Once again, a creative scion of our generation has proven that he can take a property from Hollywood's past, give it a new coat of paint, give it a script worthy of a grade school Christmas pageant, and hoist it to the top of Mount Mediocrity for all the world to see. Tim, babe, sweetheart, take a break. Read a book. You might learn something.
It might not be entirely fair to heap the weight of the problems with this "re-imagining" of Planet of the Apes on Tim Burton's shoulders. After all, this project was fast-tracked in order to make it the "blockbuster release" of the summer of 2001, thus denying it a few more months of post-production and sober consideration. Still, Burton is the captain of this ship, and it's obvious that despite his sporadically brilliant talent for bringing the weird and the whimsical to life, he's lost when it comes to handling the meat and potatoes of a serious science fiction/action film.
In the past, he's gotten help when he needed it (putting stylish bad-ass Ray Park inside the Horseman costume for Sleepy Hollow's action scenes, for example) but seems to have forgotten to do so this time around. Visually, this film pounds its chest like a gorilla. When it comes to story, theme, and characterization, it cringes like a lemur.
The new film opens in the year 2029, on the USAF space station Oberon,which appears to be in orbit around Jupiter. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is an Air Force officer training genetically modified chimpanzees for exploration missions in tiny space capsules. There are other human crew members, but they're essentially cardboard plot bait. The script gets off to an inauspicious start when command deck personnel start spouting wonk-tastic dialogue like "I'm picking up a frequency pattern" and "give me a radiation Gamma ray reading!"
A strange magnetic storm brews up in space near the Oberon,and a chimp is dutifully dispatched in his little Space Volvo to check things out. When the chimp vanishes, Leo is forbidden from mounting a rescue effort, but of course he has to get to that terrible planet of the apes somehow,so he heroically (cough, cough) steals a Volvo and zooms off into the storm. One time-hopping spaceship crash later, Leo is standing in a humid alien jungle. A herd of leather-clad humans runs past him and, without further ado, apes are jumping all over the place rounding them up. Bang, zoom, action! I guess slow tension-filled buildups to stunning revelations are only something they do in old Charlton Heston flicks.
What Works...
Okay, before we go any further, it's not allbad. I saw this film with my Better Half, and she's never seen the original. For those who haven't seen the original and don't know what they're missing in terms of characterization, theme, burning questions, and a script touched by the hands of Rod Serling, this "re-imagining" could prove a fun lightweight summer action film. Still, I don't usually like to qualify my opinions in such a fashion. After all, once you start, why stop? It's akin to writing, "I suppose this film wouldn't be all that bad if you were a totally witless space cadet with the cinematic taste of a week-dead goat." Of coursesomeone, somewhere, is bound to like any film and, as my Better Half was quick to point out, I'm a notorious cynic.
The Better Half and I were in agreement over the general look of the film- on a purely cosmetic level, it's a stunner. The city of the apes, as often seen from a distance, is a beautiful organic outgrowth of a massive hill. It crouches against the horizon, at once lovely and ominous. The jungle scenes are about the best one can expect from a soundstage, and the armor and equipment used by the apes is beautiful. The tents of the ape army are like life-sized scarlet origami, elegant yet functional.
All of this, though, is like a candle flickering beneath the sun that is Rick Baker's ape makeup. The prosthetics worn by the ape actors are masterworks, channeling rather than concealing the personalities of the people beneath them. Combined with the practiced simian mannerisms employed by the ape cast, they provide a solid, convincing reality that no computer effect could touch, and I applaud Burton for at least having the guts to employ mechanical rather than computer artistry to bring the apes to life. Just as the original film won a special Oscar for its makeup effects, this version deserves the highest accolades for its heraldic use of hand-crafted prosthetics in an age dominated by cheap CGI crap.
So, yes, at least the apes were worth a gander. I have to sharpen my knives for what comes next, though.
What Doesn't...
