**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham-Carter, Michael Duncan Clarke, Estella Warren, and Kris Kristoferson
Directed by Tim Burton & written by William Broyles Jr., Mark Rosenthal, and Lawrence Konner, from the novel by Pierre Boulle
2001 PG-13
There’s a scene fairly early in Tim Burton’s version of “Planet of the Apes” in which a group of primitive humans on the loose are hunted and captured by their ape overlords. In a dazzling array of stunt work the apes leap from trees, run the humans down, and otherwise pounce on them from out of nowhere. This is a far cry from the physical simplicity of the original film, in which the humans flee into the tall grass and the apes harvest them with nets. The newer scene is technically more impressive, but is neither as memorable as the original, nor does it capture the original’s nightmare image. We are too swept up feeling like we’re supposed to be awed by the action and the special effects to notice the ideas behind them. The new film could be described in the same way, if it were an all-out action picture. Unfortunately, it’s not that, either.
Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” doesn’t know quite what it wants to be. There are plenty of good things about it; the movie looks fantastic. The make-up used to instill ape faces on human actors puts to shame everything being done with computer animation. The apes are as unique and expressive as the human actors beneath them, among them Tim Roth of “Pulp Fiction,” “Rob Roy,” and “Reservoir Dogs,” Helena Bonham-Carter of Franco Zefferelli’s “Hamlet,” and Academy-Award nominee Michael Duncan Clarke, to name a few. Watching them do just about anything is fun. Bonham-Carter, as the good ape, is cute and engaging until the action stuff reduces her to just running around. Roth, as the baaaad ape, is nothing short of frightening, with the kind of militaristic intensity that shuts down the rational part of the brains of everyone he’s yelling at, and into that intensity he sneaks one or two gentle moments. The production design, including the garb of the apes, both civilian and military, is above reproach, and the vine-coated villages, nestled in so many tall trees, look like a good place to take a vacation. But the story doesn’t know where to go.
And the story is: Mark Wahlberg’s lost astronaut is lumbered from place to place, not as quickly as in a pure action film, and not as slowly as in the more thoughtful original. He crashes on the planet of the apes, is enslaved, frees himself and several others, and fights the apes. This is the same story as the original, only some details have been altered.
This could have been a movie about ideas, about the social implications of evolution, about the relationship between humans and animals, about our responsibility for them in exchange for eating them and caging them and putting needles into them. Genesis says God gave us dominion over everything on the Earth, but does the Earth have a right to turn against us if our dominion turns to abuse? The apes in both films are aware that humans have the potential for greater viciousness, but little discussion is made in this new version. It’s not that the film is intentionally shallow, but it feels more accidental, as if the filmmakers felt that touching on the ideas was the same as delving into them. The same shallowness is applied to many other aspects of the story, including how the humans on the ape world live, or how the humans in Wahlberg’s future world live. The film’s science, shaky as it is, is mostly glossed over, as if we’re supposed to lift wormhole-time warp mumbo-jumbo from other sci-fi films and apply them here wherever necessary.
I wish I could say “the ideas are passed over to make way for explosions and chase scenes.” But that’s not the case. There’s action in “Planet of the Apes,” but not enough to qualify it as a pure adventure. There’s some humor in the film amongst the apes, as they behave somewhat cartoonishly, and I would have settled for that. If “Planet of the Apes” had no ideas and was simply a big silly adventure about a plucky astronaut trying to survive among alien apes, I would have enjoyed that if it were done well. There is certainly evidence here and in Burton’s other films—like, say “Batman”—that this could be pure adventure. I could see Burton doing a good job if there were a tight plot with thrilling chases and clearly-drawn characters, silly one-liners from cartoonish apes with the astronaut playing the straight man to the zaniness, all surrounded by utterly implausible science, along the lines of “The Mummy” from 1996. Wahlberg moves from scene to scene as a square-jawed action hero, the kind that would have no time for philosophizing—he’s ready to hit the overdrive and plunges straight-faced from one death-defying stunt to another—but he seems adrift when the apes begin to wonder about whether humans have souls.
So with what are we left? Something in-between that looks really good and is acted well, at least by the apes. The throttle never kicks in enough to be a solid adventure and the ideas aren’t dealt with enough for it to be a thinking picture. What’s left is entertaining for the most part, a mild adventure with a slightly disparate plot, assembled more tightly than “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” but not nearly as tight as “Aliens.” The ideas are there, but not there at the same time, and not even as present as in “Artifical Intelligence,” which misses its own point but is still thought-provoking. Burton should have picked one direction and stuck with it instead of relying on the production design and make-up.
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