Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.


It is not every director that has such a unique style (good or bad) that you can recognize their work as theirs. If we had a new movie, director unknown, there are surprisingly few (maybe in the neighborhood of 15 depending on one's familiarity with movies) directors who might have done it, such that we would be fairly certain we could unmask them. It probably shouldn't be that way, but it is. Tim Burton, however, is a director we would know.

A large portion of what sets Tim Burton apart from the mass of directors is that his movies are mainly quite odd. Dark, disturbing, and simply far removed from the ordinary, Tim Burton's movies are often moving, and they are often movies that no one else would have made, or at least no one would have made in any way similar to the way Burton made them.

Surprisingly, Tim Burton's credits are actually rather few. In fact, the early days of Tim Burton find him as an uncredited animator working on 'The Fox and The Hound', 'Tron', and 'The Black Cauldron'.

His first few directorial efforts were pretty 'small time', until he made 'Frankenweenie', which was actually still small time, but rose to a certain cult status. Despite the success of 'Frankenweenie', he was relatively unknown when he made 'Pee-Wee's Big Adventure', and let's face it, he was relatively unknown after he made it. The truth is, proudly proclaiming yourself as having directed these two movies is not going to get anyone to throw a 100 million dollars at you.

But then we got 'Beetlejuice', and we really got a good look at Burton's darkness, and people liked his style. Someone noticed that 'dark' seemed like something that would work if you were making 'Batman', and another gig comes to Burton. A gig that really got him attention, and a movie that a lot of people thought he did wonderfully. Then came 'Edward Scissorhands', and suddenly everyone knew his name. Whether you thought it was great or garbage, everyone was talking about it.

After that we got: 'Batman Returns', 'Ed Wood', 'Mars Attacks', and 'Sleepy Hollow'. All the while, some thought he was getting better, some thought he was getting worse, most thought he was either a genius, a bit of a nut, or both, but all the while he was cementing his style.


Now, why all the babble about Tim Burton? Well, because I like most of his work. I don't think there's anything truly great about any of it, but I like it, and at least he has a bit of a different way of doing things. He is, obviously, pretty odd, and many people say that follows from being a genius. Myself, I think he's just pretty odd. Most geniuses, so they say, are a little weird, but it doesn't follow that all weird people are geniuses. Nevertheless, I thought I should give a little preamble to what I am going to say, which is that Burton has now lost his mind.

If you want to see what happens when Tim Burton believes the hype, and says, 'I am Tim Burton and I can do any fool thing I want,' get a copy of 'Planet of the Apes'.




I have long been a fan of the original movie (it's nothing exactly great, but it's a good movie), and when I heard it was being remade, I was glad to hear it. When I heard Tim Burton would be directing, I was glad to hear that too. At least, I thought, we wouldn't get some shlocky, nothing of a remake, where what we mean by 'remake' is simply 'reshoot'. When I heard Mark Wahlberg was going to star in it, I was thoroughly disappointed. Has no one caught on to the fact, I screamed at myself, that this is Marky bloody Mark of work with the god blessed Funky Bunch??? Imagine my incredible annoyance and chagrin, now that I have to apologize to Mr. Wahlberg, and must forever onward say things like, Has everyone forgotten that he directed Planet of the sodding Apes????


The story, as modified from the original, is actually somewhat interesting. Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is a pilot aboard an exploratory space vessel of some sort. On this spaceship there are a variety of simians which are trained to pilot smaller space pods in order to make sure unknown situations are safe, whereupon the human pilots can go do some real exploring. When a certain simian, which Captain Davidson considers a friend of his, is lost while flying one of these pods into an electromagnetic storm, Davidson goes after him. He, naturally, becomes lost himself, and he crashes onto a planet where the apes are running things, and humans are kept as slaves.

