Planet of the Apes Reviews

so much potential goes to waste in this film.

i'm not a huge fan of the originals although i'll watch them and do generally enjoy them. i was excited to see a remake because its a rich concept. i was excited to see tim burton remake it because i expect a wild take on it. he really could have done so much with this material because he is a great film maker and story teller. the truth is that this film is bad. not completely unwatchable bad but nothing i'd go out of my way to see again.

the whole premise starts out kind've bad and you hope it was just a fluke. unfortunately its not. a research ship/station out in space is doing some sort've flight test stuff with chimps. never really explained. trained intelligent chimps is just a plot point. ship finds a...??...wormhole?? yeah whatever just a plot point. basically scene 2 they send in chimp pilot, which we've already seen in the very open sequence fails a flight simulator test. more blunt plot points. the chimp is sucked into it. and immediately the trainer (mark walhberg) jumps in another ship to go save the chimp. why? you guessed it: plot point. in fact a small scene just before this he basically doesn't care about the chimps. this is all a set up, quickly run through to get to the main point where wahlberg's charactor get sucked into the wormhole after the chimp. inside the wormhole a conveniently placed meter counts off the quickly passing years. we're suppose to take for granted these ships have a prominently place calculator for changing years as if its normal and necessary, i guess? or it may just be a shitty overly blunt plot point. take your pick.

he crash lands on the planet of the apes and is immediately captured when he ends up in the middle of a group of fleeing humans. we're immediately shown the female "love interest" human sympathizer. blah blah blah. he along with some other humans escape with her help. blah blah blah....no one cares. advance the story stuff. effects effects effects, explosions, battles, effects. whatever. about the only thing surprising here is that there are no sex scenes. its almost like they forgot them since all the rest is so overly formulaic.

whats utterly lacking in this movie is character development. take for instance they young boy. clearly we're suppose to sympathize with him as a young boy becoming a man standing up for his rights. but he's only in the movie for a few moments. you remember him only because he plays a prominent part in a scene where he acts on his own and ends up stuck as an army of apemen come towards him and has to be saved by the only person who could possible do so, if only because it makes him seem like he cares to the viewers of the movie, mark walhberg's character.

there's action. yea! there's effects. yea! there is a plot. ok. all you need right? no, you definitely need more than that. and this doesn't deliver.

there are some scenes that are so embarrassing you have to hope like hell they were intended to be kitch. unfortunately they don't work that way and you just try to forget them.

the ending is a nice summation with somewhat obvious "revelations". you might however wonder how the movie ended up being so long when at every point the plot plows though like it was written in brief tweets. i've certainly spent more time on this review than they did on character development.

its watchable. thats about it. with all the money that obviously went into this, with the concepts available to work with, with tim burton at the helm....this should've been way better than it is.

(5/10)