Planet of the Apes Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter
Director	Tim Burton
Year	2001
The Scoop	A remake of the old classic about a man who crash-lands on a planet ruled by apes and people are held as cattle-slaves. Everything visual about this movie looks fantastic, and the actors, especially for the ape characters, are amazing, but the story seems to throw itself into every pitfall it can find.
What it's worth		Second run (See it as part of a double-feature or at a dollar house.)

This Planet is based on the same general premise as the original movie from 1968. A man crash-lands on a strange planet that is ruled by intelligent, advanced apes, who subjugate people as their inferiors. That man, with the help of some sympathetic apes, escapes the life of a slave and sets off to discover the origins of the species.

The movie feels free to change things around, though: this is not a strict retelling. In this story, Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is a lone astronaut/pilot who heads for the forbidden beginnings of this bizarre world only because he's planning to hook back up with a rescue team and get home. The sympathetic ape is Ari (Helena Bonham-Carter), who has always been a "human-lover" and gets her way a lot because her pop is an important senator.

Leading the apes who would rather wipe humans off the face of the earth, starting with this upstart man from the sky, is General Thade (Tim Roth), a vicious and cunning fellow who sees the chance to slaughter scads of humans as just a bonus to his plan to gain power.

There are two things that are stellar about this movie. The first is the makeup work. Rick Baker, who has been proving his genius in makeup ever since King Kong and Star Wars, shows that he's nowhere near the bottom of his bag of tricks yet. The host of well-known actors under the monkey makeup are so well-hidden it's almost impossible to identify them. And yet - and this is the most important job of makeup - the actors can express a near-flawless range of emotions and reactions.

The second outstanding part of this movie are the two ape leads, Bonham-Carter and Roth. These two take the premise of becoming ape-people and sink their entire mannerisms into it. They walk differently, sniff and touch differently, and then take those changes in two totally different directions: menacing for Roth, earnestness for Bonham-Carter. Even their two seconds-in-command (Michael Clarke Duncan and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who are mysteriously gorillas instead of chimpanzees, relish their roles and infuse their characters with a little bit of both human and ape.

The movie's two greatest strengths, though, combine to draw attention to the movie's biggest flaw. The humans are boring. Wahlberg's Leo is stoic and a good military type, remote and mission-oriented. The planet's humans are almost across-the-board so busy being downtrodden and scared that they practically disappear into the scenery. In this movie, the apes have become "human" (including with Earth sayings and quotes), and the humans have become... nothing. In a better movie, maybe they would have become animalistic? Maybe they would have started using their ingenuity, the one thing the apes still lack, for some crazy scheme for freedom?

Nowhere is this imbalance more obvious than in the almost-love-triangle between Leo, Ari, and the human woman whose name, according to the credits, is Danae (Estella Warren), but she had so little screen time or action that I didn't even know if she had a name. In the pre-movie press, quite a bit was made of downplaying any sexual tension between Leo and Ari. (Why, that would smack of bestiality! horrors!) But the tensions are impossible to hide - the two characters are fascinated with each other. In theory, Danae was also smitten with Leo, which could have made for some interesting conundrums for Leo, including exactly what would be bestiality. But Danae does so little more than look at what's going on, and Ari is so captivating, that the triangle is more like a tricycle with one broken wheel.

The faults must lie with the writers and with the director, Tim Burton. Burton's movies always love the strange, the unusual, the outcasts. Usually his villains are cardboard cutouts who are villains because they deride the different. But in this case, the cardboard cutouts are the humans, the people we're supposed to be identifying with.

The writing wasn't all bad: in particular, there's a lot of humor in the beginning as we get to know the apes, who give their own versions of common phrases and expressions we know. But the film slows down in a big way in the middle, and at the end, the plot twists don't fool anyone. In the theater where I saw this movie, the audience was laughing at events two minutes before they happened, because we all could see what was coming. They included a massive deux ex machina that gives a batty resolution to the conflict between Thade and Leo.

If the humans had been as interesting as the apes, this movie would have been out of the ballpark. But instead, it's lopsided and lumbers through the second half. The parts that are good are still very worth the viewing, but only when you're willing to sit through the parts that don't reach as high a mark.

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