Planet of the Apes (2001) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Please welcome, Marky Mark and the Monkey Bunch!

The 2001 Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes has a lot of what makes the franchise so much fun. Unfortunately, the film feels like a flop especially with the convoluted ending.

First Impressions

An astronaut crash lands on a planet that is populated by apes that can speak. He eventually discovers a group of humans that live a very simple lifestyle outside the ape cities, in the desert. There is much action and stunts shown in the trailer for this remake of Planet of the Apes.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In an orbit near Jupiter in 2029, the USAF Space Research Station Oberon is using primates in space vehicles to examine an electromagnetic storm. Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) sends a chimpanzee named Pericles out in the Alpha pod. When it encounters the storm it disappears. Defying orders to do nothing, Leo gets into Delta pod and launches to recover his missing ape. He too encounters the storm and is sucked through a vortex, crash landing on a planet, where he is caught in a stampede of primitive humans being pursued by apes in armor led by Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), a gorilla.

Leo and the other humans are taken back to Ape City where orangutan slaver Limbo (Paul Giamatti) buys them for his auctions. General Thade (Tim Roth), a chimpanzee, takes a small human girl for his niece. The branding of the humans is interrupted by a chimpanzee named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) who purchases Leo and a human female, Daena (Estella Warren). Ari feels that humans deserve better treatment than they get. Two gorilla soldiers show Thade where Leo’s spacecraft crashed. He kills them afterwards to keep the offworlder a secret.

Leo, now working as a servant in Senator Sander’s (David Warner) house–who is also Ari’s father–stages an escape, taking Daena and Tival (Erick Avari) with him. They find the other human captives, which include Daena’s father Karubi (Kris Kristofferson), and free them all. Karubi is killed in the escape, but Ari and her father’s other servant, a gorilla named Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), assist Leo and the humans to flee the city into the wastelands.

Leo takes them to his crash site where he retrieves a tracker from his pod that directs him towards his ship, the Oberon. Limbo tracks the group, but is captured by Leo, forcing the slaver to escape with them. Thade uses the “kidnapping” of a Senator’s daughter to enact martial law. He visits his father (Charlton Heston, in an uncredited role) who tells of ancient days when Semos, the first ape, was a slave and the humans were masters. He produces an ancient gun as evidence of the secret past of the apes that is unknown to the public.

Leo leads his group past Attar’s army, crossing a river that the apes are afraid of, into Calima–the forbidden area. The astronaut’s tracker leads them to a crash site, which turns out to be Oberon, but it’s too old–a thousand years maybe. Inside, Leo discovers that the apes call this Calima, due to the dirty signage that said, “Caution Live Animals.” Somehow the space station crashed in the distant past when it encountered the electromagnetic storm. Semos was an ape on board that staged a revolution and escaped, which led this world to create new factions of apes and man.

Thade and his armies attack, but other humans have arrived from the wilderness to follow Leo. A big fight ensues, killing many on both sides. Suddenly a bright light appears overhead. It is the Alpha pod, which lands with Pericles inside. Many apes believe this to be the second coming of Semos and bow. Leo traps Thade in the control room, gives Pericles to Ari for safe keeping, and jumps into the Alpha pod to return home. He travels back through the electromagnetic storm and crashes on Earth near the reflecting pool in Washington DC. When he looks at the Lincoln Memorial, the statue of Abraham Lincoln has been replaced by a statue of General Thade. Ape police officers arrive and draw their guns on him.

“It doesn’t matter: apes, humans, your planet, my planet, the universe seems only to reward cruelty with power.” – Ari

History in the Making

Planet of the Apes is not the first remake covered on Sci-Fi Saturdays. The mid to late 80s had a revival of material from the 1950s including (but not limited to) The Fly, The Blob, and Invaders from Mars. This was still a time that audiences appreciated updates of some older, sometimes campy, material. These remade films also had the benefit of modern visual effects to tell their story in a more realistic way. By the time Planet of the Apes was released in 2001, computer graphics and makeup effects had reached a new level of realism that allowed for almost any idea to be created in film. The popularity of recreating these older films (at least with the studios) seemed to continue with at least one remake per year for the foreseeable future, including the remaking of films that had no business being remade–some of which will be covered on upcoming Sci-Fi Saturdays.

But getting a big budget film such as Planet of the Apes into theaters, from a large studio like 20th Century Fox, is never as easy as it seems. The film was originally conceived as far back as 1988 with Adam Rifkin attached to direct, and the story being a sequel to the original 1968 film. Ignoring the four 1970s sequels is similar to the way that the Halloween franchise ignored intervening sequels for both Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) and Halloween (2018). This sequel would have been called Return to the Planet of the Apes, and featured either Tom Cruise or Charlie Sheen in the lead. Unfortunately, a turnover of executives at Fox just days before the film was to start pre-production changed the direction of the film, eventually bringing in Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to work on a new script draft. By the early 90s the script was altered entirely with Oliver Stone producing and Terry Hayes writing.