Mark Wahlberg has been a pleasant surprise to me, a disposable crotch-grabbing pop star who magically turned out to be a pretty good actor. I don't know what Burton's directions to him in this film were, but almost all of his lines are delivered in a quick, breathless hush, as though he'd just run a mile. His expression varies from "strained" to "squinty-eyed," and the sad part is that his is the best performance by anyone not wearing a layer of fur.
Frankly, the human cast of this film is abused on a deep narrative level. I get angry with films that don't even take the few seconds necessary to clearly identify the central characters by name, and this one is the worst perpetrator of that nasty habit I've ever seen. If you don't examine the film's website or some form of promotional literature, there are at least seven characters with bountiful screen time (both human and ape) whose names are simply lost in the general mess. I referred to some of them mentally as Blonde Human Love Interest (Estella Warren), Idiot Boy (Luke Eberl), Timid Bald Man (Erick Avari), Older Chinese Woman (Freda Foh Shen), Kris Kristofferson (Kris Kristofferson) and Loyal Ape Who Stays With Helena Bonham Carter's Ape (I honestly cannot match an actor to this character's name, even using the IMDB since it appears to be classified information). There are a few others that aren't worth the headache of research. The fact that most characters have cut-rate Star Wars names like Attar, Tival, Birn, Gunnar, Bon, Sandar, and Nado doesn't help a bit.
Lax characterization is where the film begins to annoy me, and nowhere near where it ends. Estella Warren (Blonde Human Love Interest) is supposed to be one of Hollywood's Next Big Things, but if she has more personality than a piece of driftwood, Burton takes pains to hide it from us. Essentially, she runs around in a spangled leather mini-dress and covets Leo Davidson from a distance because... um, I don't know, honestly. There is zero chemistry in their relationship, and I got the impression that a great deal of Blonde Human Love Interest's screen time was left on the cutting room floor. Furthermore, I don't recall seeing her close her mouth once in almost two hours... her lower lip is always hanging a good inch or two down, like she's power-pouting. Or maybe she's taking a correspondence course in sneering and the all-important final lesson hasn't arrived yet.
These humans are, much as I hate to say it, straight out of Battlefield Earth. Tim Burton is a master of the sensitive outcast and the fascinating eccentric, but watching him trying to deal with relatively normal people, even one-dimensional normal people with a good coating of starch, is embarrassing. The human cast hangs around the production's neck like a lead weight, an element criminally neglected by the director until it was too late to do anything about it.
Most of the apes fare better thanks to the personalities that simmer beneath them like warm coals. Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) is obviously wearing slighter, highly anthropomorphized ape makeup in order to humanize her character. Ironically, it makes Ari more expressive than any of the homo sapiens sharing the screen with her. General Thade (Tim Roth) burns with menace and coiled energy, but he is let down in a tremendous way by the sluggish currents of the film's utterly lifeless script.
I don't know who's most responsible for this flavorless piece of balsa wood, but it stinks. It's totally devoid of intentional irony, notable intelligence, subtlety, and philosophy. All of these elements have been so thoroughly excised that one could almost claim that somebody set out to purposely create a mediocre film and succeeded brilliantly. Thade is the script's chief victim- on almost every occasion where he should stand up and be the loud, cunning, and dangerous villain the film obviously wants him to be, his feeble lines manage to castrate his menace. Roth's superb body language describes a tightly-wound wellspring of lethal energy, but the dialogue he's stuck with gives us half an ape at best.
The crowning kick in the nuts is that the climax of the film actually borrows a second major plot element from thrice-damned Battlefield Earth. You guessed it- delicate contemporary era computer technology that sits around in a desert for a few thousand years and yet somehow works perfectly in the human race's Hour of Greatest Need. It's like a sick joke, a draft script written up on April Fool's Day that was somehow turned into a shooting script by accident.
As for the "startling twist" ending, well... at least it's not Steven Spielberg's A.I.
If you want a re-imagination of the original Planet of the Apes, I would bet my life that Gareth-Michael Skarka could cook up a better one for you if you gave him twenty bucks, a box of popsicle sticks, and an hour's time to prepare. If you want a limp-wristed action movie with makeup effects that it simply doesn't deserve, catch this at a matinee and bring something to bite, like a bullet.
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