I personally saw the film as an exploration of 'possible Earths' caused by a wormhole, 'rip in the fabric of space' or some other wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff. To that end, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes to the story, and Leo just landed on one of them.

If you hold to any multiverse theories, and the nature of infinity, then we will be discussing this film an infinite number times in an infinite number of ways - a 'how long would it take a hundred chimps to write a film script?' kind of thing. In lieu of finding anything official on the matter, my own interpretation of the film was that it did indeed take place on Earth throughout the story - just a parallel dimension Earth.

What was the logic behind this scene? There must be a reason for it being in the film? Take off, fly through the storm and arrive on Earth at some time in Earth's history then take over the entire planet? Or that somehow Thade managed to escape from a locked room on a crashed ship with no fuel (or use Leo's originally crashed pod?). This implies either that the clock is wrong and this was Earth all along, his navigation is broken, he's going forward in time at the end, not back, and Ape society has mirrored human history. There's a statue to Thade instead of Lincoln.Leo travels back in time from the future alien world to Earth (you can see the clock counting down when he's flying).If it is however we're led to believe it's many years in the future. The ship makes a point of telling him he's landing on Earth which it hasn't elsewhere. I'm assuming that the Ape planet they're on for the majority of the film is not Earth, as we're certainly not given any reason to believe it is Earth that I can tell.Leo lands on Earth in his own time to find it run by the Apes. I'm confused by the final scene in the Planet of the Apes film (2001, not the recent Rise film).

Planet of the apes full movie 2001