This newer version of the film would have featured a geneticist (to be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) named Will Robinson (uh, already things are crossing franchises) who discovers that a plague killing humans is a “time bomb” from the Stone Age. He then “time travels with a pregnant colleague named Billie Rae Diamond to a time when Palaeolithic humans were at war for the future of the planet with highly evolved apes.” According to one producer, “Terry [Hayes] wrote a Terminator and Fox wanted The Flintstones.” The film continued through various drafts and directors including James Cameron and back to Peter Jackson, before eventually landing with Tim Burton. Burton was interested in revisiting the world of the previous films, but not a direct remake or sequel. That is seemingly what this film offers. On first watch, it appears to be an updated remake of the original film, but fans of the Charlton Heston film will see minor differences. The ending creates an entirely new take on the WTF twist of the original, but reveals that Leo was never on Earth to begin with. The biggest twist is that Planet of the Apes turns out not to be  a remake, but the first reboot in modern filmmaking. This is when the filmmakers go back to the source material and try making the movie again from scratch. It has become a popular tool in reinvigorating franchises, like Star Trek, and more often superhero films like Superman and Spider-Man.

Genre-fication

There’s no doubt that technically this 2001 version of Planet of the Apes is superior to the 1968 version. The visual effects are the primary driver of that argument. The elements of the Oberon space station, and the space pod shots are as good as any other film of this era. There is a sense of modern/futuristic technology at work. Another update is the ferocity of the ape characters. Some excellent stunt work showing the creatures leaping high and far, as well as being able to fling humans around–showcasing their strength, is also on display. Visual effects presumably allowed for the stunt rigging to be removed. This film also just has more apes on the planet. Some scenes show legions of soldiers, no doubt cloned with some creative editing and visual effects. In all, this version just feels bigger.

However the most amazing achievement of the film is the modern makeup appliances worn by the actors portraying the apes. John Chamber’s work designing the original ape prosthetics set the standard for many make-up effects professionals for decades. One of the people he inspired was Rick Baker, the craftsman responsible for the creatures in An American Werewolf in London and Harry and the Hendersons, plus an avid designer of primates. His goal was to perfect the most photo realistic simian character seen in films, and he had many opportunities in films such as King Kong (1976), Greystoke the Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes, Gorillas in the Mist, and Mighty Joe Young. The look of these versions of the titular apes were all individually tailored to each of the actors portraying them. Even 22 years later, the make-up holds up incredibly well, even on high definition screens.

As a genre film, Planet of the Apes also delves into a time displaced human having to come to terms with being in a new place. This remake goes further than the original by having Leo not only make his escape attempts, but also inciting a revolution with the other humans on the planet. His bravery at standing up to the apes inspires Daena, Birn, and the other humans as well as Ari and Krull who have been marginalized by the ape society. Ari, who functions in much the same way as Zira did in the original, sees the drive and intelligence in Leo’s eyes. She knows inherently that these human creatures are smarter than they are given credit for. These beliefs are things that set her apart from the other apes in the film. And their society is not just an ape society. The characterizations of the apes and their world act as a metaphor to describe human (real-world) society. Sometimes that works, but often it can come off as awkward.

Societal Commentary

What Burton and his screenwriters appear to be doing is use the apes as metaphorical stand-ins for various types of people in human society. The simian structure is not so different from human culture. There are both Senators, Generals, scientists, and businessmen. And the apes’ version functions in much the same way as the human ones. In the end, apes are shown at being no better than man, even though they believe they are superior. Man creates wars, and so do the apes. Ari sees no difference between man and ape in the rewarding of cruelty upon individuals with power over those individuals. And just as man chooses to ignore the truths of his past, so apes do the same–including hiding a fundamental truth about the formation of their society. In our world man thinks himself above the animals, yet in a different timeline, the animals could think the same thing as well.

The female chimpanzee Ari is the one character that speaks out about the inequities of the system. She speaks truth to power, which includes both her father–the Senator, and General Thade. She tries to disrupt the system by letting Leo escape, not necessarily because she initially believes he is correct about his being a visitor from another planet, but because she she’s the humans as intelligent creatures that deserve respect. She corrects young apes in the street, telling them that throwing stones at humans is wrong. She’s her own little AETH (Apes for the Ethical Treatment of Humans). At first she is only shunned or teased for her beliefs, but when she takes action, Thade has her literally branded as a human. In this way, she will now never forget what she is fighting for.

Yet with these scenes echoing real-world concerns, the film never really seems to say anything new. Perhaps some viewers might find enlightenment from the story that uses apes to show how hypocritical humans are, but overall the film says truths that seem to be more self-evident. Those in power want to retain their power, sometimes by any means necessary. It says that some individuals will take advantage of weaker beings, using them for slave labor. And that people often shun and distrust the things they cannot understand. Leo, as a (white, male) human that has never known the oppression Daena and Karubi have encountered, and becomes the forefront of a revolutionary movement to return the humans to a place of more prominence on the planet of the apes. Perhaps these arguments may have been better drawn if someone other than Mark Wahlberg were cast as the protagonist.

