With technology, 'Planet of the Apes' evolves into purer version
of
original
By Duane Dudek
From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 07.27.2001
"Planet of the Apes" is a hairy hoot in a monkey suit. It gets two
opposable thumbs up.
We had to wade through "The Mummy Returns," "Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider" and "Jurassic Park III" to get to it, but the best effects-
driven action film of the summer has just arrived.
It has in spades what those dumbed-down spectacles lacked -- narrative and
imagination.
Director Tim Burton neither reinvented nor re-imagined the 1968 cult film, although
purists -- and yes, they are out there -- will probably claim otherwise. His
take on the tale is faithful to the themes of the original even when it deviates
from the specifics. It's not like the Statue of Liberty sight gag from the original
could be repeated.
Burton and his screenwriters cook up a number of delectable surprises, including
a ham-fisted finale that is sure to inspire debate, and the irony coursing through
the spirited remake is an evolved descendant of the original.
This could easily have been a banana splat. Few actors are as uncharismatic and
impassive as Mark Wahlberg, here a human astronaut caught in an interplanetary
slingshot that sends him hurtling through time and space to, well, insert-title-here.
The incredible shrinking costume worn by Estella Warren, one of the feral humans
Wahlberg meets in this banana republic, makes Raquel Welch
from "One Million Years B.C." look like Lady Macbeth in a fur-lined
bikini.
The story is still as hokey as the earlier version, although arguably less so
today, an era when even "Cats & Dogs" wage armed combat. But the fun
in the new film is found in the technology, prosthetic and digital, that helps
the original vision of the 1963 Pierre Boulle novel -- which inspired the increasingly
cheesy film franchise -- finally fulfill its nightmarish
potential.
Burton's film owes as much to makeup artist Rick Baker, whose creations resonate
with physical personality, as to primate behaviorist Jane Goodall, for its sly
portrait of simian hierarchy.
The characters are a compelling and often comic rogue's gallery: a corpulent
Jabba the Hutt making monkey love to a trophy wife; chest-pounding, armor-clad
guerrilla warriors, headed by Michael Clarke Duncan; a shifty-eyed orangutan
slave trader, played by Paul Giamatti; and the ape military leader, played by
Tim Roth with athletic, teeth-baring malevolence. (Roth's father is played by
Charlton Heston, who was the human astronaut in the first film.)
The story sets up a parallel between apes Wahlberg trained as shuttle pilots
during his deep-space mission with the ruling species he encounters after his
accident.
On this planet, the humans are the animals. When Wahlberg is captured with Warren
and her father, played by Kris Kristofferson, he is saved from captivity by a
compassionate "human rights activist" ape played by Helena Bonham Carter.
Her attraction to him is the most blatant interspecies relationship since Kermit
the Frog and Miss Piggy.
His defiance turns him into the leader of the ragtag human resistance, but all
he wants is to go home. He should have been careful what he wished for.
The dialogue is peppered with camp humor and phrases from the first film, yet,
like Wahlberg's inarticulate speech to his human army, is disappointingly plot-driven.
The space scenes are sleek and antiseptic, and the planet scenes have the primeval
grit of a developing culture. The sense of impending doom is inescapable from
the first notes of Danny Elfman's ominously rumbling soundtrack. Burton apes
the operatic scale he brought to " Batman," the haunting atmosphere
of "Sleepy Hollow" and the genre-busting
quirkiness of "Beetlejuice."
His films have a distinct personality and an untamed point of view that make "Planet
of the Apes" the evolutionary superior of other monkey-see, monkey-do summer
blockbusters.
Planet of the Apes ***
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Estella Warren, Kris Kristofferson,
Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, David
Warner
Behind the scenes: Produced by Richard D. Zanuck. Written by William Broyles
Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal. Directed by Tim Burton.
