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Film Review by John Demetry
On the surface, Burton's Planet of the Apes looks like the kind of clunky, zeitgeist-surfing nonsense we go to Burton films to escape. In Mars Attacks! - Burton's masterpiece - he sustained subversive satire. Even there, he lacked "taste" and "slick" storytelling techniques. His editing rhythms always disconcerted, but he more than compensated with a unique, hilarious, dazzling, and coherent visual sensibility within the shots. His very weaknesses warmed us to his visions in opposition to the Hollywood action incoherence that leaves us cold. Still, his editing has never before seemed so awkward, so unaffecting as it is here. The lighting and the colors lack the ravishing B-movie aesthetics of his Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow. But don't be fooled: Burton's anarchic sensibility burrows beneath the Planet of the Apes. And his real subject ain't talking apes, but the naked apes in the movie theater.
Action and adventure motivate Wahlberg's character, like many of the ticket buyers who made Planet of the Apes a box-office record-breaker. Wahlberg instigates the film's story - and entire centuries of two planets' histories - with his cocky declaration: "I'm going to get my ape back." Yet, action glory eludes him in his quintessential quest to return home. Not even bad dialogue eludes Wahlberg from his emblematic portrayal. He pumps up the big battle between humans and apes with a tongue-in-cheek speech appropriate for a football huddle. Then, Burton intentionally fumbles the action by throwing in one of his distinctive plot twists. Wahlberg's most emotional moment comes when an ape breaks his gun - a loaded symbol that ricochets through the film and hits every target. For the first time, Wahlberg brings to a film performance the politically astute self-awareness of his white-boy rap career and homo-erotic Calvin Klein underwear ads. (Though some may be disappointed that he does it without Heston's loincloth.)
There are at least three more incendiary performances in ape drag. Michael Clark Duncan significantly played the messianic Black prisoner on death row in The Green Mile. As a gorilla general in Planet of the Apes, he gets the film's most earnest line: "Everything I was taught to believe is a lie." Because he and his particular species get placed on the frontlines as fodder for a holocaust, the line resonates with genuine poignancy. Movies and the media perpetuate such lies. Heston provides a hefty cameo as an ailing ape leader. In his one scene, he reveals his knowledge of the ape civilization's origin and of the gun, the logical conclusion of human civilization. Heston, that homophobic supporter of the right to bare arms who once marched with the Civil Rights Movement, repeats his famous anti-nuclear-war concluding lines from the original Planet of the Apes: "Damn them! Damn them all to Hell!!" The scene balances Heston's easily condescention to politics by weighing moral imperatives. As the film's explicit comic relief, Paul Giamatti plays a greedy trader of human slaves. Begging for mercy, he says, "Can't we all just get along?" Don't mistake this for an In Living Color-style joke on the broken, pathetic Rodney King. In his smarmy quoting of King's infamous sound bite, Giamatti expresses its devious manipulation and repetition by the media. Even when the apes and humans reconcile at the end, Giamatti recognizes the potential of a new market: "Hey kids, who wants to buy some. . . Tylenol?" The full humor and the horror of Heston's and Giamatti's punchlines convey the sense of human history as a constant loop of power struggles.
Paul Giamatti trades humans as slaves, but provides much of the comic relief in Apes
You might even get the creepy feeling that every line of dialogue has been recycled. The same goes with the muted colors, even lighting, and collage-style editing that eliminate conventional thrills. Not lazily, but intently constructed. Burton no longer makes the mundane fantastic, but the fantastic mundane. The familiarity is eerie. It makes audience and characters captive - while captivating spectators with probing minds. Burton's elaborately designed title sequences always excite the mind, preparing the audience for the aesthetic and the theme of the film to follow. Here, he opens with a graphically striking montage of ape artifacts ending with a close-up of ape eyes. It's scored by Danny Elfman's primal loony tunes. The sequence establishes Planet of the Apes as a challenging exploration of culture and its mechanisms - not least of which are the mechanical responses of an audience at the movies.
In the film's final plot twist, Wahlberg finds himself at the butt of Burton's enfolding narrative pranks. The world's fate is bound to his story. Wahlberg's fate is trapped in the history beamed back at us from the void. You can't escape from the planet of the naked apes. |
Mark Wahlberg is the 'Damn, dirty human' in Tim Burton's re-imagining of Planet of the Apes
Director Tim Burton
Tim Roth plays the diabolical General Thade 
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