The Science in The Fiction

For myself, the Planet of the Apes is an enjoyable enough film, with plenty of action and humor. But it takes a left turn in the middle of act three when it is revealed that the apes are all descended from Semos, a chimpanzee from the Oberon, which crashed a thousand years ago on the planet. The filmmakers decided that time works differently in this film, in order to create some crazy paradoxes and try to surprise  savvy sci-fi audiences. What they ended up doing was to confuse and alienate audiences with this plotting. The time travel element was obviously confusing enough that a brief diagram was presented in the DVD version of the film, in order to explain the order of events.

According to the DVD imagery, “time does not travel in a straight line through an electromagnetic storm,” and shows an S-curve of time between Earth and the planet of the Apes. How’s that now? The film depicts that the electromagnetic storm displaces characters in time, presumably forward, with the first character into the storm being the last to emerge, and vice-versa. So even though the Oberon went through some time after Leo, it emerges centuries before his arrival, crashing on a planet. A planet that the distress call from the Oberon, indicates is “uncharted, uninhabited.” This crash seeds the world with the ape and human progenitors to the characters in the film. This explains why the apes are in control, since Semos–a genetically engineered chimp–was able to lead a revolution and his offspring became the rulers of the planet. The humans conversely had to survive in the wastelands and became the oppressed. But then where did the horses that the apes ride come from?

Planet of the Apes would have viewers believe that the storm holds some kind of sentience or at least algorithmic control over things that pass through it. Not only does it seem to reverse the order that objects exit (also, assuming that there are only these three objects: Pericles in the Pod, Leo’s pod, and the Oberon), but it sends objects forward in time from the Earth’s perspective but backwards in time from the Ape planet perspective. This is evidently how Thade was able to reach the Earth at some point in the mid-19th Century to become a new Abraham Lincoln. It can be inferred that Thade escaped imprisonment in the Oberon, recovered the submerged Delta-pod that only he knew about, got it repaired, and set off to follow Leo back to Earth. Passing through the storm at some point after Leo, allowed Thade to appear centuries before Leo. But that means that in some short amount of time, Thade becomes a new Abraham Lincoln, freeing apes from their bondage so that by the year 2029 they are the dominant species on the planet. This minor portion of the film reframes everything else about the film, and asks audiences to rethink what they have seen. Sometimes that’s a revealing proposition, like in The Usual Suspects. Here, it becomes the film’s downfall.

The Final Frontier

There are a few other things that seem out of place in Planet of the Apes besides the time travel issues above. The first is a pop culture reference that seems to land a bit awkwardly. After the humans begin to revolt, Limbo–the slaver orangutan–asks plaintively, “can’t we all get along.” This echoes the words spoken by Rodney King after his vicious attack by the LAPD. It was a phrase that had gotten much traction culturally, both as a call to a movement, and the butt of a joke. Perhaps a better line could have been chosen here, as this one does not seem to hold up after the fact. Later, Ari gives Leo a kiss before he leaves in the pod. This interspecies affection, shown as a strange attraction on Ari’s part, is also very awkward. It definitely seems like someone forcing a romance to happen in the film, where none is needed, especially after Leo seems to be more attracted to Daena, who is also a human.

Planet of the Apes does pay homage to a number of the classic elements of the 1968 film that fans might find enjoyable. Two of Charlton Heston’s most iconic lines are recreated here, but spoken by apes. “Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human,” is said by Attar when capturing the humans at the film’s beginning, while “damn them. Damn them all to hell,” is quoted by Thade’s father, played in a cameo by Heston. Heston is not the only cast member of the 1968 version that makes an appearance. Linda Harrison, who played the young woman, Nova, in the original, here plays a woman in the cart that shakes her head at Leo when he talks to the Apes. The character of Nova exists in this film, but has been changed into an ape role, with Burton’s girlfriend Lisa Marie playing the part of Senator Nado’s girlfriend. Burton also gave a cameo to makeup effects artist Rick Baker, as an ape smoking a pipe during Leo’s entrance to the city. The final cameo is not from a person, but a place: Lake Powell. This lake was where Heston’s spaceship crashed in the original film, and here it’s the river the humans must cross to get into Calima, by the ape camp.

All in all, this version of Planet of the Apes is a fun watch, when taken for what it is: a saturday matinee popcorn flick. While Burton seemed to have fun and reverence for the franchise, the direction the film headed was not what audiences (or executives) seemed to be interested in. It would be another ten years before the next film in the franchise, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, would arrive. It serves as a prequel to the original Planet of the Apes, and seemingly ignores both this film, and the sequels that came in the early 70s. The fourth of these prequel films is currently set to debut in May, 2024, called Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. These films have been a bit more successful and seem to be leading up to a point where they can connect into “future history” of the franchise.

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