Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre into the realms of excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 1 out of 5 Stars
This 2001 reboot of the Planet of the Apes series was directed by visionary director Tim Burton who previously worked on such well-regarded genre movies as the first two Batman films, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and one of my all-time favorite films Edward Scissorhands. So based on that, I don’t know how you explain what happened with this one, but then every director has their misfires I guess. The new Planet of the Apes draws little from the original 1968 movie and even less from Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel. Instead, we find Mark Wahlberg as an astronaut on a deep space mission who follows the test chimp he is working with through some sort of mysterious space storm that jolts him far into the future of a distant planet. There he finds that intelligent apes rule the world and that humans are kept like animals. Wahlberg’s character becomes involved with a human rebellion against the apes and ultimately finds that the spaceship that he had departed from had crashed on this planet thousands of years prior and that the other test apes had become the nucleus of this upside down society.
This Planet of the Apes remake had its origins as far back as 1988 when the original intention had been to do a sequel to the 1968 film with a descendant of Charlton Heston’s Taylor character leading a Spartacus-type revolt against a Roman Empire-like ape society. This story would go through multiple permutations and would find many directors attached to it over the decade that followed including Roland Emmerich, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson. At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was in talks to play the lead role in the movie (Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen were other actors considered as well at various times during its long journey to the big screen). After years of development hell, it finally landed in Tim Burton’s hands who did not want to do a remake of what had come before, but a complete re-imagining.
He had taken a shinning to the script written by William Broyles, but that would not fit into the $100 million budget that the studio had pegged for the movie and it went through several re-writes. Burton claims that the budget constraints (a paltry $100 million!) and tight shooting schedule (filming began in October 2000 and Fox wanted it in theaters by July 2001) hampered his ability to deliver the film he really wanted to produce. I have also heard that the studio regularly intervened with the production wanting to a keep tight control on the franchise. How much of each of these factors impacted the final product is hard to say, but the movie definitely failed to deliver a film that came close to comparing to the original (or even the most inferior of the Planet of the Apes sequels).
Burton’s Planet of the Apes basically just gave us a tepid re-imagining of the concept that offered nothing new and little better than what had come before than perhaps some more advanced special effects. Sure, the ape makeup was probably more realistic and I’m sure Rick Baker put all he had into creating this new version of intelligent simians. Put the original movies had already done a heck of a job with the ape make-up and had given us characters that have since become iconic in the genre. The new versions on the other hand did nothing to replace those permanently etched faces in our memories. And the story that the film delivered was plodding at best and often confusing, especially at the end (Burton claims that the end was actually supposed to be confusing to set up the sequel which never happened).
This movie actually did quite well at the Box Office, pulling in over $360 million vs. its $100 million budget, but it received scant praise from fans or critics. And ultimately, this one failed artistically because it tried to remake a movie that did not need to be remade. The original is a classic for a reason: it was well made and told a good Science Fiction story and it still stands up today. Sure, special effects have come a long way since the 1960’s, but the original Planet of the Apes did not rely on sfx that much beyond its makeup work, which was superior for a production of that time and still looks good when viewed today. When you go back and watch that movie, you do not imagine actors in makeup playing the roles of Zaius, Cornelius, Zira, and the others. Instead, they come to life as exactly what they appear to be, intelligent, human-like simians. Burton’s lackadaisical remake on the other hand had little life to it and quickly fades from the memory once the visual pyrotechnics disappear from the screen. This is yet another example of the need to leave good movies (can you even imagine a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey?) that Hollywood has yet to learn from. And ultimately, this movie holds little even in the way of curiosity appeal. Avoid it and go back to revisit the original movies. Even the lesser of those have some camp appeal. And we can only hope that Rise of the Apes, which hits theaters later this year, will not once again embarrass the franchise like this film did.
Buy the Planet of the Apes Movies on DVD from Amazon.com:
