Starring:Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Kris Kristofferson
Director:
Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, Big Fish)
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for some sequences of action/violence.
Release Date:
July 2001
Synopsis:
After flying through a space worm hole, astronaut Leo Davidson crashes on a planet where simians rule over humans. Aided and abetted by a sympathetic chimpanzee, Leo leads a small band of rebels against their captors.
My Two Cents:
I can’t remember how old I was when I watched the original version of Planet of the Apes, but it blew my mind. It was depressing as hell, but I could tell it was a great movie and that not all movies had a happy ending.
This is a movie that didn’t need a remake, but there was a brand new generation of movie lovers that had only heard about the Planet of the Apes series, but not actually watched them. Tim Burton was the man chosen for this project and instead of a remake he decided to do a reimagining of the series. He made it his own, but kept the essence intact.
The movie starts out in the year 2029 with astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) aboard the spaceship Oberon training some chimps to complete space missions too dangerous for humans. A big-ass electromagnetical storm approaches and the astronauts sent out Leo’s favorite chimp, Pericles, to study it. Pericles gets sucked it and disappears from radar. Leo goes after him but is also sucked in and sent hundreds, maybe thousands of years in the future to an uncharted planet ruled by apes, where humans are the animals. Leo has no idea of what’s going on, but tracks a signal from the Oberon. It seems that his friends are already on the planet looking for him. Now all that stands in his way to freedom is a giant army of killer apes. Nothing Mark Wahlberg can’t handle.
Spoiler Alert!
It’s first unclear if this strangely familiar-looking planet is Earth or not. There is vegetation, water, English-speaking humans, and horses. No other planet besides Earth can sustain humans, and the planet where the original movie takes place IS Earth. However, some scenes in this remake reveal this planet has two moons, so the Earth idea is discarded.
The signal Leo was tracking did come from the Oberon, but it was a wreckage of it that crash landed centuries ago in this strange new planet. It seems the Oberon crew went after Leo but were caught in the electromagnetical storm and were sent to the same planet, but in the past. The chimps that were onboard slowly became more and more hostile, eventually going apeshit and killing the humans. The chimp leader was called Semos, an anagram of Moses. I don’t remember seeing gorillas and orangutans inside the Oberon, so I have no idea where those variations of apes came from.
All sort of things happen from ape on ape to ape on human action. Leo “liberates” the humans and forms sort of an army of his own. The apes corner the humans at the Oberon crash site and the ultimate showdown ensues. During the mayhem Pericles wormholes his way to the ape planet and the apes mistake him for their savior, Semos. When they see him hug Leo they assume they had been mistaken in treating the humans like slaves and the war is over. General Thade (Tim Roth), leader of the ape army, has other plans though. He tries to kill Pericles but ends up being locked behind a glass door operated by a fingerprint-reading device inside the Oberon. All the apes, including his most powerful soldier, Colonel Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), now hate him. Basically, he’s fucked. Leo then climbs into Pericles’ pod and travels back to Earth to the year 2130, roughly 100 years after he left, only it’s not quite the same. It’s infested with talking apes. Goddam it, more fucking apes! They have replaced the humans as the dominating species and have all our technology.
The original novel written by Pierre Boulle ends in the same way, and the ending was not explained. We have to assume Thade somehow managed to win back the ape’s trust and somehow invaded Earth to enslave humanity, as Leo’s ancestors did to his. But, how did he reach Earth? Where there more pods besides Pericles’? Well, there was the pod in which Leo came from, but that’s under a lake now, so only humans could get it out. And even then, it was heavily damaged. Maybe Pericles knows how to repair it. The Oberon ran on infinite nuclear power and all of mankind’s electrical data was stored in Oberon’s computers. Hmm, maybe Thade accessed this info and learned humans are not to be trusted after all. These computers also had the results of all the ape studies and technical details of their training and missions, as well as the coordinates of the electromagnetical storm.
OK, so Thade arrives at Earth, now what? How will he start his revolution if he’s the only talking ape there? He either brought more apes with him, in many different pods, or somehow made new apes on his own. It would have taken too long to enslave humanity, so it must have been centuries by the time Leo returned to Earth to find apes running the show. Thade is shown wearing Lincoln clothes in the Thade Monument in Washington D.C., so we can assume Thade arrived at Earth in the late 1700’s or early 1800’s. Fast forward 300 years and you have a planet ruled by apes, with humans either in zoos or exterminated.
The problem with this theory is that if Thade and the rest of the apes conquered Earth and enslaved humanity before the year 2029, then the Oberon mission would have never taken place, thus Thade would have never been born. You know, forget trying to understand it and just enjoy the costumes, make up, sets and Kris Kristofferson’s hair.
Sadly, the film was a critical failure, but it was a fair success at the box office with earnings of over $350 millions worldwide. It had a gorilla-sized budget of $100 million dollars, though. Burton would have made a sequel but he and 20th Century Fox had a bad relationship throughout filming and the movie wasn’t received as well as everyone had hoped. That’s too bad, because I liked it and really wanted to find out what the hell was going to happen to Leo. Damn them all to hell!
Score:
Trivia:
- Mark Wahlberg joined the film after meeting with Tim Burton for only five minutes. He was so anxious to work with the director that he agreed to play any part.
- Michael Clarke Duncan had sprained his ankle during filming and was forced to go to the hospital in his full gorilla makeup.
- Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan) says to Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), "Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!" mirroring the original line from George Taylor (Charlton Heston) ("Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!")
- Linda Harrison, who played Nova in the first two films of the original five-part series, appears as a caged human in this film.
- Charlton Heston, spokesman for the NRA, is one of only two apes on the planet to own the same gun, which was passed to his son, Thade, upon the death of Heston's character, Zaius.
- In 1995 Oliver Stone was attached as director. In addition, in 1997 it was suggested that James Cameron (who hated this remake) would direct, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
- Mark Wahlberg refused to go shirtless (or wearing the loincloth Charlton Heston wears in the original film) because of his history as an underwear model.
- In order to star in the film, Tim Roth declined the role of Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001).
- Thade's Father's last words ("Damn them! Damn them all to hell!") are an obvious reference to the Planet of the Apes version of 1968. The last words that Taylor, who is also played by Charlton Heston, screams at the end of this movie are: "Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