Basically, it becomes the same story as the first movie, with our hero bringing the humans together to fight against the apes, and so on and so forth. In this version, we learn that Davidson's ship (the mothership if you will) crashed on this same planet while looking for Davidson, only they apparently did not make the jump into the future that he made, and the variety of simians from the ship gave rise to the civilization that now exists. Not bad. What's more, these apes (some of them at least), know where they come from to a degree. Also, not too bad. Couldn't really happen, but not too bad.

In the movie, our major to do type ape is the leader of the military, one General Thade (Tim Roth). It seems General Thade is a direct descendent of the first leader of the simians that escaped from the crashed spaceship, and this line of apes has passed on the knowledge (no this doesn't actually make sense) of humans, and coming from space, and whatnot. Thade, of course, is among the most anti-human of apes, and takes an immediate dislike to Davidson.

As counterpoint to Thade, we have Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who is a sort of human rights activist among apes. Ari soon joins up with Davidson and a small group of humans he has freed.


For about the first thirty minutes there is some hope for this movie. Our hopes are quickly dashed, however, as this movie simply can't figure out what it's doing, or where it's going, and it never gets out of the gates. Once we get ourselves onto the planet, things go south quickly. Burton seems to have grown overly accustomed to comic-book movies, though I must say he could make my comic-book movie anytime. Most everything that happens within the city of the apes is just like watching a comic-book. It would be true genius if that was what it was supposed to be.

General Thade is a character engulfed in ridiculousness. Of course, we are given this idea whereby General Thade has his position largely due to his lineage, but it's hard to accept. Where we have an enlightened side to the ape society, the military seems... well, very apelike. Very macho, with much beating of chests, and basically being rather tough, and things happening because I am bigger and badder than you. Meanwhile, General Thade is, with very few (mostly female) exceptions, the smallest ape in the movie. Not only that, by and large, even the military things seem to be driven by rational thought when at all possible, and Thade is the only one who truly goes (pardon me) bananas and jumps all over the landscape, screaming and hooting. How, one has to wonder, does anyone take him seriously?

Throw into the mix the fact that the apes have apparently been watching a lot of Kung Fu movies, and they fly through the air, jumping fifty feet or more at a single bound, smacking in mid-air, bringing to mind certain scenes from (among other things, of course) 'Big Trouble in Little China'. Bringing to mind that movie particularly because of how stupid and out of place the whole business is.


It is actually difficult to articulate all the ways in which the movie is awful. As one would expect, the movie progresses to the final stage where we have an entire horde of apes battling the ragtag group of semi-barbarous humans who have come together under Davidson. After a briefly hopeful counter by Davidson using the engines of the crashed mothership as a weapon, the apes come full force, and are quite obviously going to slaughter all the humans.

This is no good, of course, and in one of the most true to form examples of deus ex machina seen in modern times, another space pod comes down from 'heaven' and lands right in the midst of the fighting. Inside, and it is presented in a somewhat dramatic fashion as though there were some chance we wouldn't know who it was, is Davidson's monkey who went out at first. The apes see this as the second coming of the ape they worship, and this gives way to the apes (apart from Thade) looking at the big picture, and listening to Davidson's explanation of what happened, and general cheeriness and much rejoicing, and none of it makes any sense.

Now, not everyone will know what deus ex machina means. There's a reason for this. It's really, really stupid (In fact, it now practically means just to do something really, really stupid). It's a term that comes to us from Greek playwrights, mainly Euripedes, and it all started when writers basically ran out of ideas, and God (or some God) simply flew down when things were getting rough and resolved all the conflict. It is now used much more loosely and generally refers to any highly implausible trick that comes out of nowhere to solve whatever problem our protagonists might be facing. It is used in the loose version now because no one is stupid enough to do such a thing as make the literal version of the term useful, until now.

Even this, however, is not good enough for Burton. You think that's stupid, Burton laughs at us from the other side of the screen, wait until you see the real ending. Once our small primate has brought Davidson a fairly intact pod, he takes it and makes his attempt to go home. He climbs in, finds the storm in space, blasts through it (thus going through time precisely to the year he was in... you might think this would be some anomaly or such, but Davidson has it down to a perfect science), and then sets a course toward earth. He approaches home when for some unknown reason (except perhaps that only a monkey can actually land one of these things without crashing) he crashes into earth, right up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Only it isn't the Lincoln Memorial, it's the General Thade Memorial, and as the authorities surround him, they are revealed to be apes in police uniforms, driving cars and riding motorcycles.


