Planet of the Apes (2001)

Planet of the Apes (2001)

Dir. Tim Burton

Replace the image you have of Charlton Heston with Mark Walberg. Things are already bad, but they get much worse. Read on.

In an interesting first act, Walberg flies directly into danger to rescue his favourite space-chimp and, because no good deed goes unpunished in film, crashes in a studio backlot decorated with foliage. Soon after it becomes Marky Mark and the Monkey Bunch and the two-hour running time feels like ten hours.

The Ape City is more advanced than what we'd seen before in live action PotA films. Visually, it looks good (and the apes like to look good too, as evidenced by the barber shop). The resident kids even play basketball in the street! That's the kind of evolution we understand.

Co-star Helena Bonham Carter is the film's high point. She's the ape with a heart, the human-sympathiser, basically Zira's replacement even though she's named Ari. Because there's no Cornelius in the story this time, she's free to develop romantic attachments of her own choosing... but the less said about that the better. Trust me.

- Don't even go there. -

Supporting characters include Paul Giamatti as Limbo, a comedy slave-trader, and Tim Roth as Thade, an aggressive military leader with Napoleon complex. The latter is as predictable as they come, but is nevertheless the second most interesting character thanks to Roth's ferocity. He's plain evil in contrast to Helena's plain good, both of which sit far above Marky's plain boring.

- My agent is going to pay for putting me in this joke of a movie. -

It's a shitty film with a bullshit ending, but the make-up effects are fantastic, the costumes equally so, Elfman on score duties worked out okay, and 'the perils of intelligence is destruction' message is pretty clear. I used to think it was Burton's worst release; it was up to that point, but he's since made Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2012) and I'm not so sure anymore. The waters are very muddied.