'Apes' Remake Sorta Tame

By Jack Mathews

From Daily News (New York), 07.27.2001, Friday Sports Final Edition

Tim Burton's "reimagining" of the 1968 sci-fi classic "Planet of the Apes" ought to be titled "Planet of the Apes R Us."

It's a toy-store attraction, with an impressive line of lifelike primates - big, burly silverbacked gorillas, whimsical, bearded orangutans, cerebral chimps - and though these hirsute creatures think and talk, they don't think or talk about much of importance.

As a story, Burton's "Planet of the Apes" is more of a comic-book creation than either of his "Batman" movies. He has not just reimagined Franklin Schaffner's original film, which was a severe commentary on the folly of man in the nuclear age. He has taken the only thing he apparently liked about it - talking animals, how cool - and thrown the rest out.

Instead of a frightening allegory, we get an hour and 20 minutes of physical shtick (a chimp writing in her diary with her foot), easy role-reversal jokes ("How many times do I have to tell you, wear your gloves when you're handling humans!") and silly pop references ("The one thing you don't want in your house is a human teenager").

The only thread connecting it to the original - and to the 1963 Pierre Boulle novel - is the notion of a man being beamed into the future and crash-landing on a planet where apes are the dominant species and humans their beasts of burden.

Mark Wahlberg is Burton's astronaut, Leo Davidson, a headstrong Yank who abandons his mother ship to rescue a chimp in the 22nd century and ends up on a hostile planet run by apes in the 26th. With several moons in orbit, this is not Earth, but it's certainly a parallel comic-book universe.

The apes who rule this medieval kingdom speak mostly American English, though one - the gentle human-rights activist Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) - is obviously British. And their language is peppered with references to events that occurred on Earth way back in the 20th century.

"Can't we all just get along?" asks the frightened orangutan Limbo (Paul Giamatti), a slave trader and two-bit hustler who is easily the film's most interesting character.

The dramatic crisis in what is likely to be the first in another cycle of "Planet of the Apes" movies (the 1968 film spawned four sequels and two TV shows) has Leo, with the aid of Ari (who digs Leo in a way that could get him jail time here), leading a human rebellion against a simian Hitler known as Thade (Tim Roth, in a constant sneer).

This culminates in an interspecies, inter-god showdown, between humans who think Leo is their savior and the apes, who believe in a god who made them in his own image. Its wan religious allusions don't rise to the level of irony, let alone irreverence, but there are sparks of humor in it.

Typical of Burton's work, "Planet" is dark and visually fascinating, and makeup guru Rick Baker has upgraded the ape masks to include teeth and more lifelike lip movement. They still look like actors in makeup, however, so the "awe factor" is minimal.

In acting range, Wahlberg is more ape than any of the apes, and none of the other human roles has enough dimension to catch your attention. Paul Giamatti is a riot as Limbo, and though Bonham Carter gives love-struck Ari enough personality to light up the theater, her bestial flirtation with Leo creates the kind of sexual images that quickly turn a dream into a nightmare.

The scene-stealer, of course, is rifleman Charlton Heston, who returns 33 years after playing the astronaut in the original film to play a dying ape elder, repeating his famous last words from the first picture: "Damn them, damn them all to hell!"

That's exactly how I feel about remakes.