Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes Reboot Has the Pieces but Never Assembles Them

Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes arrived in 2001 as the sixth film in a series that began with Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel and the 1968 movie version. It is a remake, loosely based on Boulle, with a screenplay credited to William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal. It runs 120 minutes. It stars Mark Wahlberg as an astronaut who falls out of his own time and lands in a world where apes own humans.

The pieces were in place. The result is a movie that moves fast, looks expensive, and never decides what it is about.

Trailer, via Planet of the Apes.

Leo Davidson and the Oberon

The setup is the best thing in Planet of the Apes. In 2029, aboard the space station Oberon, Leo Davidson works with apes trained for space missions. His favorite is a chimpanzee named Pericles. A deadly electromagnetic storm approaches the station, and Pericles is sent out in a small space pod to probe it. The pod enters the storm and disappears.

Leo takes a second pod to find Pericles, though he has no authority to do it. He enters the storm, loses contact with the Oberon, and crashes on a planet called Ashlar in 5021 A.D.

That is a clean, hard idea: a man thrown far past everything he knows, and the station he left behind is the thing that beat him there.

Ashlar, Thade and the Gorilla Army

Ashlar is ruled by intelligent apes who treat humans as slaves. Leo meets Ari, a female chimpanzee played by Helena Bonham Carter, who protests how humans are treated. Ari buys Leo and a female slave named Daena, played by Estella Warren, to serve in her father’s house.

Leo escapes his cage and frees other humans. Limbo, an orangutan trader played by Paul Giamatti, sees them and is taken prisoner to keep him quiet. Then General Thade, played by Tim Roth, marches ape warriors after the humans, with his gorilla junior Colonel Attar, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, at his side.

Roth is the reason to watch. Thade is a zealot with a personal grudge, and Roth plays him at a pitch most of the cast cannot reach. Giamatti’s Limbo is a lighter, funnier turn, and the movie is better whenever he is on screen.

Calima and the Log of the Oberon

Leo finds Calima, the forbidden holy temple of Semos, the first ape, whom the apes worship as a god. Calima is the wreck of the Oberon. It crashed on the planet’s surface and now looks ancient. The computer logs show the station has been there for millennia.

Leo works out what happened. When he entered the vortex he was pushed forward in time. The Oberon, searching for him, was not, and crashed long before he arrived. The log also shows that the apes aboard, led by Semos, mutinied and took the ship after the crash. The human and ape survivors left the vessel, and their descendants are the people Leo has been running from and fighting alongside since he landed.

This is the movie’s best scene and its real subject: not ape versus human, but a mutiny that became a religion. Semos is not a god. He is a mutineer whose story got old.

A Remake That Took Years to Get Made

Development on a Planet of the Apes remake started as far back as 1988 with Adam Rifkin. His project nearly reached pre-production before it was canceled. Terry Hayes wrote a script called Return of the Apes that would have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger under director Phillip Noyce, with Oliver Stone, Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher producing. Creative differences between Hayes and 20th Century Fox ended it.

Chris Columbus, Sam Hamm, James Cameron, Peter Jackson and the Hughes brothers were all involved at various points. Burton was hired once Broyles Jr. had a script, and the film went into active development. Konner and Rosenthal rewrote it. Filming ran from November 2000 to April 2001.

That history shows on screen. Planet of the Apes plays like a movie assembled by committee and finished by a director with a strong eye and no fixed idea of what the story is for.

Here is what works and what does not, in order of how much it matters:

1. The ape makeup and the physical design of Ashlar. This is the film’s clearest success.
2. Tim Roth as Thade. A villain with real menace in a movie short on menace.
3. The Oberon reveal. The one scene that pays off the premise.
4. Paul Giamatti as Limbo. Comic relief that lands.
5. The human characters. Leo and Daena are written thin, and Wahlberg plays Leo as a man reacting rather than deciding.
6. The ending. It arrives without the weight the story has been building toward.

What Planet of the Apes Gets Wrong

The film has a plot and no argument. It sets up a world of ape masters and human slaves, then spends its second half on a chase. The chase is competent. It is also the least interesting thing the premise could produce.

Wahlberg is a real actor, and Leo should be the audience’s way into Ashlar. Instead he is a passenger in his own movie. He crash-lands, he escapes, he runs. The script gives him almost nothing to want beyond getting home, and the film never makes the audience feel the distance between the year he left and the year he lands in.

Burton’s visual instincts are not the problem. Ashlar is built with care, and the ape society reads as a place with rules and history. The problem is that the movie treats its own best idea — the Oberon, Semos, the mutiny that became a faith — as a twist rather than a theme.

The 1968 film had something to say about religion, hierarchy and the stories people tell about their own origins. The 2001 Planet of the Apes has the same material and uses it to explain a time paradox. That is a downgrade.

The film is not a disaster. It is a missed opportunity with a few strong pieces inside it, and the pieces that work are the ones Burton and Roth control. The pieces that fail are the ones the script was supposed to hold together.

Planet of the Apes runs 120 minutes and never feels long, which is its own kind of compliment. It just never feels necessary either.

Mark Wahlberg · movie review · Planet of the Apes · Sci-Fi Remake · Tim Burton · Tim Roth