Rating:

A friend of mine recently alerted me to this news story and it got me to thinking: Have the movies taught us nothing? With so many valuable lessons to be learned from our onscreen heroes—and even from a few of the villains—how can we have failed so drastically to heed their warnings? Teaching monkeys to do math? A more frightening prospect I cannot imagine! As cinema expert Mike Nelson so eloquently put it, as soon as you begin to make your monkeys smart, “they’re going to cordon of great swaths of the planet and label them Forbidden Zones; they’ll start wearing strange leather ponchos and comb their hair like Paul Williams; they’ll build completely impractical white, blobby houses in a depressing Sixties Foam Home Style.” He couldn’t be more accurate.

Charlton Heston made all the dangers of intelligent apes clear to us nearly forty years ago (along with flashing us a glimpse of his supple backside). In our modern age, where the genetic engineering of hyper-intelligent talking beasts is as commonplace as the rising of the sun, we should be paying more attention to these teachings, not less! Why, then, have scientists discarded that valuable life lessons Planet of the Apes imparted to us? The only conclusion I can come to is that our current crop of scientists paid attention only to the 2001 remake of the film, and as a result are leading us down a slippery slope to our doom. If you can stomach it, let’s take a look at that version of Planet of the Apes and see if we can determine why everyone forgot that intelligent monkeys are a seriously bad idea.

Oh yeah, that’s why! Because 2001’s Planet of the Apes licks balls! I can’t believe I forgot! The movie starts with astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg, if you can believe it) following astronaut Pericles (Reeking, Lice-infested Chimp) through some cosmic space vortex or something and ending up on the titular planet (Apes, of the). Before he can get his bearings, he finds himself in the middle of a stampeding herd of humans, on the run from the apes who seek to capture them. Fortunately, he escapes, lives happily ever after, and the movie comes to a merciful close.

No, that’s not what happens. He’s captured, which means the movie can go on. Among the humans captured along with Davidson are a female named Daena and her father, played by Kris Kristofferson. It’s kind of interesting that Kris Kristofferson is in this movie. Other than that, nothing of interest happens for the next 105 years.

I’m trying to come up with something to say about this movie, I really am. But it’s hard. It’s just a complete turd of a movie (but with Tim Burton at the helm, should I have expected any less?). What, then, of note? Well, for starters, all the humans can talk. So while circumstances are certainly foreign to Davidson, there’s none of the complete isolation that Charlton Heston experiences in the original film. Further, his female chimpanzee savior is an established human sympathizer; she’s ready to help him and believe him from the word go. The gradual acceptance of the talking human and the casting aside of dogmatic beliefs ingrained for a lifetime that were present in the original movie through the analagous role of Zira are gone, and with them goes any interest we have in the story and the relationship between her and the humans.

Problems with this movie are almost too numerous to mention in anything less than encyclopedic length. There remains in this telling of the story virtually none of the social commentary that has made the 1968 version an enduring classic. The racism and mutual animosity between chimps, gorillas and orangutans is gone. The message that maybe humans shouldn’t blow themselves all to hell with bombs and warfare is totally absent; we all know by now that the “Planet of the Apes” in the original movie was actually Earth, and humans had come to be subjugated as a direct result of their actions, yet in this movie it’s explicitly stated that this is an uncharted planet. It’s said the humans were once masters of the planet, but nothing is said about what led them to fall or if they’re truly the same humans as we. There is a feeble attempt made to make a statement about animal rights, but it falls flat. The analogy doesn’t hold up because the humans in this movie are just as able as the apes. Although the original movie’s humans were animal-like, mute and savage, these are not; using them as pets and laboratory animals, then, is not akin to what we currently do with animals, but more akin to outright murder.

Peppered throughout the film are callbacks to the 1968 original. They come in the form of repeated lines and even a cameo by Charlton Heston. While these could have been used to good effect in a much better film than this one, instead they only serve to remind us of what we’re missing out on. The lines lifted from the original planet of the apes are taken from Charlton Heston’s mouth and twisted to come from the mouths of apes in what plays less like an homage than a desperate attempt to generate goodwill by bringing to mind that which we already like. Heston’s cameo is a pointless waste of talent. At this point, you’d be fully justified if you felt the need to let out an exasperated sigh.

And then there’s the ending, which serves as a giant notice to filmmakers with letters a hundred feet high reading “DO NOT END YOUR MOVIE LIKE THIS.” After Davidson flies away from the planet in a spaceship and back through the spooky cosmic vortex, he ends up crash landing in Washington D.C. where he finds that, surprise, everything’s all overrun by apes. Why? How? Nobody knows and nobody cares. It doesn’t track in terms of the story at all, and it’s tacked on merely as an attempt to top the twist ending of the original film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t top anything because it’s meaningless and retarded. Avoid this movie at absolutely all
costs.

THE SINGLE DUMBEST ASPECT OF THE FILM: An actual love triangle between two humans and an ape.
A DISEASE I WOULD RATHER HAVE THAN EVER WATCH THIS AGAIN: Crohn’s disease

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Friday of the Apes: Escape From Tomorrow
• Friday of the Apes: The Good Seeds
• Grindhouse
• Random Thoughts on a Couple Flicks