball, Joe Hartwick, Jr., p.g.a. (The Maze Runner), Rick Jaffa, p.g.a., Amanda Silver, p.g.a., Jason Reed, p.g.a. (Mulan), with Peter Chernin (the Planet of the Apes trilogy) and Jenno Topping (Ford v. Ferrari) serving as executive producers.