n the U.S. Air Force space research station Oberon, astronaut Leo Davidson (Wahlberg) trains chimpanzees to fly spacecraft, but longs to pilot one himself. When Oberon encounters a mysterious magnetic storm in space, the crew sends a pod piloted by Davidson's chimp trainee, Pericles, to investigate. When Pericles' pod disappears, Davidson violates orders, mans a pod himself and takes off to find him.
Bad idea. Davidson's spacecraft gets caught in a vortex and winds up crashing through the atmosphere of an unknown planet. The pod splashes down in a lake, and Davidson crawls out into a primeval forest. He's not alone.
Ragged people come out of the woods--the beautiful Daena (Warren), her father, Karubi (Kris Kristofferson), and others. They are being pursued by apes wearing armor, riding horses and carrying sharp weapons. Able to leap tall trees in a single bound, inhumanly strong and fast as lightning, the apes quickly overmatch their human prey, and Davidson finds himself carted away with the others.
Led by the snarling chimpanzee General Thade (Roth) and his faithful gorilla adjutant, Attar (Duncan), the ape army brings the human captives into Ape City to be sold to the sleazy slave trader Limbo (Paul Giamatti). Ari (Bonham Carter), a high-born chimpanzee and champion of human rights, buys Daena and Davidson to save them from Limbo and his hench-apes.
Davidson and Daena are made into "house humans," but quickly plot their escape. Reluctantly, Ari and her faithful gorilla ape-servant, Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), agree to help them. Thade, meanwhile, has discovered the secret of Davidson's origins. As Davidson and his party trek to the forbidden zone, Thade and his army close in.
A script in need of more monkeying
Apes is the highly anticipated remake--"re-imagination," in director Burton's words--of the campy 1968 SF movie of the same name, which was based in turn on French novelist Pierre Boulle's La Planete des Singes.
With its state-of-the-art makeup (by Oscar winner Rick Baker), detailed production design (by longtime Burton partner Rick Heinrichs) and special effects by Industrial Light & Magic, Burton's Apes is handsome to look at and brings to life an entirely credible simian world. The actors, who reportedly went to "ape school" for months to learn how to walk and move like the real thing, generally embody their non-human characters believably. Giamatti's wisecracking orangutan slave trader has some of the best lines.
But for all its polish and creativity, Apes is surprisingly flat and uninvolving, owing mainly to the overly predictable and schematic script by Broyles (Cast Away) and Lawrence Konnor and Mark Rosenthal (Mighty Joe Young, Star Trek VI). More attention is paid to the evil Thade and the sensitive Ari than to the human characters, particularly Wahlberg's Davidson, who remains emotionally opaque; Warren's Daena is just a cipher in a loincloth.
Ignoring a few gorilla-sized plot holes, filmmakers also appear to have made the choice to downplay the philosophical, religious and existential themes of both the book and the original film, though they receive lip service in a few scenes. Instead, Burton et al. have supercharged the action and visual effects.
Moreover, Burton and the writers undercut the essential irony of this topsy-turvy world by making the humans smarter this time around and making the apes more animalistic. Gone is any real cathartic moment, as when the original film's Charlton Heston screams, "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" (That line, and Heston, both appear in the film, but in dramatically different contexts.)
