Reviews

Be warned, there are minor spoiler warnings here. You might not want to read farther if you don't want to know anything about the movie.

I left this movie wondering at what point the creators thought this was a GOOD movie.

It's difficult to review this version of PLANET OF THE APES without comparing it to the original. Visually, it's stunning, but the story holds together about as well as sand castles in high tide. True, the remake does a better job of having actors, you should pardon the expression, ape the movements of simians, but little else of this movie is an improvement over the original.

The movie doesn't really create an ape society so much as it takes aspects of present human society and has apes do them for satiric purposes. Not only does this joke grow old very quickly, it's frustrating to watch the movie squander the opportunity to produce real satire or explore more deeply the aspects and workings of this ape society. That could have been interesting. Unfortunately, the movie moves quickly to the action sequences so doesn't spend enough time in Ape City to do much more than give satire or social commentary lip service.

Still, the movie wasn't bad up to a point, but you hit that point -- the final reel and the ending -- with all the grace and abruptness of a crash test dummy.

About that end: without revealing what the end is in the remake, said end pales when compared to the end of the original. The famous surprise ending of the original was set up in that movie. It made sense within the context of the movie, because Taylor's speech at the beginning of the movie, when he's recording his log entry, lets us know that conditions exist which make the surprise at the end possible. The ending of this remake is not set up. It comes from nowhere. (Yes, I know where the ending REALLY came from, but, again, in the context of that source material, its ending made sense. In this movie, the end has no context and no set up.) The remake's end simply made no sense. Nor did the several plot contrivances or the unexplained personality-altering epiphanies of main characters which all occur within the final ten minutes. No sense other than that they were necessary to end the movie. It was as if writers William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal and director Tim Burton realized, we only have ten minutes left, we'd better throw out logic for the sake of expedience.

Then, just when you thought the ending couldn't get any worse, well...