What happens when you give $100 million to a geeky fanboy? You get a $100 million homage to a cult classic SF flick beloved by geeky fanboys.
Clearly, though, Tim Burton is no ordinary geeky fanboy, having taken such diverse figures as Batman and cheese-filmmaker Ed Wood — characters much loved among fannish types — and given them a whole new spin, exploring the dark, psychosexual underpinnings of their subliminal selves. And always, the pathos of the outsider (a theme geeky fanboys and girls can appreciate) seemed to obsess him, from the lonely, misunderstood Edward Scissorhands to the tormented Bruce Wayne to Ichabod Crane, Man of Reason among the superstitious.
So, a “reimagining,” as Burton has been calling it, of Planet of the Apes would surely be ripe for Burton’s brand of psychological autopsy. A human man, alone among hostile, intelligent apes, unable to relate to the uncivilized, subjugated homo sapiens he encounters… Bring on the angst, the hero’s twisted self-torture, all the stuff that makes you wonder what happened to the director as a child!
But don’t hold your breath waiting for it here.
Oh, the film looks incredible. Rick Baker’s ape makeup is astounding: the actors under all that latex can still use their faces to act, smirking, quirking eyebrows, and so on — it’s really easy to forget that these are not intelligent, speaking primates up on the screen. Tim Roth (The Legend of 1900) as the evil chimp general and Michael Clarke Duncan (Cats & Dogs, The Whole Nine Yards) as his lieutenant are terrific, Roth in particular oozing malevolence even through all that makeup. (Helena Bonham Carter [Fight Club, The Wings of the Dove] is less compelling as a rebellious chimp sympathetic to the humans’ cause. That’s not really her fault; bad guys are always more interesting onscreen.) And the apes have a richer culture this time around, too… or richer-looking, at least, the soldiers sporting menacing armor decorated with meaningful symbols, ape houses and clothing demonstrating their appreciation for beautiful design. They have music and an economy and a seemingly viable society. And that’s really cool.
But that’s just window dressing. The film is pretty and all, but it feels like an episode of Mark Wahlberg in the 25th Century, or whenever. As astronaut Leo Davidson, hurdled from his home in the early 21st century (thanks to, it must be said, his own macho stupidity) into the future, to a planet run by apes, Wahlberg (The Perfect Storm, Three Kings) feels a tad unsupported by the story (and the director) — he’s a capable actor, but his muted onscreen personality isn’t the type that can get away with becoming a heroic figure without some more help from the manufacturers of his tale. His rallying of the human troops for the big battle between ape and human simply isn’t believable, no matter how often leather-bikini-clad babe Daena (Estella Warren: Driven) insists her people will follow him. If Wahlberg can play the leader type, we’ve yet to see him do it.
Written by William Broyles Jr (Cast Away, Apollo 13) and Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (both of whom wrote Mighty Joe Young and Mercury Rising), this new script based on Pierre Boulle’s novel is less overtly socially satirical that the original — though it tosses some bones to the concept of giving humans a taste of their exploitative medicine — and more interested in nodding fondly back at the 1968 film, putting classic lines of dialogue from the original to humorous use. (And it’s almost impossible to avoid doing so here: “A planet where Mark Wahlberg evolved from Charlton Heston?”) Heston gets a fun cameo, too.
Ultra purists, of course, will probably wish that Burton had kept his damn dirty paws off a classic… but that’s usually the case with remakes. Anyone looking for a good, fun popcorn movie in which monkeys get their butts kicked will get precisely what they expect. But Burton fanatics (like me) will wonder where the hell Burton was in all of this — except for the absolutely gorgeous production design, it doesn’t feel like a Burton movie at all.
Oh, and the ending? Hilarious. But it makes no logical sense at all.
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
[spoilers]
i have a question, i probably sound stupid though but oh well..can you explain to me the ending? im a bit confused..did he land back on earth in the future where apes have just evolved and taken over the world all on their own? or, when general thade went in the old space ship he flew it back and took over earth? or, was it something completly different? its really bothering me that im not catching on to the ending. if you could explain it to me id appreciate it greatly.
I can’t explain it. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and a Fox exec admits that flat out.
It’s a completely asinine ending to the film. It’s funny (but senseless), but it would have been even funnier if Wahlberg was only hallucinating everyone as apes.
I know somewhere some scriptwriter is still cracking himself thinking about “Ape-raham Lincoln.”
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
I really enjoyed it, but that’s not the point; I wanted to comment on the ending, which you said was “hilarious but didn’t make a bit of sense.”
A couple of things:
1) Nobody seems to have noticed, but Burton and Co. haven’t made up a new ending at all but rather kept the original one Pierre Boulle used in his novel.
2) When Wahlberg goes back to earth, his date counter stops not at 2029, which is when the film begins, but at 21 something or other, which could, I suppose, give the apes enough time to evolve and take over.
Well, not really. But it doesn’t really matter anyway.
The ending is not quite the same as the novel, because the planet in the novel was always Earth. Wahlberg travels to a different planet in the new film, then returns to an Earth that has changed for what reason? It’s completely ridiculous, and intentionally makes no sense, according to that Fox exec.
