PLANET OF THE APES (2001) Pretty good, once it's groomed for lice and ticks It's gotta be the notes. I always take notes watching movies at home when I intend to review them later, but I never do so at a theater. So I spend six to eight days wondering what the hell I intend to write. It was once in Oliver Stone's hands, then in Chris Columbus's. It's based on (or at least follows in the footsteps of) a movie starring one of the worst actors of all time. As the release date neared, the ads made it look like Battlefield Earth...with apes. It even has the same tag line! And it stars Marky Mark, ferchrissakes! Nevertheless, it had one of the biggest opening-weekend takes of all time, go figure. At any rate, Planet Of The Apes has turned out to be one of the better popcorn flicks of this year...which, when you look at how few good popcorn flicks have been released this year, might well be damning with faint praise. Tim Burton has long been one of those directors who I sort of admire, and definitely tolerate, but never could actually much like. His Batman movies bored the shit out of me, and a number of his 90's films just disappeared from memory moments after they were over. It seemed like he didn't care what he directed (boring superhero movie, boring manipulative romance with Wynona Ryder), as long as he directed it with everything he had, which was usually a little too much. I might have been more impressed if he didn't just keep getting saddled with such terrible (yes, terrible) scripts. Of the films of his I could really get behind, one he didn't direct (the songs in The Nightmare Before Christmas aren't nearly as annoying now as they were when I first watched it), and the other was Ed Wood, which seems like a fairly obvious exception. His last film, Sleepy Hollow, was a welcome change of pace, with Burton finally using his considerable gifts to enhance an interesting (if well-worn) story (if burdened by a silly ending) instead of...gaahh, I hated Mars Attacks!. Planet Of The Apes stays the course, with great visuals, an interesting (if well-worn) story...and a silly ending. Some call it his "going Hollywood" or "mainstream"...I'm way past caring, Burton long having seemed to me like a director who needs to focus on making movies that won't bore the shit out of people instead of beating us over the head with the same point for two hours (usually "Look at how great of a director I am!"). Of course, looking at a movie like this, it seems like he's definitely doing just that, beating us over the head with the same point...but I don't think there's a point, so I like it just fine. It's better than Mars Attacks!, anyway. An amusingly expressionless Mark Wahlberg stars as the indefatigable Leo Davidson, a space pilot in the future who flies out to rescue a beloved (or maybe just useful) chimp (which the Air Force - I'd always thought it a long-forgone conclusion that military ventures into deep space would be handled by the Navy) - always sends out first) from the maw of some big space anomaly. He doesn't find the chimp, but he does manage to go through the anomaly and crash-land on some alien planet with two moons, and as he finds out in very short order, the dominant species isn't human. Among these English-speaking apes is the human-hating chimp General Thade (Tim Roth), who wheezes asthmatically throughout the film and glowers so much that even his final sort-of bit of screen time hilariously continues the glare. Michael Clark Duncan plays his chief soldier and best friend Attar, who falls out of favor with his old teacher Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) when the daughter of the family Krull serves (Helena Bonham Carter) chooses to fight for human rights. Also watch for David Warner (as with everyone else playing apes in this movie, I couldn't recognize him until he spoke) as Carter's father. Probably the most memorable (for better or worse) is Paul Giamatti as Limbo, who deals in human slaves/pets; his lines are silly and more often lame than funny, but the panicked, frightened way he delivers them makes him interesting, as if Peter Ustinov lost all his cool in Spartacus. Planet Of The Apes has two predecessors is supposedly has to live up to; the original film starring Charlton Heston, and the book which both were based on. Never read the book, and I've never understood how Heston got to the planet, considering that each time I saw the first film, I always managed to miss the first 15 minutes. Anyway, whereas satire was front n' center for the first movie (and reportedly the book), Burton's version mostly doesn't include it, or doesn't think it through when it does. Humans on the ape planet are not convincingly shown as deserving of any sort of parallel to apes on this one, regardless of Carter's line that maybe our apes never talk to us because they don't want to (couldn't tell if she was kidding). These humans speak English, same as the apes, and have whatever social skills the apes let them have. Any attempt to compare them to our apes is gonna stop dead as soon as your first ape starts throwing his feces at you. It's entirely possible (and has been widely speculated on) that the issue being covertly addressed here has nothing to do with animals but is a racial one. That doesn't really work either. The differences between humans and these intelligent apes are much larger than anything we see between humans in the real world. While the apes do seem to be divided into species-specific castes (gorillas are used as foot soldiers, chimps as administrators and generals, orangutans as merchants and fatcats), this doesn't really reflect any earth-bound (by which Hollywood usually means America-bound) racial realities, except for knee-jerk stereotypes only the simpleminded buy