"Planet of the Apes"

It looks beautiful, feels menacing and features the luminous Helena Bonham Carter, but Tim Burton's remake is disappointingly conventional.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jul 27, 2001 | No one can make foreboding look more inviting than Tim Burton. The first third of his "Planet of the Apes" is like an invitation to explore a lost kingdom both more brutal and more civilized than our own, a place where china teacups comfortably coexist with shadowy, spiky suits of armor. Cruelty may exist here, but good manners are still king. All done up in glossy, muted browns and sepias, richly embroidered tapestry interiors and opium-tinged Victoriana, Burton's planet is unsettlingly primitive-futuristic, but also as redolent of vanished glory as a Roman coin. It's not a place built to suit man; apes, with their soulful eyes and unassailable dignity even when caught flea picking and butt scratching, are the only creatures that could possibly be in charge here.

Burton, with the help of master cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Rick Heinrichs, has built the perfect primate planet. But he doesn't know quite what to do with it once he has set it up, and that's the major failing of this "Planet of the Apes." Burton catapults us into a world we've never seen before only to use it as a backdrop for a rather conventional battle picture, complete with a venerated war hero and a ploddingly simplified St. Crispin's Day speech. Past the first third, "Planet of the Apes" is entertaining enough, but it stops far too short of being completely seductive.

Sometimes it seems that all it takes to fall in love with a Tim Burton movie, from the poetically tattered "Sleepy Hollow" to either of his brooding "Batman" movies, is to give yourself over to the look of it. But when he's at his best, Burton's twisted, kid-sinister sensibility goes hand in hand with his visuals. They become an inseparably entwined whole, like the gnarled, ancient branches of separate trees that have fused together over time.

But Burton's instincts feel somewhat constrained in "Planet of the Apes." There are too many times when you feel him pulling back, as if he were following orders not to make a picture that would seem too strange or alienating to audiences. The movie has some lovely twists in it, including a sly surprise cameo and a sequence in which a monkey "god" makes a special appearance. And it's definitely a Tim Burton movie -- you know it when you see a human child being dropped into a burlap bag by a gang of scary ape soldiers, a vision straight out of a 19th century European fairy-tale engraving.

But some of those touches feel a bit rote, and Burton doesn't know quite what to do with the extraordinary actor he has working for him this time around, Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg sometimes looks lost in the movie, as if he were overwhelmed by the magnificence of it instead of caught up in the spirit of it.

This "Planet of the Apes" is moodier and more menacing than the 1968 Franklin Schaffner original, although that picture has held up well over the years: There's a mournful contemplativeness to it, and the sequence where marauding apes round up the terror-struck humans who are trespassing on their property is still terrifying (partly because it all takes place in broad, cold daylight).

Wahlberg is Leo Davidson, an astronaut-in-training stationed on a research lab traveling through space, circa 2029. He works closely with the lab's live chimps and becomes distressed when one of them, Pericles, is shot out in a pod to investigate a space storm and disappears. (Anxious animal lovers should note that no great harm comes to the chimp; as for the apes on the planet -- well, that's another story.) Davidson disobeys orders and shoots off in another pod to rescue him.

After hurtling through a time hole in space, Davidson crash-lands on a planet run by apes, some of them very dignified (Senator Sandar, played with unflappable patrician grace by David Warner) and some very bloodthirsty (Tim Roth's General Thade, whose simian hissing and snarling make him the stuff of nightmares). Humans are the second-class citizens on this planet; they're rounded up by these damn dirty apes to be sold as slaves. Davidson finds himself captured and penned up with the lovely Daena (played by model Estella Warren) and her father, Karubi (Kris Kristofferson, in a role that's way too small for his down-to-earth classiness and winking good humor). The pair, in one of the movie's best visual jokes, sport matching his-and-hers flowing pale tresses.

Next Page: The heart and soul of the movie is a beautiful chimp

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