| PLANET OF THE APES |
 2001 – USA
Director: Tim Burton - Reviewed by Tom
Davidson is posted on a starship as the "monkey keeper" in charge of training chimps to be pilots on dangerous missions (kind of like the early NASA space monkeys of the 60s). One of his student monkey pilots (hmmm...reminds me of some people I used to fly with!) is sent out to probe an electrical disturbance and vanishes. Davidson goes after him and also vanishes into the disturbance/time-warp/wormhole-thingy and crashes on a planet. He joins a herd of humans running by that are being chased by apes and of course gets caught, stuck in a cart and thrown into slavery in the ape city. One of the apes, Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), finds that Davidson is different from the other humans and sets out to rescue the group. The story pretty much follows the original Apes movie where they run from the apes, kick a bunch of ape-asses and blow up other apes with a secret device and "ancient human weapons". Our old buddy Charlton Heston even makes a cameo appearance in the movie as an old dying ape. If you can't pick him out, just listen to his spoken lines (if you have seen the original, you will spot him easily from what he says!). The time-travel part takes a nice twist from the original movie and give you something to think about. Kind of an interesting alternative to the Darwin theory—and I'm not talking about the "Darwin Awards" either! The ape effects were well done. I like how the actors even walked and ran like apes in kind of a bow-legged chimp fashion. Seeing large groups of apes running on all-fours with full armor was kind of interesting. It almost reminded me of the "always disturbing no matter how many times you've seen it" flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. The makeup was well done, without too much of the "rubber face" look from the original movie and was fairly convincing. I never figured out what role that blonde human girl had in the movie. They could have done without her completely since she had very few speaking roles. I guess they just needed some cleavage for the movie poster to pose next to Wahlberg; they never really developed much of a character for her. The movie was better than I expected and a pretty good adaptation of the original. The plot could have been a little more original, but what would you expect from a bunch of apes? |
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Planet of the Apes is a remake of the old 1968 Charlton Heston movie, with a similar plot but twisted
around in some different ways. Instead of Heston, the
2001 version stars Mark Wahlberg as Leo Davidson, the
off-course astronaut who crashes his spacecraft on the
ape planet.