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
Having read your review of Planet of the Apes I was just wondering, firstly, I don’t think you had reviewed the ’68 original. Have you thought of doing a comparative review to the re-imaging (don’t call a remake! Sheesh! Unclench, Mr. Burton!…)?…
At the end of your review, you wondered why it ended the way it did. Well, it’s what’s called “planning for the sequel”. ;-) I’m not stunned, actually. The original series had to do this too. They had filmed the apocalyptic second Ape, but it did so well the studio wanted a third movie. So when Paul Dehn (the screenwriter for all four sequels) wrote “Escape From…” he intentionally left the ending there for a fourth installment. See, reading the trivia section in imdb.com is educational!…;-)
Hope this helps.
Leaving room for a sequel at the end of a film is fine. But that setup should make some sense within the context of the two hours that have come before it. Tain’t the case with POTA.
I may review the original Apes movies soon. Stay tuned…
Well, that’s where the sequel comes in. It’ll explain *how* Thade escaped his glass prison; *how* he was able to find a space pod to fly off into the timestorm, *what* he did when he arrived at Earth to mutate the dimished ape population here in order to conquer it, and *who* will rise up among the disaffected chimps to aid Marky Mark and claim the role of savior against Thade’s evil rule. BTW, can Alan Cumming do a good Roddy McDowell impression? Anyone? Someone’s gotta play the noble Cornelius!…
The technical term for that explanation is “s-t-r-e-t-c-h.”
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
[spoilers]
Just started going through the latest reader mail [previous comments here–maj] (which has always been one of my favorite parts of your site), and noticed you were a little off on the details of the Apes novel:
I haven’t read the book myself, but going from a synopsis on Cinescape, Burton’s movie actually follows the general outline on this level. Earthman travels to distant, definitely-not-Earth “Ape World,” has adventures there, then returns to Earth. At the end of both, Earth has turned into a Planet of the Apes itself.
But in the book, it makes more sense. Due to relativity effects, the hero’s journey takes only a few years, while centuries pass on Earth, thus semi-plausibly providing enough time for the big changes to occur. And more to the point, it fits the philosophical theme of the novel. Apes took over from humans on “Ape World” because (in the words of the Cinescape article’s author) “[the humans’] intellect slowly devolved through apathy, allowing the apes to mimic their actions and evolve to their current state.” The message of the ending is that this same thing happened to homo sapiens on Earth. An interesting moral, not really addressed by any of the movies. Something like “Don’t take your superiority for granted. Evolution never stops.”
The problem with Burton’s movie, of course, is that Wahlberg arrives on Earth not long after he left. (And even if he had arrived centuries later, the groundwork *still* isn’t there.)
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
Much as I adore both your reviews and your wonderful website, my anal retentiveness demands satisfaction. In response to a letter regarding the new Planet of the Apes movie, you wrote that in the original novel, the planet was Earth all along. This is simply not the case. In Pierre Boulle’s original novel, the intrepid French astronauts found themselves on a planet orbiting the star Betelgeuse. The protaganist returned to Earth to find that in the intervening years, it too was controlled by apes. In fact, the original novel is quite good, but the twist ending in the original movie was entirely the invention of Rod Serling. In fact, in the novel, the apes came into power because of human mental apathy because of reliance on apes and technology, not because of any catastrophe.
Is that right? Maybe I was getting the novel confused with the original movie — I guess I should read the novel again (it’s been a while).
Assuming that what you say is true, though, the ending of the new film still is not the same as the novel. The new film posits that somehow, General Thade — from a civilization that is relatively technologically backward on a planet distant from Earth — somehow finds a way to travel through both space and time, and engineers a takeover of Earth, and that the ape-ruled Earth still develops a Washington DC that looks exactly like the one we know today.
Like I said, it’s preposterous.
[reader comment via email from 2001 reposted by maj]
What happened to Tim Burton. Or, perhaps more accurately put, what happened to the image of Tim Burton propogated so well by Hollywood? After watching his remake of Planet of the Apes, all I can say to Mr. Burton is take a bath, get a haircut, and drop the brooding genius pretense. There is nothing brilliant, artistic, or even mildly above average about this film. Think “Stargate Meets Planet of the Apes.” And even a horrible film like Stargate had an ending we could understand.
But, then, maybe that’s Mr. Burton’s game. Present an ending that even Socrates couldn’t unravel. There! That’s the proof of his brilliance. Only he of old man sunglasses and dirty hair is capable of understanding this “twist.” Sorry, though, I don’t buy it.
MaryAnn, you dismissed the ending summarily. And there is good reason not to give it much thought. But it is worth dissecting it if for no other reason that to project what the sequel might be. (Oh, there will be a sequel. The ending begs for one. “Please, give me chance to explain this shocking non-sequitur!”) Here are my best guesses for the sequel:
(1) It was all a dream. Marky Mark is a zookeeper who wakes up from this nightmare, frees all of his chimps, and falls in love with a particularly attractive Orang. (She’ll be animatronic in the film–with perky, human-like breasts, perhaps.)
(2) Marky Mark entered a parallel universe in which an ape version of Tim Burton is making Planet of the Humans. Mark is recruited to star in the movie and is ultimately placed in a zoological park for retired animal actors.
(3) Marky Mark was driven insane by his experience with apes and now sees all humans as Apes, including his mother–which leads to some dramatic incidents involving bananas.
As usual, MaryAnn, I love your reviews and your site. Keep up the good, hard work.