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planet
of the apes (2001) |
director
Tim Burton
screenwriters
William Broyles Jr.
Lawrence Konner
Mark D. Rosenthal
based on
the novel by
Pierre Boulle
producer
Richard D. Zanuck
cinematographer
Philippe Rousselot
music
Danny Elfman
editor
Chris Lebenzon
cast
Mark Wahlberg (Leo Davidson)
Tim Roth (Thade)
Helena Bonham Carter (Ari)
Michael Clarke Duncan (Attar)
Paul Giamatti (Limbo)
Estella Warren (Daena)
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Krull)
David Warner (Sandar)
Kris Kristofferson (Karubi)
Glenn Shadix (Senator Nado)
Anne Ramsay (Grace Alexander)
Lisa Marie (Nova)
Rick Baker (Old Ape #2)
Linda Harrison (Woman in Cart)
Charlton Heston (Zaius)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 119m
u.s.
release: 7/27/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other tim
burton films
reviewed on this website:
- big
fish
- charlie
and the chocolate factory
- corpse
bride
- ed
wood
- mars
attacks!
- sleepy
hollow
see also:
- planet
of the apes: the original series
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"Some of it is very much
me. Some of it isn't." That's Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton's
first Batman movie, referring to his armor collection.
Burton could point to his own collection, his filmography, and
say the same thing. Edward Scissorhands, for instance,
was very much Burton. Some parts of his bigger films -- Batman,
Mars
Attacks! -- are very much Burton, and some parts aren't.
Planet of the Apes would seem at first glance to be very
much not Burton -- a suit of armor that doesn't fit him.
But he wears it well anyway, and it's fascinating to see him
work on material that doesn't click perfectly with his gothic/carnival
obsessions.
I took the movie as a fine,
chest-pounding jungle adventure -- the sort of square sci-fi
epic Burton tries and, amusingly, fails to do straight. The soul
of this Planet of the Apes is illogic -- bursts of simian
passion, rage, fear, even lust: I will not soon forget the moment
when a seductive female ape gazes through a veil at her husband,
then leaps onto the bed with a thrashing mating call. Aided by
Rick Baker's astonishing make-up, Burton makes the apes more
distinct and, well, human than the humans ever are, and
I'm sure this is by design. As in the 1968 original and its four
sequels, we're meant to look upon the apes and see ourselves.
The actual humans in chains onscreen have little to do with us.
The new movie, which begins
28 years from now, follows pilot Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg)
as he pursues an off-course space pod containing his favorite
test-pilot monkey. Leo's pod crashes on a futuristic planet where
apes reign (in a heavily militaristic society, as in the earlier
films) and humans are slaves. The saturnine General Thade (Tim
Roth, swinging his shoulders and glowering) runs the army, meaning
he runs the show and would like to run humans into a mass grave;
his ideological opposite is Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), basically
Kim Hunter's Zira version 2.0, who detests the subjugation of
humans. She detests it even more when Leo is captured; she develops
eyelash-flutter whenever he's around.
This Planet of the Apes
is all about noise and chaos -- the unstable mix of intellect
and brutal will that's intended to mirror our own evolution.
The script, by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Mark
Rosenthal, is short on intellect and long on brutal will; whatever
ideas you take away from the theater are the ones you brought
with you. Nobody in the movie stands around debating the ethics
of, say, experimenting on human slaves or breeding them genetically.
Burton understands that the five earlier Apes movies already
did the furrowed-brow thing long past the point of relevance
(the series really should've stopped at the third one).
This director isn't a thinker;
he brings more of a painterly mindset to the franchise, letting
artists like Rick Baker, set designer Rick Heinrichs, costumer
Colleen Atwood, and cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot work their
primal, primate magic (Danny Elfman's flamboyant Wagnerian outbursts
complete the movie's epic flavor). So what if Burton loses interest
in the human characters? I for one don't blame him; the movie
isn't called Planet of the Humans, and they're not who
we came to see. Mark Wahlberg, that sincere, amiable, total blank
of an actor, is consistently knocked off the screen by great
actors in ape latex. Tim Roth, though mesmerizing in his relentless
combative spewing, is a little too conscious of playing a mean
motorscooter; I was more taken with Carter's avid, idealistic
Ari, or Paul Giamatti's cringing sleazebag slave trader Limbo
-- Giamatti could act with a bucket over his head and still rock
the house -- or even Charlton Heston in his belabored yet still
gotta-see-it-for-yourself in-joke cameo as Thade's dying great-ape
father, who gives humanity props for inventing guns (and the
NRA, one assumes).
Planet of the Apes is far from Tim Burton's best film,
but I don't think it's a sell-out or an anomaly in his portfolio,
as some have charged. Here you have a lavishly designed atmosphere,
in which the "freaks" -- the Other, the characters
we don't see when we look around us every day -- are the
clear focus, while humans take a back seat. This pretty well
describes all of Burton's films (think of how lifeless
Mars Attacks was before the Martians landed), and here,
at last, Burton puts his bias up front. He'd much rather play
with sets and latex than with bland, interchangeable people (a
contemptuous ape hilariously confirms this when he snorts that
humans all look alike) -- he's comfortable on this planet
where apes enjoy sex, drugs, and rock and roll (or their version
of it, anyway) while humans rot in cages. It's as if the misfits
of our world -- the apes in zoos, the monkeys experimented on
and shot up into space -- finally triumphed. The more you think
about it, the more Planet of the Apes seems very much
Tim Burton.
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