Get Your Hands Off, Ya Big Gorilla!

By Elvis Mitchell

From The New York Times, 07.27.2001

This is not the summer for interspecies cooperation. In "Cats and Dogs," the prissy kitties fling ninja stars at their jowly canine foes while purring oaths of world domination. And in the new version of "Planet of the Apes," Capt. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is flung through a space-time continuum into the future to a planet where apes rule over humans.

There, simians like the gorilla soldier Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan) wear menacing army uniforms and growl, "Take your stinkin' hands off me, you damn, dirty human." By giving that line to Mr. Duncan, the mentally underdeveloped black victim-martyr in "The Green Mile," this remake of "Planet" shows a sparkling guile. The picture plays on the best-known image of Mr. Duncan as an embarrassing, shuffling child-behemoth and lays claim to one of the signature lines of dialogue from the original film. The director Tim Burton can offer a keen intelligence about racial humor.

The movie can be both a gas and distant, a toy sealed in its unbreakable box. It is remote and overly expositional for long stretches at a time, a slide-show tour of "Planet of the Apes." Mr. Burton veers between his usual course of portent and mockery, which can be glimpsed in the opening credits. There are close-ups of angry ape hieroglyphs and intimidating dark armor accompanied by a brooding overture by the composer and longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman; it's ominous with a hint of schlock.

The jokes and scares build to a lovely touch -- a swirl of stars dotting the skies reminiscent of "The Twilight Zone," whose creator, Rod Serling, was a co-writer of the script of the 1968 original. This starry expanse is being navigated by a spaceship, and there's a cut to the deliberately moving hand of a chimp working the craft's controls. It's revealed to be a space-ship simulator, and Leo is training the primate, Pericles, for an exploratory flight.

Mr. Burton, working with the screenwriters William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, allows for glimmers of wit and energy, and the film's first five minutes are a graceful sprint of entertainment and information; not a motion is wasted.

When the pod with Pericles is launched and lost, Leo jumps into another ship to rescue him. Swallowed into a nebula, Leo crash-lands on another world. Until this point, "Planet" has been partly a tease toying with expectations. When Leo thuds into the planet's jungle, a maddeningly intense chase begins. It's a literal manhunt, and in this brutal, swift sequence, gorillas stalk and capture fleeing humans. The gorillas scramble ferociously, all four limbs propelling them forward. They move close to the ground, hurtling like cannonballs. This is the most potent image in "Planet," with the gorillas thundering across the screen like a bad dream. It's another way Mr. Burton and his team plant their own flag on the new "Planet." In the original, the apes hopped, moving like marionettes. Here they're proud animals not trying to imitate human movement -- they vault around the rooms and bounce off the walls.

The proudest of them is General Thade (Tim Roth), a preening, vindictive chimp with ambitions to rule and do away with the compacts that govern ape society. "Declare martial law," he murmurs in a voice that implies how much wanton anger he's keeping in check; his larynx quavers with the effort.

The mercurial mixture of rage and disgust -- a trembling contempt -- is a brilliant conceit on Mr. Roth's part; he treats every social situation as if he's marking his territory. His turn complements a jarring cameo by Charlton Heston, star of the original film, who plays his father. Mr. Roth's flamboyant insouciance dovetails neatly into Mr. Heston's majestic hamminess -- a pair of alpha male animals vying for the light. Maybe it's just that the ape makeup humanizes Mr. Heston, but he's enchanting.

"Planet" creates a tension in the audience partly because of our expectations. The first "Planet of the Apes," perhaps the most ingenious sci-fi film ever made, was a landmark: the first B-picture with a major motion picture budget, setting a new tone for a genre synonymous with laughable chintziness. The movie was adapted from a first-rate allegorical novel ("La Planete des Singes") by Pierre Boulle, who used it as a way to slap around European class consciousness; the book is part Jane Austen, part Jules Verne and part Celine.

