As Palpatine would say: long have I waited to discuss this film! A film reviled for its infamously confusing ending, its gleeful presentation of punk apes and other humanistic ape-eries, and its attempt to convince us that Mark Wahlberg earned his way onto an expensive Air Force ape research space station while still getting away with calling apes monkeys every ten seconds. A film that shockingly made a decent chunk of change and almost got a sequel. It’s Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001)!
Call it a remake or a reboot or a reinterpretation, Planet of the Apes has rightly earned its place as one part visual marvel and one part disastrous narrative — beauty and terror fused into one glorious package. Its position in the Planet of the Apes oeuvre has, alas, earned it additional and unfavorable comparisons to its more successful and narratively compelling predecessor and successor. Have the twenty years since this film’s release helped its perception?
Before I get to that question, we should probably briefly discuss the film itself. Directed by Tim Burton, it stars Mark Wahlberg as Captain Leo Davidson alongside a pretty stellar cast of ape actors. Davidson works for the U.S. Air Force on a research space station called the Oberon. There, he helps train genetically-modified apes to pilot pods to study phenomenon in space. Why not use drones and the like? The movie doesn’t bother to answer that question. Meanwhile, a massive electromagnetic storm stolen straight out of Star Trek shows up, and Davidson’s favorite chimp, Pericles, is lost in its delicious clouds; being an animal-loving sap, Davidson rushes to rescue his chimp friend and is sucked through a space vortex some thousands of years in the future and crash lands on a planet ruled by, you guessed it, ape people! In his attempts to find his way back to the Oberon, Davidson inadvertently causes an ape-human civil war, attracts the wrath of chimp-man Thade (Tim Roth) and his trusty gorilla-man companion Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), and gets caught in a love triangle with human Daena (Estella Warren) and chimp-lady Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), the latter of whom happens to be a human rights activist who is like 75% into abolition because that’s the allegory we’re going for here.
The main plot is not terribly difficult to follow. The central mystery here concerns how the ape people got to be walking and talking ape people and what happened to the Oberon — each tied to the other. This forms the basis of ape religion, as they worship a deity called Semos, the first ape to found ape society. The ape people think he’ll return like Jesus and end the struggle ape society suffers. who they think will return like Jesus (or, if we take the anagram of the name seriously: Moses).
The execution of that story, however, is a mixed bag. No doubt, the visual portrayal of ape society is astonishingly detailed, from the clothing and armor they wear to the set design and political structure. Even the makeup design supports the characters beneath them. Paul Giamatti’s weaselly slave salesman, Limbo, is lanky, hunched, and toothy, speaking to the slimy salesperson he’s meant to be. Meanwhile, Tim Roth’s imposing — and, frankly, incredible performance as — General Thade looks like the seething rage trapped within; his body almost twists with the hatred he tries to hide, especially before Ari, whom he wishes to possess.
Clearly, Burton and his team tried to think through the world as it might be after a cataclysmic break between humanity and their genetically-modified ape creations. This makes for some obviously allegorical discussions between the militaristic Thade, the weak semi-abolitionist Senator Sandar (David Warner), and the “well we tried” Senator Nado (Glenn Sadix). It also makes for some genuinely hilarious moments, such as the image of the teenage punks straight out of Ape Grease — ridiculous, sure, but also pretty funny. If there’s an argument for this film, it’s that it is visually striking in a way so few films are. This feels like a world with real people. It’s not an artificial space as so many films in the last ten years have created — I’m looking at you, Jurassic World.
But the care taken in devising the visual and physical formation of the world of Planet of the Apes clearly fell short in the narrative department. The most infamous example of this is the cliffhanger / surprise ending laughingly referred to as the Ape Lincoln moment. While much of the film indulges in quirky transfers of our human culture to an ape culture, the concluding merger of a U.S. narrative about Lincoln’s role in ending slavery with an allegory of that same struggle involving ape people is, to be blunt, almost insulting. The entirety of the mainline narrative of the film is a loose allegory of the abolition movement ended by the arrival of Pericles, whose immediately love of Davidson shocks the ape and human worlds alike into realizing that maybe the line of Semos, of which Thade is a descendant, is actually toxic and destructive. It’s a crude allegory, to be sure, but one that on its own works well enough even if you’d rather see more time spent unpacking it. But the Ape Lincoln disrupts that allegory by simply translating Lincoln, the mythical anti-slavery figure, into a presumably pro-segregationist descendant of slave holders and genociders — he shares a striking resemblance to Thade, after all.
Additionally, one has to wonder just where they hoped to go with all of this. The film is full of timey wimey nonsense, sure, but jumping forward a thousand or so years to a future in which Thade’s brutal rejection of human rights or collaboration begs more questions about “how” than the film seems interested to answer. That critical failing leaves the concluding battle — another visual spectacle, as apes are shown jumping all about in attack on a ragtag army of humans — somewhat pointless. If the lesson everyone is meant to learn is “humans and apes can live together in harmony” — a simple and poorly explored message — then shoving us into a world where the exact opposite has become true seems less a thoughtful twist than a kind of narrative cowardice to commit. In this sense, we’re honestly lucky that we can enjoy the visual wonders of Burton’s vision rather than see this story continued in a film that would undoubtedly feel like more horror.
So to turn back to that fateful question: Have the twenty years since this film’s release helped its perception?
For me, the answer is “yes, with caveats.” This is the part where I admit that I never hated this movie. In fact, I spent one glorious summer re-watching this film on DVD, though partly to listen to Danny Elfman’s incredible soundtrack and to watch the behind-the-scenes materials. To me, the visual splendor of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes deserves far more recognition that the film has received in the twenty years since its release. The BAFTA, Saturn, and Academy Award nominations don’t do it justice.
There’s also something else here to appreciate: time. No, I don’t mean the film’s odd and nonsensical time warps. I mean the time we’ve had to sit on this film while it was usurped by a more successful franchise. Planet of the Apes was meant to have a sequel, and its modest financial success virtually dictated it would get one, but the absence of a true successor reduces the space allotted to considerations of the film’s most reviled component: its conclusion. Because we don’t get to see this brought to life, there’s more room for the enjoyment of its better qualities.
For that reason, I’ll continue to find this movie a lot of fun even if I think aspects of its story leave a sour taste. I’ll never get tired of watching Tim Roth seethe as a grizzled general chimp or hearing Michael Clarke Duncan’s booming voice behind a gorilla face. There is so much to love here even as we recognize what ultimately doesn’t work.
And you know what? I think that’s OK.
