Too much monkey business (Planet Of The Apes [2001] (DVD))

Member Name: keeeels

Product:	Planet Of The Apes [2001] (DVD)
Date:	31/07/02 (17 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: visuals

Disadvantages: boring

STARRING:
Mark Wahlberg, Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Estella Warren and Micheal Clarke Duncan..too mention the big names


THE PLOT:
This is director Tim Burton's attempt to see if he can capture some of the magic which turned his dar, brooding, stylish 1989 summer event movie version of BATMAN into such a triumph. He claimed that the spin of PLANET OF THE APES is neither a sequel to, nor a remake of the 1968 original, but a "re-imagining" apparently!! Quite what this means I really don't have a clue, because ultimately this is a pretty similar tale of an astronaut (Mark Wahlberg) from the future who goes through a timewarp, crash lands on a weird planet where horrible English-speaking apes rule over enslaved humans, and spends the rest of the film trying to escape their clutches. Oh, he also gets be-friended by a nice goodlooking lady ape (Helena Bonham Carter) and a comely young human girl (Estella Warren).


WHAT'S RIGHT WITH IT?:
The whole apes ruling humans thing is a nice concept which enables the film makers to pull off a few amusing jokes (old bloke ape has a wig, young female ape likes shopping etc), and the visuals, effects and make-up feats are just about as good as you would have expected from a film with this kind of budget. The one slight exception is Helena Bonham Carter's strangely unconvincing get-up which looks like a rubber ape mask from a novelty shop. But she's so good that after a while her character becomes the most rounded, likeable and, yes, human figure in the film.


WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT?:
The lack of any excitment, tension, imagination, plot intrigue and character developement. Burton's planet turns out to be a dry, drab and deeply unsexy place where nothing ever happens. For some mystifying reason he and his fellow script writers have sapped all the verve out of the usually likeable Wahlberg, and turned him into a somewhat empty shell of a man.
The vague attepmt to involve him in some kind of romantic triangle is so flimsy they might as well have not bothered, and the would-be shock ending just doesn't make any sense.


LENGTH:
110 minutes


VERDICT/SUMMARY:
This was a big let-down, sorry to any big fans. Burton's creativity has been constained by trying to ensure it was a huge box office success that he's turned in the most drably conventional and uninvolving film of his career.

Summary: