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So, at last the Apes are back. The original 1968 Planet of
the Apes was a surprise hit and is every bit as powerful a movie
more than 30 years later. But what about this 2001 version?
Is it another sequel? Or is it a remake? Director Tim Burton
prefers to call it a 're-imagination', but for me it is a disappointingly
hollow shell of movie, featuring one dimensional characters
and unriveting action, loosely held together with a mushy banana
of a plot.
The story vaguely follows that of the original, but with some
key differences. Rising star Mark Wahlberg plays astronaut Leo
Davidson whose spaceship gets caught in a multi-coloured Buck
Rogers style timewarp thing and ends up crash landing in a jungle
swamp on a mysterious uncharted planet. Almost immediately,
he is captured and dragged off to become a slave of an advanced
race of talking apes. Actually, they're not as advanced as they
like to think they are, boasting technology that has not progressed
much that of ancient Rome.
Leo winds up hanging out with a human rights activist chimp,
Ari (Helena Bonham-Carter), her gorilla butler Krull (Cary-Hiroyuji
Tagawa - who starts off like TV's Benson, but ends up like Obi
Wan Kenobi), and a token blonde human Daena (newcomer Estella
Warren). He defies ape authority, raises the ire of militaristic
chimpanzee General Thade (Tim Roth), and eventually finds himself
facing a final showdown with an entire primate army.
There are some good points to this movie. RickBaker's make-up
is stunning as usual and the visual spectacle of the ape city
is as well envisaged as any of Tim Burton's previous atmospheric
settings (Gotham City, Sleepy Hollow etc). There are also some
nicely worked nods to the 1968 movie, from a piece of gorilla
dialogue ("Get your hands off me, you damn dirty human"),
to a brief but critical cameo by Charleton Heston (who played
the original astronaut heroTaylor). Even Danny Elfman's percussion
dominated score evokes the eerie 1968 theme. There are even
some corrections to the inaccurate ape stereotypes of the original
(the chimpanzees are now correctly the most aggressive of the
species).
So where does it all go wrong? Firstly, the characters are
mostly extremely dull and poorly realised. The only character
that the audience really cares about is Pericles, the cute 'real'
chimp who goes missing at the very start of the film. Secondly,
there is so very little tension in the screenplay. There is
no buildup to Leo's first encounter with the apes and from there
on, there are almost no scenes where you really wonder what
will happen next. The chimpanzees are supposed to be menacing
but once you seem them leap infeasibly long distances you can't
help comparing them to the (much scarier) flying monkeys from
The Wizard of Oz. Thirdly, and most importantly, there are too
many scenes which are just plain silly. At the risk of giving
away the story, most of the silliest scenes occur in the last
20 minutes, including one of the most blatant sequel set-up
scenes in history.
Overall, this film pales in comparison to the original. Is
it unfair to make such a comparison? Probably not, because if
you want to cash in on the success of something like Planet
of the Apes, you must also be prepared for people to play 'spot
the difference' like I have. Even as a stand alone science fiction
film, this movie does not stand up to much scrutiny. To summarise,
the 2001 Planet of the Apes is like an extra in one of Rick
Baker's costumes; stylish and impressive on the outside, but
no substance inside.
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