When Hairy Met Silly

By Jay Carr

From The Boston Globe, 07.27.2001, Friday, Third Edition

In interviews, Tim Burton has been adamant about labeling his new version of "Planet of the Apes" a reimagining, not a remake. But reimagined is precisely what the new film is not. It updates the trappings of the 1968 film based on Pierre Boulle's novel about an astronaut who crash-lands on a planet where apes rule humans, but it's not as entertaining. Both films push off radically from Boulle's novel, although Burton's ending comes a lot closer than the 1968 film did. But it simply doesn't have the wit and panache the first movie had. The original film was campy but resonant with social themes in a time of civil rights struggle. This new version is little more than a screenful of heavy-metal political correctness.

In fact, it seems less like a reimagining of "Planet of the Apes" than a crafts-project version of "Spartacus." Dark, heavy, and underenergized, it pretty much strands Mark Wahlberg - figuratively as well as literally - in his hero role as an astronaut who finds himself leading a slave revolt against brutal simians decked out like Kiss wannabes.

This will not be remembered as the finest hour for Burton's neo-Goth sensibilities. The best thing about "Batman" was the way he made the dark, looming Metropolis the star of that film. It was an inspired projection of the fear and dread Americans felt about their cities in the 1980s. It's this kind of imaginative heft that the new film lacks.

Boulle's novel, although frequently referred to as a classic, is a startlingly mediocre piece of writing, with its ham-handed ironies about civilizations and bestiality, barely able to sustain its single inspired idea - a world in which men become the lower order of primates, and apes are, so to speak, top dog. In place of Boulle's smug earnestness, though, Burton gives us little more than a warmed-over sword-and-sandal epic, without the nimbleness of the original film - or its anti-racist subtext. What this new take also lacks, despite a screenful of handsomely crafted stygian visuals and elaborate makeup, is strangeness.

For a film that begins in space, with Wahlberg's ship in trouble, and spreads out over jungle and lava-covered landscapes, this new "Planet of the Apes" is strangely earthbound and pedestrian. Part of the problem is the flatfooted dialogue, which mistakenly has characters voice pieties instead of letting the message - about the oppression of the weak by the strong - speak for itself. The new film equates the humans in their loincloths much too overtly to African-American slaves. The more lightweight 1968 version limned the antiracist theme more deftly.

Helena Bonham Carter's simpatico chimpanzee has been changed from a scientist to a human-rights activist of privileged background. She sounds like a 19th-century abolitionist, insisting, against lively simian opposition, that humans have souls. Tim Roth's militaristic heavy complains of a human-rights faction nipping at his heels. And just as "Spartacus" had a slave dealer played by Peter Ustinov, this film has one played by Paul Giamatti, who, when he's in trouble, turns Rodney King's famous line upside down and says self-servingly, "Why can't we all just get along?"

Nor is space-suited Wahlberg spared. At the end, when it's time for the showdown, he says to the beleaguered humans, "All right, listen up, everyone - I've got an idea." By then, it hardly matters. The film has dissolved into self-parody, helped along by the fact that Wahlberg's character is only a standard action hero and fatally nice. Charlton Heston's astronaut, in the original film, was arrogant; you didn't mind seeing him get his comeuppance. (Heston has a cameo in the new film, as the heavy's aged father. Just as Kim Hunter's scientist stole the original, Bonham Carter, given almost nothing to play against, walks away with those scenes that aren't stolen by a bona fide chimp. In what amounts to the romantic lead, she gets most of the job done with her big brown eyes, which are filled with caring. One can only sympathize with Estella Warren, done up as a cross between a beach bunny and Sheena of the Jungle, only marginally less sexist in conception than Boulle's take on the human mate intended for the astronaut. The production design and art direction, drawing resourcefully on Asian sources, are eye-catching. But this new "Planet of the Apes" won't enjoy the long life and popularity of the first film. It's too psychically flat and dramatically inert. Instead of reinvigorating a Hollywood classic, Burton only takes it to camp.