There are several explanations for this ending. Unfortunately, none of them really follow any logical chain, except that Burton has lost his mind. What Burton means to say by this ending is simply, 'Listen, next time stay home and send me a check for $10.' There is simply no sensible way in which this ending can have meaning relating to the film, and really, the ending of the film may just as well have shown Mark Wahlberg walking around to Tim Burton's trailer, and walking in on him counting a big pile of money. At which point Burton looks at the audience, points, and starts laughing maniacally.



Not everything about the movie is bad though. Mark Wahlberg is actually not bad at all. I may have to take him semi-seriously in the future. Putting on even a mediocre performance in the midst of this utter shlock would be impressive, and he came in somewhere above mediocre. Paul Giamatti (Duets, Saving Private Ryan, and for some fool reason Big Fat Liar) gives us a pretty interesting, or at least a thankfully distracting performance, as the slave master ape who gets caught up on the wrong side of things. Helena Bonham Carter does pretty well, but the ape on the side of the humans (see Roddy McDowell) is an important character, and she is a bit lacking. However, blaming an actor for anything in this movie is going a bit far beyond any sort of fair play.

The makeup and special effects are exceptional, and Danny Elfman is certainly the man you want doing your soundtrack.


The movie as a whole, however, is entirely bad. I would give the movie no stars if it were possible, but I accept leaving the one star based on the fact that if you turn the volume off and try and pretend it isn't a movie at all, you can see some nice effects and, in general, some nice visuals.


Everything about the movie is either 'way too...' or 'not nearly enough...'

The 'civilized' apes are too civilized compared to the military apes. We have no explanation for the existence of humans on the planet at all, especially considering we are given to understand that when the apes initially rebelled, they killed everyone. Of course, explanation is meaningless when you're making a movie that is just inherently ludicrous. We might have some explanation for the human problem, if anyone bothered to give it to us, but it would mean that some of the humans from the initial crash escaped and while the apes were evolving, the humans were (for no apparent reason) de-evolving, which doesn't make much sense anyway. But, at least there could be some explanation. In a movie that ends in a way that defies any attempt at explanation, I suppose this isn't seen as a problem.

The movie never makes any attempt to 'let us in', and moreover makes every possible attempt to push us away, and it succeeds in that respect. One ridiculous thing after another bombards us, and at any point that we might have about five minutes where we think we might be able to get in, something else pops up to slap us back out.

Apes, for some reason, are deathly afraid of water, because in all their evolving they have never learned to swim. In fact, they are so afraid of water that when Mark Wahlberg is running away from them, across a river, he is literally only a few steps into the water when the apes stop pursuing them. The idea seems to be that they are afraid of drowning, but apparently they are afraid of getting wet at all. Ummm... okay.



This movie has caused many people to ask the question, 'Can an ending completely ruin a movie, and/or take away all it's value?' The answer is yes, but the question is simply misapplied here to begin with. This movie is ruined by its beginning, middle, end, and everything else. It had no value when it got to the ending, and it had not merely one stupid ending, but two!




Now, on the plus side, the DVD has a pretty interesting feature. You can turn on this smashing little feature, whereupon during the course of the movie this little symbol will appear alerting you to the fact that you can press a button on your remote (simply the enter button on mine) and you will cut away to explanations of the special effects relevant to that scene. This struck me as rather odd actually, being that there is no other way to get to this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the special effects. It also seemed a rather distracting option, but it turns out that these little cutaways are a welcome break from the movie.


Not only do I not recommend this movie to anyone, I don't recommend any apes be unfairly exposed to, and for that matter I would keep it away from cats, dogs, furniture, rocks..........................

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD