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Aping a Classic...badly: PLANET OF THE APES

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For one thing, he can't seem to decide what his theme is. The arrogance of humanity, which destroyed the earth's ecology and is now paying for it via ape-engendered genocide? The irony of role reversal where humans are kept as slave labor and pets in the same way they once kept chimps and orangutans? The universality of the hunger for power and/or the blindness of religion? All of these ideas pop up along the way, but then they sort of fade again as we move on to something else.

The attempts at irony, and they are many, fail because we've already heard them a hundred times. What was original and fresh in 1968 is old news thirty years-plus later. We got it, already. And the occasional parodies of the first film--early on one of the gorilla slavers tells Davidson "Get your hands off me, you damned dirty human," reversing Charlton Heston's line--just don't cut it because they are so obvious.

As for the performances, Wahlburg is reasonably heroic but he's very New Age. He's sensitive and thoughtful and has no problems whatsoever that he's the object of cross-species lust. Helena Bonham Carter does what she can with the role of Ari, the rebellious human-rights chimp. As the villain of the piece, the genocidal General Thade, however, Tim Roth is so over-the-top you just want to smack him. He snarls, he hisses, he smirks, he leers--he practically foams at the mouth. Yet all of his compatriots find him totally admirable, his mad ravings the height of sense.

In short, he is a caricature -- and so is much too much of everything that goes on in this film. If Burton had simply gone ahead and done a parody, it might have worked better. Instead, Planet of the Apes nouveau is just a haphazard, wandering waste of time. Except when they suddenly begin swinging from the chandeliers or jumping up and down and screeching, there is nothing at all to distinguish the apes from humans in monkey suits, no sense of alienness.

Essentially, Planet of the Apes nouveau suffers from the P's: it's preachy, plodding, predictable and pointless. Mr. Burton opted to direct the film as though it were one great in-joke, and it simply doesn't work. As for the ending, the less said about that the better.

Oh, and I have one question for Messers Broyles, Konner and Rosenthal: if the human crew of the space station were all killed by the ancestors of the apes on the planet, where did the human population come from?