Planet of the Apes (Remake)

Written 10 August 2001

Warning: This film review reveals most of the plot of the movie.

The original Planet of the Apes movies was arguably one of the best movies of it's time. Certainly most of the children and adults of that era can remember the famous line "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!" The costumes were incredible (for the era), the acting was very good and the plot was solid and well written. I clearly remember the chill that went through my teenage body when the Statue of Liberty was revealed at the end of the movie - it was quite a shock.  

The original movie deserves an A- rating, it's only real flaw being that it is a little slow in a few places. Sure, Charlton Heston overacted, but that's standard for movies of that time.

The remake does not do justice to the original by any means. In fact it's among the worst movies ever made.

Okay, so I went to the theater without expecting much - after all, this is a remake of an incredible classic. But I felt like it could be a good action flick, something to fill a hit summer afternoon.

The movie opened with a date, 2029 to be exact, and an exterior view of a large space station. I immediately felt disbelief - there is no way we are going to see this kind of technology in space in just 28 years. It just isn't going to happen. The station is very large (compared to our current space station), and apparently has some kind of artificial gravity (again, not believable for the time given).

I took a deep breath and thought, well, okay, I'll accept this just for the movie. After all, I could accept that Steven Segal was some kind of super-spy in Under Siege (or just about any other movie he's been in) and I could live with an Enterprise that seems so incredibly fragile that it cannot survive more than a few hits from another ship. Sometimes you've just got to let your common sense and intelligence go when watching movies, after all.

The idea of genetically engineering chimps was kind of cool and actually somewhat believable, but seemed somehow out-of-place on this space station.  What on Earth were they doing here? Of course I guessed most of the rest of the plot at this point - virtually all of it, as it turned out.

Okay, so the space station detects some kind of electromagnetic thingy which they want to investigate. The captain decides to send one of the apes (seems like a good idea to me) instead of a human. The ape is named Pericles. Spaceman (the hero, whose name is Captain Leo Davidson and is played by Mark Wahlberg) protests but is ordered to shut up (basically). Pericles goes out on this little ship that kind of looks like an electric razor (it's kind of silly looking, actually) and almost immediately gets into trouble. Spaceman violates orders and goes off after him.

By now I'm wishing that I'd seen some other movie or gone to the beach. First of all, the captain was so coldly callous about the ape that, well, I just didn't like him anymore. The Spaceman violated orders, and well, I have a hard time believing in expensively trained Spacemen acting as he did. The whole scene (which, by the way, is only a couple of minutes long) was done so woodenly and so coldly that I was hoping all of these people (including the spaceman) would die and save me from the remaining two hours of the film.

Take a deep breath now, I'm going to go fast. Spaceman and Pericles go shooting off into this electronic thingy. Ape ship disappears and spaceman crashes (kind of a cool effect, ripping through the jungle) into a lake. Unfortunately for us movie-goers, he survives. Not much suspense there, as what else could he do? There was some suspense in the original because there were several crew members - one or more of them could (and did) die. Spaceman obviously was going to make it.

Spaceman is immediately caught up in a "human-hunt" by apes and captured, along with Kris Kristofferson and Estella Warren. I loved Kristofferson in Blade, and the only thing disappointing about his performance in this movie (besides the lack of decent lines and a script) was it's shortness.

Where was I? Oh yes. They all get captured and transported to ape city. The city is cool (about the only cool thing about the movie) in that it's much more vertical than a human city - just about what you would expect from an ape city. At this point one of the primary weaknesses of an incredibly weak movie is revealed ... the humans can talk (the apes and humans both speak perfect English, by the way).

If you remember the original, the humans could not talk and really were not all that bright. In fact, it was quite understandable why the apes would consider humans to be animals - basically, humans were animals. In the remake, however, that's not true. Oh, the apes say they are animals and wonder if they have a soul and so on, but because humans can talk and create clothes and do chores ... well, it just does not make any sense at all.

Anyway, the humans are delivered to the only decent character in the entire movie. This is a wonderful ape (played by Paul Giamatti) who acts so deceitful, so delightfully two-faced ... well, let's just say that in this movie, he is entirely out of place. The guy can act ... and that's something that simply is not done in this film.

Moving along quickly again, a female chimpanzee named Ari seems to have a love interest for the human (yech, sounds perverted to me) and frees him and his friends at great threat to herself. They flee through the city, waking up all of the apes in the process. This is a totally meaningless scene - why didn't the silly humans just sneak out? Instead, they ran at full pace recklessly, making me wonder if the apes were not right about the lack of human intelligence after all. The only other decent actor in the movie (Kristofferson) gets killed, but the humans escape.

General Thade is in charge of the army, and convinces one of the senators that things are so bad as to declare martial law, which means Thade is in control of everything (martial law is declared for a half dozen escaped humans, who are considered animals?) Slightly afterwards, two of Thades soldiers approach him, saying they have found something strange. The general follows them to the lake where the spaceship crashed. When they turn their backs (stupid apes, didn't they read the script?) Thade kills them both. This didn't make any sense at all, since the apes worked for him.

Okay, General Thade returns to the ape city and visits with his father, played by Charlton Heston. Heston reveals that humans had powerful weapons and told Thade that the spaceman must be stopped. Thade says he will stop him, gathers up his entire army and goes off after spaceman and the others (some humans, Ari, a retired gorilla general named Attar and the deceitful ape). After some lame fight scenes, the humans find the ***holy ape thingy*** out in the desert. Oh yes, the fight scenes include horses - and it is never explained how in heck horses wind up on this planet.

The ***holy ape thingy*** turns out to be the crashed space station. It apparently followed spaceman, for no sane reason, into the electromagnetic whatever-it-was and crashed on this planet several hundred (thousand?) years before. In fact, spaceman soon discovers that the space station is the source of the apes and humans. It seems that the apes in the station revolted and killed all of the humans (really? where did the other humans come from?)

Let's look at this for a minute. The space station followed spaceman into the whatever-it-was in response to a mayday from, apparently, themselves. They crash on an earthlike planet. Now, this space station is most definitely not designed to land or crash or anything else on a planet. This thing would never get to the ground - it would burn up in the atmosphere fast. 

Apparently the word has gone out to the thousands of other humans on the planet, because all of them have arrived at the ***holy ape thingy***. Wait a minute? How did the word get out and how did the humans all get here so fast? Let's see, hmm, as far as I can tell, less then two days (at the most) has gone by since spaceman crashed. Yet suddenly thousands of humans appear on the scene. Humans who seem, for whatever reason, to believe that spaceman will save them from the apes. Yeah, right.

Spaceman tries to get them to leave, but the humans ignore him. After sulking for a few minutes, spaceman comes up with a plan. He has the humans hide behind the ***holy ape thingy*** and lures the ape army (which has followed him to this place) to the front. The apes are all knocked down by the engines of the space station, which spaceman has somehow succeeded in firing briefly.

A big battles results, which the apes almost win, except that, low and behold, Pericles (you remember the ape that spaceman followed) lands in his ridiculous space ship. The other apes get on their knees (except for general Thade) and claim Pericles is their savior.

Some meaningless dialog and fights ensue, and after a while Thade is locked in a room where he cannot do any harm (supposedly). At this point, I must admit that I honestly thought the movie was over and left the theater. I had some better things to do.

Much to my surprise, I later found out there is a few more minutes to the movie. Apparently spaceman took the little ship which transported Pericles back up into the electromagnetic thingy. Why? Who knows. Anyway, spaceman was transported in time again and managed to get back to Earth (in this little itty-bitty spaceship?).

Surprise, the Earth is inhabited by apes!

Oh yes, no explanation of this at all. The end.