Clunky Monkeys

By Michael Sragow

From The Baltimore Sun, 07.27.2001 Friday Final Edition

The original Planet of the Apes (1968), like the source novel by Pierre Boulle, was a scintillating mix of sci-fi adventure and allegory that spawned four big-screen follow-ups, a live-action TV series and a Saturday morning cartoon show. Younger kids loved the talking apes on the mystery planet who lorded it over pathetic humans. College kids loved what they and Charlton Heston's astronaut antihero said, which replayed the slogans of the Vietnam- and civil-rights-era in simian drag.

The new Planet of the Apes will do tremendous business and spawn at least one sequel from people who will demand to know what, if anything, it means.

Not a remake but a jumbled revision that tumbles out as if from a pinata, this Planet of the Apes starts with a gentle example of the bond between man and ape. On a science lab in deep space, Mark Wahlberg's Capt. Leo Davidson trains a chimpanzee named Pericles to navigate a space pod into trouble spots. When Pericles gets lost in an electromagnetic storm, Leo throws caution to the stars and goes after him. He crash-lands on a planet remarkably like Earth, except that "lower" primates rule and humans cower before them.

Almost immediately, Leo becomes part of the wretched refuse fleeing from human-catching apes and delivered into the hands of a slave-and pet-trader named Limbo (Paul Giamatti).

This isn't your parents' Planet of the Apes. Remember how the rule of ape behavior in the old film was that an ape would never kill another ape? Well, it isn't long before the fascist General Thade (Tim Roth) breaks it with a brutal double murder. What's more, the humans aren't weak, mute or cowardly, only weary. The chiseled Karubi (Kris Kristofferson) and his daughter Daena (Estella Warren) lead a handful of heroic battlers who become legion as the legend of Leo grows.

Unlike the original book and movie, the apes no longer live in a stratified, ordered society where orangutans preserve tradition, gorillas enforce it, and chimpanzees press for intellectual exploration. Sure, there's still a stalwart and adventurous female chimpanzee, this time named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who immediately sees that Leo is a strange new sort of human. But the evil General Thade is a chimpanzee, too, and both Thade's champion and Ari's are samurai silverback gorillas, Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). And Limbo is one very seedy orangutan.

Director Tim Burton (Batman, Sleepy Hollow) plays with reversals of human and animal behavior, as the first movie did. He also confounds expectations of Planet of the Apes films. The originals were explicit parables of minority persecution and revolt in both the ape and human realms.

Yet here, when Limbo quotes Rodney King's admonition for us all to get along, it's the pathetic ploy of a wheedling con artist. And when Ari says that apes' treatment of humans reflects badly on apes, her statement is partly the reflex, radical-chic expression of an upper-crust ape gal's moral vanity. The result is intermittently amusing and exciting, but also chaotic and befuddling. Burton wants to create a camp epic. Too much of the time it's simply summer camp.

If there's anything uniting this movie's mad whirl of audio and visual wisecracks, it's the idea that one man like Leo, or chimp like Ari, can make a difference. Indeed, Bonham Carter is so fetching as Ari you hope that the moviemakers will go all the way and plump for inter-species romance between her and Leo the way Warren Beatty proselytized for inter-racial romance as a panacea for America's ills in Bulworth. (Daena has a few good moments shooting Ari's and Leo's envious glances.)

Paul Dehn, the original series' most frequent screenwriter, tried to have the second entry end with the birth of a half-human, half-ape child. "It was thought that Man-Ape miscegenation might lose us our G certificate," Dehn once said, according to Eric Greene's Planets of the Apes as American Myth. Apparently that goes for PG-13 movies in our gutless new millennium.

Without this unifying idea, and without the hammer and tongs structure of the original movie, Burton and his collaborators must rely on nonstop invention. What they arrive at is simian potpourri, equally indebted to Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and all five Planet of the Apes films.

Thade parallels Laurence Olivier's Crassus from Spartacus: This chimp is a proto-Nazi who believes that humans are nothing more than a virulent fungus on his planet. The funniest scene is an aristocratic dinner party in which one ape with a formidable wattle and his svelte trophy wife argue over the virtues of the city and the country. (Later, everyone tiptoes around the seething Thade.) They're like the Romans trading gossip while the slaves stew and burn in Kubrick's movie.

Unfortunately, Wahlberg's Leo is no Spartacus. (He was more of one in Three Kings.) He's unsentimental, which is a blessing. But he's fatally self-contained; only the other humans' knowledge that he dropped from the sky justifies their flocking to him as a leader. The movie should build in tension and terror as it moves toward a climactic battle akin to Spartacus or Zulu.

But the apes aren't even as shiver-inducing as Kubrick's crucifixion-happy Romans. The scariest movies always have scary ideas. In the first Planet of the Apes, the echoes of the Nazis' "scientific" experiments were genuinely horrifying. Here, General Thade's attitude is haughty and his goal nothing less than genocide, but his methods are plebeian. And he spends too much time doing military acrobatics in mid-air. Less of it would have been more; it's as if he's trying out for Crouching Human, Hidden Chimp.

This Planet of the Apes is a highly variable smorgasbord. Some of the key plot strokes are feeble, relying on stupidities like no ape ever thinking to wipe the dust off a fossilized space vehicle. At the same time, there are wonderful visions of gorillas encamped in red tents on white-yellow sands (Philippe Rousselot did the cinematography) and locking into rigid battle formation like ratcheted-up versions of the nightmare palace guards for the Wicked Witch of the West. And Heston contributes a delicious cameo that plays off his big-screen image as mankind's last best hope, while evoking his off-screen advocacy of the NRA.

At the movie's most decisive twist of fate, Burton should be praised for the use of a deus ex machina that works both figuratively and literally as a god descending from a machine. If only the director, or his deus, could have delivered us from the inevitable shock ending, which blends Darwin and Einstein with purest P.T. Barnum.