How dare director Tim Burton "reimagine" (he avoids the word "remake") theclassic 1968 film Planet of the Apes? It's a milestone in sci-fi history, a brilliant, many-layered social commentary, many Apes buffs would argue, and its timing and essence can never be revivified.
Actually, it's been more than ripe for reimagining for years. It isterribly hokey, it disses its source material, and its social commentary is atbest a hopeless hodgepodge and at worst a market-driven right-wing dissemblance.The more you think about it, the less clear it becomes what the heck it's about.
At first glance, it's an antinuclear polemic--except that in the first of thefour sequels by the same producers, within the series' temporally circularframework, the Charlton Heston character, Colonel George Taylor, the ostensiblevoice of reason, turns out to be the man who pushes the button.
Can we agree that the film is about animal rights? No, that doesn't quite panout, either. Although Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) is sympathetic to the humans, shemore crucially speaks for science; and on the Planet, scientific knowledge of thehumans is primarily advanced through experiments on their living brains.
Well then, it's about race, as Eric Greene articulately argues in his 1996book Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Okay, but what about race? While the film's sequels became a weird genre sidecar to blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s, the original could be interpreted either as a dark, Swiftian reflection on human inequality or as a dystopian vision of impending revolution (particularly if you buy into the premise that in the orangutan-chimp-gorilla hierarchy, the prole and military gorillas are coded representatives of African America). It's that second, prophetic reading that fueled the people-power sequels as well as, on the other side of the spectrum, the white supremacists who at rallies carried signs equating the apes with the NAACP.
But the picture as an indictment of racial inequality also is a somewhatrickety interpretation. Greene is convincing on the notion that the chimps arestand-ins for Jews--based on, among other things, the script's pointed referencesto quotas. (Co-scriptor Rod Serling inserted that element.) But the argument thatthe gorillas are stand-ins for blacks is iffy. With their On the Waterfront accents, they could just as easily be "read" as bluecollar workers.
Indeed, it's unclear whether blacks entered into the filmmakers' worldview anymore than women did. The only black human character, Taylor's fellow astronautDodge (played by Jeff Burton), is not only quickly killed off but also stuffedand mounted in a museum. And as Greene notes, the one attractive and presumablyintelligent woman, fellow astronaut Stewart (Dianne Stanley), dies and shrivelsup into an old mummy hag on the spaceship before the story really begins. Theother prominent female character, Nova (Linda Harrison, a former Miss Maryland),is a mute in an animal-skin bikini.
Maybe the narrative stew just had too many cooks for a coherentdish to emerge. For instance, Serling introduced the nuclear theme over theobjections of Pierre Boulle, author of Monkey Planet, the novel from which themovie was adapted. And while Boulle's book was widely seen as a meditation onhuman frailty and class consciousness, the film's producers at one point wanted toplay up Ape City as an example of a communist-controlled economy. For co-writerMichael Wilson, who had been blacklisted in Hollywood, Taylor's tribunal may havesignified McCarthyism, but then it's also often compared to the Scopes monkeytrial.
The conspiratorially minded could contend that the film's creatorscaptured viewers of all ideologies by tricking them into thinking that Apes is about their particular liberation when it is really about none. Regardless, the movie's appeal is surely as visceral as it is intellectual. Many of its elements are titillating taboo--bondage, voyeurism, exhibitionism, to name a few--but, in context, are presented as outrageous ("Madness!"). Audiences could have their cake and shun it too. As critic Michael Atkinson put it in FilmComment, "The miracle of the Apes films is that such complex textual issues dominate an otherwise preposterous manifestation of cheap trash culture"--and such a combination couldn't be "recaptured in expensive remakes, no matter how strenuous the effort."
Tim Burton's effort certainly looks strenuous--and the results,while mixed, are ultimately disappointing. His best choice was to dip intoBoulle's whimsically existential text, somewhat in terms of plotting but more interms of tone and visual imagination. Boulle indulges in wonderfully giddydescriptions of ape lovers walking through a park and then ascending into thetrees for greater intimacy, and of a scientific congress of apes clapping with allfour limbs. With the aid of top-notch makeup artist Rick Baker, stunt coordinatorCharles Croughwell, and movement expert Terry Notary, Burton brings similarimages to brilliant life. Production designer Rick Heinrichs has given Burton asplendidly varied visual playground to work in, too, contrasting claustrophobicjungles and ape cave dwellings of a civilized, organic grace with expansivedeserts and ripply volcanic wastelands.
With $100 million at his disposal, Burton has dressed everyone up, but the script gives them no place to go. Screenwriters William Broyles, Jr.,Lawrence Konner, and Mark D. Rosenthal have wisely chucked most of the unwieldypolitical baggage of the 1968 film. (Orangutans, chimps, and gorillas are nolonger segregated by class and position.) And there are bare pegs of a mildlyintriguing story about the self as simultaneous savior and destroyer of one'sworld. But instead of the richly searching fantasia they might have developed,the writers have come up with a clunky tale of good and evil, executed with anemphasis on mindless and repetitive violence. More terrifying than savage apes isthe thought of the millions of 10-year-olds who will clobber each other imitatingthem.
Burton's film is set in 2029, and the Heston role is now that of the somewhatdim and distracted-looking Mark Wahlberg as Captain Leo Davidson, who, whilepursuing a beloved wayward test-pilot monkey, crash-lands you know where. Hestonhas a much-hyped cameo as a dying chimp-sire whose legacy is a gun. The heavy isthe fabulous Tim Roth as the tic-ridden warlord chimp General Thade, sniffing andsnorting and literally bouncing off the walls with rage. The love interest,instead of Nova, is an upper-crust, radical-chic chimp named Ari, played byHelena Bonham Carter, whose mingled soft-spoken seductiveness and feralassertiveness make for a memorable performance. The native humans, now grantedthe ability to speak, might as well not have been, since all they do is gawkworshipfully at Captain Davidson.
The apes are mesmerizingly powerful. They thwomp, grunt, and screech their waythrough battles and elegant dinners alike and zing each other through the airwith crouching-tiger-hidden-chimp flamboyance. Unfortunately, they turn out tohave no other tricks--and the same is true of the film overall. There are therequisite campy allusions to the original and some nice visual, vintage-Burtonha-ha's (an old ape with a hairpiece and dentures, for example, and anymphomaniac chimp couple who bring sexual foreplay to, well, new heights). Butwhile offering some much-needed relief from the headache-inducing pummeling,these gags end up obscuring the dazzling uniqueness of the primate principals.
Though Burton could have done so much more, he only makes the point that--inthe words of Boulle's hero, Ulysse Mèrou--"well-trained animals might wellhave...become expert in all the human arts, including the art of cinematography."But because of thin summer competition, Planet of the Apes is a major hit (it took in $68 million the first weekend), with sequels and theme-park rides sure to follow. Burton has forgone the heavy-handed message-movieing of the original but--in emphasizing conflict over vision--has plunked down in its place an equally heavy-handed commercial bombast. If the purpose behind the 1968 film is irresolute, the goal here is sadly clear: a box-office killing.