This new version tries to preserve the class warfare in the novel and to incorporate ideas from "Planet of the Apes as American Myth," Eric Greene's resourceful 1996 social analysis of the film and its sequels. Mr. Greene thoughtfully examined the racial politics that made the pictures both tough minded and slightly repugnant.

When Mr. Burton's "Planet" fixes on being entertaining as single-mindedly as the gorillas bearing down on homo sapiens, it succeeds. But the picture states its social points so bluntly that it becomes slow-witted and condescending; it treats the audience as pets. There's a faint air of absurdity in the coarse mix of satire and show-biz cynicism; this picture has as much ambition about conquering the box office as General Thade does in taking over the monkey planet.

The sometimes determined twinkle in Mr. Burton's eye exists in direct opposition to Mark Wahlberg's steely politesse. Mr. Wahlberg is a man of action who still carries the contradictions of a street kid: dark, inscrutable eyes framed by impish brows and a brawny, I-don't-need-nobody swagger that makes him a hip-hop Cagney. Surprisingly, his husky whisper can hit an empathetic high note of concern; he often ends a line with a plaintive "O.K.?" -- a vocal gesture like a comforting hand on a shoulder.

Like several other hip-hop artists turned actors, Mr. Wahlberg has mastered the fine art of underplaying. In movies like "Three Kings" or "The Yards," where the directors know how to set off Mr. Wahlberg's subtlety against the passion in the material, he's a gem. Mr. Burton is better suited to actors who need to set off sparks, like Paul Giamatti as Limbo, the wheedling orangutan who traffics in human slaves; he's W. C. Fields in mottled red fur.

Yet Mr. Wahlberg seems lost here, heroic but not in a particularly vital way. By depriving its hero of definition, "Planet" misses the brawny sexual forthrightness that Mr. Heston brought to the original. With his hip-first gait and broad-shouldered masculinity, he was the All-American Cro-Magnon who had got up on the wrong side of the bed. (In a lovably cheap irony, he was less couth than the apes, most of whom were doctors. The original "Planet," directed with old-school courtliness by Franklin J. Schaffner, embraced the ugly American archetype.) Mr. Heston's glowering impatience injected undercurrents of interstellar/ interspecies love that brought the movie to a boil; he sized up Kim Hunter in her chimp makeup as if she was freshly grilled mutton. Mr. Burton has always had a prepubescent fear of sexuality; here it translates into a film that's fit for 6-year-olds of all ages.

Substituting for Ms. Hunter, Helena Bonham Carter as Ari, a simian with a sympathy for humans, uses her vocal powers to convey emotion. She does a good job of it, since her makeup is a little rigid and masklike. Her mouth is well defined, though, as if she's wearing lipstick.

It's startling how much the apes' skin approximates the leathery textures of real simian flesh. The makeup designer Rick Baker has probably waited his whole career for this chance, and it was worth it in at least one instance. Mr. Roth's makeup is bewitching and by far the most effective in terms of articulation of movement and individuality. With a few exceptions, the others suffer by comparison. Not only do the gorillas all look the same, but they also sound just like Attar, which makes it hard to keep track of who's who in their army. But the menacing atmosphere of the monkey planet, with its dark, cave-like interiors designed by Rick Heinrichs, is quite distinct.

Estella Warren's Daena is at least given dialogue, unlike the mute human female in the first "Planet." She's not bad, though she's better at wounded, pouty looks. There are also a lot of heads turning theatrically toward the cameras, as if every scene had to have a shot that could be excerpted for the trailers.

This activity may be overly dramatic, but it's clear. Such a claim can't be made for the very last scene, a puzzler -- not to be revealed here -- that negates the glib, chest-pounding dramaturgy that comes before. "Planet of the Apes" has an extraordinary burden: it has to live up to the shocking denouement of the original film. This, too, will leave audiences talking -- they'll be muttering, "What happened?"

"Planet of the Apes" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has intense man-to-simian violence and vice versa.