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Reviews:
Struggle
for the (Tone of) Planet of the Apes
by Michael Flanagan
Wimpy
I have often been a fan of
Tim Burton films.
I loved Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
as a child, and I still enjoy its new meaning
and hidden jokes that I never understood before.
Beetlejuice is an absolute
brilliant farce about death, and about life.
Batman and Batman Returns
are great movie versions, but very different
versions, of a great comic book story.
I have never, however, been a fan of the
original Planet of the Apes movies, TV
show, or Saturday morning cartoon.
When I found out Burton was going to be
directing the re-imagining of these films, I was
intrigued.
Now that I have seen the result, I am
…baffled.
Plenty of “Burtonisms”
abound in this new version of Planet of the
Apes. The
entire ape village looks like Burton took the
dead characters from Beetlejuice and the
Joker’s henchmen from Batman, made them
apes, and set them loose in the jungle.
Apes sit around doing opium.
Ape kids play basketball, dribbling low
to the ground, because that’s how apes would
dribble. An
ape even has a little human marionette.
The technical people, like people-ape
trainers and make-up folks, have done an amazing
job. And
the ape village is clearly Burton’s world, and
it is, as expected, intriguing.
Unfortunately, due to the rest of the
plot, it’s also out of place and somewhat
stupid.
Mark Wahlerg has crashed on
this planet after going through a Star Trekkian
time warp while getting his monkey. How do we know he went through a time warp?
Well, if we haven’t seen the original,
we know because the time gauge on the ship shows
the years passing.
Thousands of years.
On the time gauge.
Anyway, by introducing Wahlberg’s
character to the plot, and the human oppression,
and the resulting revolution, Burton also
introduces a tonal shift that doesn’t work. While the first half of the film is full of these ape-people
reversal jokes, the second half is a dramatic,
action movie struggle of humans against apes,
mainly the stereotypical Thade, an angry little
monkey played by Tim Roth.
This section of the movie works on its
own, with the people trying to escape, the apes
chasing them, a forced crush-story with Helena
Bonham Carter (who is, as always, excellent,
even as an ape), comic relief lines by the
forced prisoner ape, and a rather poorly
delivered “Freedom!” speech by Wahlberg.
But after the farcical nature of the
opening, it misses its target.
And the ending.
Oh, the ending.
SPOILER, in more ways than one.
The original had Charleton Heston find
the Statue of Liberty on the planet and realize
the planet is an evolved earth.
Not so here.
It’s a different planet, but a ship
from earth that crashed there had apes, and they
evolved and populated the place, imprisoning all
humans. After
the battle is over and they’ve decided to just
get along, Wahlberg goes home.
He gets back to earth.
And crash lands in front of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington D.C.
And, well, let’s just say Honest Ape
isn’t a misprint here. The big surprise ending is an attempt at hitting the tone of
the first movies, with campy, funny plot-twists.
This one, though, doesn’t make any
sense, in any regard, whatsoever.
It’s not even in the same room as
making sense, and it’s barely in the door of
being campy.
And, like the movie, it
certainly isn’t good.
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Bollocks!
Planet of the Apes**t
by Christian De Matteo
Pathetic
First, the script sucked.
And from this pinnacle of suckitude,
sprang forth one massive suckfest.
William Broyles Jr. who usually does much
better scripts (like freaking Cast Away
and Apollo 13, two of my favorite films)
put together, for one of the most anticipated
movies of the year, a script so bereft of any
inkling of intelligence that nothing at all
could be done with it, save prettying it up with
billion dollar special effects.
But like a beautiful blonde with a shape
like an hourglass but an IQ of .5, the
attraction oh-so-quickly fades.
Any film that uses one scene (here, the
dinner table scene) to lay out with as little
subtlety as possible, its entire message agenda
using nothing but political taglines and clichés
from the last thirty years is doing nothing but
admitting that it has absolutely no worth and
nothing new to offer.
Now I have no problem with political
messages pervading Science Fiction efforts.
Sci-Fi has ever been a medium of
political parables and cautionary messages.
I give you Twelve Monkeys, The
Time Machine, and the original Planet
of the Apes as as three examples.
But do it right. It isn’t enough to say, “Our film is a reflection of
human society intended to open viewers’ eyes
to our own prejudices and stupidities so we’ll
get that all taken care of in one scene and then
provide eye candy.
No, that’s hack and I expect a helluva
lot more from the director of Sleepy Hollow,
a film that dealt brilliantly with the old
world’s transition into the new and how one
idea should never be ignored due to one
ideology.
But this time we get crap.
We get a cast of great actors given
nothing to do and are wasted. Ask yourself after viewing this, “Do I even know the Mark
Wahlberg’s character’s name?
Do I care?
Did I care about him in the least bit?
What the hell was the reason he was in
the film?”
And so the acting sucked.
One actor, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Snow
Falling on Cedars, Vampires) did his
damnedest, despite being utterly shafted by one
of the most anti-climactic fight scenes in film
history. He
still managed to be the only character to get
emotion across and to make me care about him.
Compare this to the waste of Kris
Kristofferson (who proved his worth to me in Blade)
who seemed to have been told to do two things:
Run and die.
And the editing sucked.
Did someone go out of his or her way to
make the holes in the plot big enough to fly the
Death Star through?
How the hell did all the humans across
the planet with no telephones or even newspapers
find out in a day’s time that Mark Wahlberg
was going to fight the Apes in the forbidden
area? Why
was Helena Bonham-Carter’s sacrificing herself
to Thade scene so chopped as to give a possibly
powerful scene no punch whatsoever?
I felt nothing when she was branded
because I didn’t even consider the scene part
of the movie.
Even the Charlton Heston scene—which
entertained me greatly—combined with the
excellent make-up by Rick Baker and effects
couldn’t lift this above the lowest dredges of Pathetic
for me.
This was insulting.
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