Are You With Us? Planet of the Apes
By Ryan Mazie
August 2, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Tim Burton is one of my favorite directors. His style is creative without being kitschy and his films usually always hit the mark, mixing quality with entertainment. A re-do of Planet of the Apes with him behind the wheel looks good on paper, bringing a darker aspect to a pretty dour plot. Unfortunately, what we end up with seems like filmmaking by committee. Nothing looks particularly Burton-esque, we are never sure who to root for, and motivations come and go. The result is Tim Burton’s most creatively bankrupt film yet. It looks even more pedestrian when comparing it to the Burton film it followed, the visually inventive Sleepy Hollow. This might be due to the fact that almost every single director that has made a $100 million grosser had been set to direct a variation of Planet of the Apes at one point or another (some interesting names attached were Oliver Stone, Michael Bay, Chris Columbus, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron).
The film stars Mark Wahlberg (I guess Johnny Depp wasn’t available) as an astronaut in 2029 who gets sucked into a space storm that spits him back out onto a strange planet about a thousand years later. To his horror, the few surviving humans are slaves to talking apes led by the dictator-like General Thade (Tim Roth). Seen as a savior from another planet to the humans, Wahlberg leads a resistance against the apes in hopes to find his ship and get back home.
A straightforward plot that offers little in twists and turns, Planet of the Apes is big-budget filmmaking at its lowest. The only bits of unpredictability are at the end of the film, but they are so haphazard and idiotic, that the movie would be better off not having them at all.
Wahlberg as an actor for me is either hit or miss. He seems to live or die by the screenplay. When he is working with strong material, he turns in grade-A performances (The Fighter), when he works with zilch, he sucks out all of the oxygen (Max Payne, The Happening). Here, he dutifully performs the role, although he could be replaced by anyone on the “it-actor” conveyor belt. Estella Warren, who experienced an immense amount of popularity for reasons as unexplainable as a planet of talking apes, is likewise just there on the screen without much to do in the other human role.
I enjoyed some of the action sequences, but in the end they all started to blur together and when the “Man vs. Ape” novelty wears off, the ending battle royale is quite frankly boring.
The only aspect about the film that is still with us is the make-up. Instead of using CGI, all of the apes in the film are human actors under heavy prosthetics that took four and a half hours to apply and an additional one and a half hours to remove … daily. Designed by Rick Baker, whose most recent work includes The Wolfman (which garnered him his seventh Oscar) Norbit, and Tropic Thunder, was robbed of an Oscar nomination for his impressive work. Nominated for just about every other award, Baker’s prosthetics are creepily realistic (or at least realistic in a Tim Burton sense). What I found most impressive about the make-up is that it is flexible enough without looking plastic-y to gives the actors room to make essential facial expressions.
Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s female muse who with whom he is in a never-ending engagement, delivers the best performance as the pro-human chimpanzee, Ari. Throwing in some monkey-mannerisms, she comes across the most authentic. Paul Giamatti throws in some comic relief as a sleaze-ball human trader, while Michael Clarke Duncan is threatening as Thade’s right-hand man.
Charlton Heston makes a brief cameo as an elderly ape, just reminding the viewer how far movie make-up has come.
However, spectacle can only get a movie so far. It needs plot and good characters to make it noteworthy (ie the entire Transformers franchise). With a reboot coming out, this film is not with us any longer.
Rushed on a timeline for a July 3rd release date, Apes missed that mark by about three weeks. Opening July 27th, Planet dethroned Jurassic Park 3 in its second week with much stronger results, having the second best opening of the year with $68.5 million ($95.2 million today). Critics ended up panning the hyped remake and audiences weren’t much kinder. The movie received some controversy amongst groups for its intense violence, although compared with today’s movies, it doesn’t seem that out of the norm for a PG-13 flick.
Collapsing by 60% in its second week (normal nowadays for an event film, but steep for a decade ago), Apes evened out and wound up with an impressive $180 million total ($250 million adjusted) and doubled that amount overseas. Budgeted at a surprisingly restrained $100 million, Apes was a success.
With a cliffhanger ending that even most of the cast admitted being unable to explain, a sequel surprisingly never happened. Maybe it had to do with Burton saying that he’d rather “jump out of a window” than direct a follow-up.
I think that a sequel would’ve been interesting given the set-up existing on modern-day earth. However, it was not meant to be. Thankfully, they took the set-up for the new reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Rise differentiates itself by using CGI to create the murderous monkeys instead of make-up. However, with much less hype and street credibility on and off screen, it is doubtful that Rise will see similar numbers.
So why is Fox so high on Planet of the Apes? Rich with source material from the Pierre Boulle novel, the 1968 original spawned four sequels that were released in a Saw-like fashion one year after the next and two TV series and TV movies.
Roger Ebert was right when he said in his review that in ten years, people would still be renting the 1968 original. Charlton Heston’s original still remains as the iconic Planet of the Apes, and I’d be willing to bet most people will recall that film rather than Wahlberg’s when sitting in the theater for this new CGI-monkey installment.
A must-see for anyone interested in becoming a Hollywood make-up artist, everyone else can pass. Even fans of Tim Burton will say that Planet of the Apes is nothing to go bananas over.
Verdict: Not With Us
5 out of 10