PLANET OF THE APES (as well as the entire Planet of the Apes saga) was a timely tale, speaking on issues such as race relations and tensions, and war. It is also a timeless tale with a foretelling of a dismally allegorical future that could befall mankind if it didn't shape up. And can you believe all of this was packed into one of the most exciting and fun sci-fi films of all time? The primary accomplishment of these Ape films is their ability to appeal to the audience on both an aesthetic level, and an intellectual level. You rarely ever see that in big Hollywood films anymore.

On the other end of the spectrum is Tim Burton's PLANET OF THE APES (2001), a most ponderously ineffective film. This film is surely a sign of it's time as well, demonstrating how Hollywood (and many non-Hollywood), as well as pop culture America, has become all too obsessed with their gadgetry and trinkets, and making gobs of money. Blockbuster movies merely became a show-and-tell of the latest technological trickery. Burton is obviously in love with making striking imagery, and he does it probably better than anyone else out there. The problem with all this is that the audience is overpowered with it. Instead of bringing the audience into the fanciful world that's been displayed, they are left standing outside of it, gawking at it with wonderment of the great spectacle. They marvel at the system of technology, speculating on how the FX were achieved, and as a result they have become removed from the story.

I can't question the obvious and fantastic achievement of the make-up that Rick Baker has created. But the same effect was conjured up in the seemingly primitive monkey masks of the original. Today some will call the original ape make-up cheesy or unconvincing, a claim that is highly unfair and slight. Back in '68 it was abundantly capable of holding the audiences attention more than enough to believe in the story, and that's what it was meant to do. If it seems cheesy it's only in the comparisons of techniques, one being more advanced than the other. Were we not still fully immersed in the story though, despite the obvious make-up?

There's a term that was pounded into the heads of every film student in every film school - suspension of disbelief. That's a scholar's fancy way of saying that a successful film will draw the audience into it's world, making them believe through character and imagery that the fictitious world within the movie is convincingly real. Burton seems to have taken this task much too heartily, and entirely out of context. His idea, as well as every other blockbuster director, of suspending disbelief is to spend millions of dollars on technology that will visually demonstrate what their world would look like it were real. Nevermind bringing the audience into that world. It doesn't matter if all the actors slaved away endless hours learning to walk like a monkey, or that the make-up people tied the actors down for hours so that they could place intricate hair plugs into the masks - if you don't have a story to tell, then all the gadgetry is merely a big display. And film is more than just a display. It's a device to tell a story.

Instead of spending months on the technical gimmicks, they should have spent a couple more weeks on the script. If they had they could have smoothed out the cavernous gaps in the plot, and developed a character or two. The character of Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is an obvious attempt to conjure up the misanthropic astronaut, Lt. Taylor (Charlton Heston), from the '68 original. Profoundly disenchanted by society's complacent attitudes, Taylor volunteers for a dangerous space mission solely to escape Earth. It is his belief, or rather his hope, that there must be something out there that is "better than man." What he finds is an unfriendly world were apes rule over humans, using them for experiments, and keeping them in check. Taylor soon finds that he is the reluctant hero, trying to escape the apes and to save the human race that he at once despised. Heston brilliantly portrays Taylor's cynicism with growling angst, allowing his dichotomous struggle to save mankind to essentially rip him apart at the seams. Wahlberg's portrayal of the reluctant hero, rather, is void of any of Taylor's motives, or any motive for that matter. Leo's emotional torments have him sitting in the dilapidated spaceship's chair and muttering the all too obvious "It's my fault. I created this mess…" Wahlberg hasn't yet expanded on the great job he did in BOOGIE NIGHTS, but it's Burton's fault for not giving the guy at least some direction or emotional background. Leo Davidson's only drive was to get his chimp and get off the planet, that's all there was to his character. So Wahlberg had nothing to do but to react to the moments of action.