"The Planet of the Apes"weblog| writing| reviews| flickr| Mothcast |
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Be warned - I'm going to spoil the end of this movie for you. In a way. In fact, I may just save it. You see, the end of Tim Burton's reworking of The Planet of the Apes is truly awful. Until the final scene, I was enjoying myself. Then my intelligence was insulted so massively that I came out of the cinema wanting to kick people. No doubt wanting something as poweful and shocking as the end of the classic original ("Damn them all to hell!" - Yes, Chralton Heston actually says that line in the remake. For no good reason, but there you go. He says it, and it's quite funny), Burton gives us a final scene wherein Mark Wahlberg's Captain Leo returns through time to Earth only to find it exactly like he left it, only - gasp! - it's populated by monkeys! Look! The Lincoln memorial commemorates the memory of General Thade (played with exuberant, deranged menace by Tim Roth)! Oooo-eee-ooo! Spooky, eh? Only not, because the rest of the film is set in the future and on another planet. How the hell do they explain that ending? They don't. It's utterly illogical, total nonsense. If the planet the rest of the film is set on is Earth, why have the Apes devolved to a semi-feudal system from a parallel 21st-century society? How come a dishonoured general of thousands of years hence is celebrated in a monument over a hundred years old? If they're saying that this is a parallel universe, it isn't even internally consistent, as there is no indication that the electromagnetic storm travelled through flips things into another universe. My advice? Leave five minutes before the end. Imagine that Cap'n Leo stays with the apes. It's a better ending. Anyway, as for the rest of the film... Well, as I've indicated, you have your Planet of the Apes timewarp plot device to propel chimp-loving space-jock Leo Davidson to, well, guess where? He is almost immediately captured by slave-hunting apes (bizzarely, two of the most senior military leaders seem to be involved in this somewhat menial task, but perhaps they like hunting humans, just to keep their paws in, like), and taken to their city - a vast, towering confection of trees and organic-looking houses, one of the few indications that you're watching a Tim Burton movie. From there, he finds a sympathetic ape (Helena Bonham Carter's Ari) who helps him and his newfound human chums escape, much to the annoyance of the psychotic Thade and oddly sympathetic brute General Attar. Blah, blah, ape politics, blah, blah comic sidekicks.. it's a very standard, though fairly satisfying, sort of "journey of discovery" plot from here, with apes and humans growing to understand each other in the handy microcosm which Leo builds around him. Some elements of this film shine. The production design is excellent, though lacking the off-kilter kookiness you'd expect from Burton. The script is frequently witty and papers over the convoluted plot-holes just enough to make them easy to bear. The makeup is light years ahead of the groundbreaking original - Rick Baker's designs look like real apes, really acting. Even underneath inches of latex, Tim Roth is marvellous as Thade. He, more than anyone else, seemed to have mastered acting like an ape, his facial expressions and body language telling us that, yes, this is a super-evolved chimpanzee, though his character is all human; barely-contained anger and paranoia punctuated with bursts of frenzied violence. Though Helena Bonham-Carter's makeup has effectively removed the expressiveness of Roth's, she still manages a heartfelt performance as the closest this movie comes to Burton's usual angsty, goth-lite protagonist. The humans, alas, fare less well. Mark Wahlberg is fine as far as it goes, but he brings little to the role of stranger in a strange land, playing it, essentially, as Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Estella Warren as the supposedly feisty "feral human" Daena is dead weight, completely forgettable. She pouts and sulks her way through the movie without once bringing anything useful to the plot. In the end, though, however hard the film works to entertain through its running time, it is far too easy to pick at the ludicrous inconsistencies and illogical plot points (How does an out-of-context pistol prove that humans are evil geniuses? Okay so the ship's nuclear power cells could last for millennia, but surely the wires connecting them to the ship should have rotted by now?) until you find the experience unravelling and leaving you with nothing but a bad memory of what should have been another fantastic entry into the Tim Burton canon |
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