into. Additionally, everybody on the ape world seems to LIKE the caste they're in. Besides, even the seemingly obvious bits of satire (take the gorillas-as-blacks angle, since gorillas come from Africa and the most prominent one here is played by a black man, Duncan) fall apart under a little scrutiny (the next most prominent gorilla is played by an Asian, Tagawa). It is, however, interesting that all of these different species of ape can live together in apparently perfect harmony, singling out one species (the physically weak one) for exclusion. It's also interesting that when (unarmed) humans are running around the ape city, ape civilians are terrified of these comparatively weak humans. But nothing much is done with either of these. This movie does not "say" anything (other than some fairly obvious jabs at religious dogma) - it's pure summer popcorn entertainment. Nothin' wrong with that at all, but for sure, that's bound to crush some hopes. The story is not too terribly convoluted, post-climactic nonsense notwithstanding, and the characters are, with few exceptions, perfunctory. Wahlberg is inexplicably given a human love interest in the form of Estella Warren, who's a complete and total dead zone on screen. Why she's wearing lipstick when she's a freakin' cavewoman and she's being held captive by apes, I don't know. A bigger mystery might be why Wahlberg gives Carter a nice little kiss at the conclusion of the film, but Warren gets a big, tonguey one. Christ, I'd rather suck face with the ape. For that matter, all of the humans in this movie are pretty bland, making Leo's quest to get home a lot more interesting than his quest to, uh, take back the planet. The apes are a lot more fun, thanks in no small part due to the fact that whatever this movie lacks in terms of story, Burton certainly did his damnedest to make up for it with his visuals, which are damn hard to match. Granted, the once-promised love scene between Wahlberg and Carter does not happen, suggesting at least a little reining in; I don't think I would really have bought it if it had (the line between defending another species' rights and trying to have sex with it is not a narrow one), but it would've been something to see. The actors playing the apes are so splendidly ape-like with their walks, their expressions, and their personalities that the actors themselves disappear entirely. This movie works hard to make sure you forget there are regular humans underneath there. The makeup (Rick Baker, natch) is beyond reproach (except maybe Carter's), and those people playing the apes were reportedly meticulously trained to act ape-like in many ways; loping, swinging from the ceiling, hissing and yowling suddenly, seemingly unprovoked until we think about it for a second. Well, leaping through the air dozens of meters at a time is a bit much. Damn you again, The Matrix! Damn you to Hell! The production design is fabulous, expanding on the notion of a civilization run by apes in ways the original film could never hope to afford to do. Placing the apes at a level of development at about a par with medieval Europe (well, a democratic medieval Europe...that believes in evolution...) is a pretty neat idea (book? Original film? Don't remember.), though I would've liked to have seen an ape-on-ape swordfight. Still...apes in armor! How cool is that? The dialogue is nothing special, including non-gems like Carter's previously mentioned quip about apes on planet Earth, and (more!) Battlefield Earth-like lines where human clichés have one word replaced to fit this new dominant species (for example, Thade says "Extremity in the defense of apes is no vice." C'mon, we wouldn't have let Travolta get away with it if he said "Extremity in the defense of Psychlos is no vice", would we? It really does take an actor as good as Roth to deliver these lines without making you want to choke on your popcorn. There are some nods to the original film in the dialogue, some of which work ("Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty human!") and some of which don't ("Damn you! Damn you all!"). While things spiral down predictably (though enjoyably) into a big apes-vs.-humans battle at the end (and I didn't even mention the monkey messiah), it's the VERY ending which has people talking, questioning, muttering, crying, what have ya. People are trying hard to make sense out of it. But the movie's own makers admit that it's not supposed to make any sense. So...don't even try. The absurdity of it aside, I kinda liked it; it's like the flip-side of Arlington Road, and it's the only part of this movie which really fits Heston's "It's a maaaaaadddhouuuuse!!!!" hysterics in the first film. I can't wait to see the other four endings Burton reportedly filmed, sure to turn up on the DVD. (no, I don't own one yet, but if I don't by then, I'll mooch) Planet Of The Apes is not everything it could have been, but in the summer season, nothing ever is. It is, however, most of what it sets out to be - an adventure movie with a number of thrills, some laughs, and more awesome sights than you could hope to absorb in six viewings. It even has Heston himself contributing a cameo, the contents of which suggest that Heston may well have had a hand in writing that scene, unless Burton thought that was a clever gag...in which case, it was! I wouldn't quite say this is a check-your-brain-at-the-door movie (well, not always), but it's definitely a check-your-reverence-for-the-first-movie-at-the-door movie. A lot of what I've read dogging this movie is people comparing the two films as if they weren't different, uh, strains of ape (are there even any characters in common?). Such an approach does neither movie any favors. BACK TO THE P's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE