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"Ape Over Apes: Part II"

 











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"Ape Over Apes: Part II"

a review of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes
by Dr. Susan Block

Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes had me rooting for the apes. I know, the apes on this Planet are the bad guys. They're aggressive, belligerent and tyrannical. They beat on each other a lot in a rollicking sort of Primate Fight Club of the Jungle. And they viciously dominate the poor, weak, fangless humans, here in this upside-down universe where apes are in charge, and people are treated like animals (yes, like the original).

But these apes don't often fight to kill. Their weapons are their own natural strength, agility, and those nasty gnashing teeth that would make Dracula jade with envy. When it comes to using their own brute power, they're totally without restraint. They use a few spears and swords here and there, yet they shun the mighty weapon that so many humans embrace--the gun--as "too dangerous." Their paw-to-claw combat is ferocious, but infinitely less destructive than human guns and bombs.

So, though I abhor violence, I sympathize with the underlying motive for the apes' forceful domination of the humans. Yes, they hunt humans like game, and the ape kids enjoy keeping human children as pets.


Paul Giamatti as an Orangutan Trader in Human Slaves
Though, as Limbo, the human slave trader, comically portrayed as a slouchy, borsht-belt orangutan by Paul Giamatti, warns an upper-class chimp family purchasing a human baby girl as a pet, "Be sure to get rid of her before puberty. One thing you don't want in your house is a human teenager."

Yes, they're ruthless and casually cruel. But that's, in part, because the elders know and the others sense that if they give an inch, the hapless humans will seize power and will, in due time, kill most of them off and put the rest behind bars.


Tim Roth as General Thade nabs a human who's been out in the sun too long
In other words, they will be in the abysmal shape that most Great Apes are in now: highly endangered, hunted and eaten as bushmeat by humans, or captured, caged, ogled in zoos, abused in circuses, studied in primate centers, used as guinea pigs in often deadly experiments, their babies sold as pets, only to be abandoned as adults (since, as any ape expert knows, one thing you don't want in your house is a teenage ape!). Why wouldn't-and why shouldn't-they fight fang-and-paw to maintain their precarious position of power and safety?

At least the apes on this Planet don't eat the humans.

Another reason I rooted for the apes on Burton's Planet is because they're much more interesting than the humans. Better makeup, better acting, better lines; I'll bet they were even given better food by Craft Services. All of the human actors are mind-numbingly dull, with the exception of Kris Kristofferson (as the wild-haired, feral-eyed Karubi) who is just plain silly.

The dullest of dull humans is the star. Mark Wahlberg plays the stoic heroic Captain Leo Davidson who trains genetically enhanced chimps at a space station.


Mark Wahlberg looking determined as Captain Leo Davidson
In the first few minutes of the film, Captain Leo disobeys orders and impulsively flies a space pod into an electrical storm through a time warp, then crash-lands into a lake in a rain forest on this planet where apes rule and humans run. Wahlberg acts like being boring is a virtue. He seems capable of only four facial expressions--anger, surprise, determination and blank. And he's not even wearing three pounds of latex and fake hair on his face.

As for his body, well, we don't get to see much of it this time around, thanks to the actor's born-again modesty. Here is a guy who attained fame in his underwear, then doubled his money playing a porn star. Now he's "worried about the possibility of having to wear a loincloth," according to the program notes. What a priss! Is he getting soft around the middle, or just trying to appeal to Dr. Laura fans?

Wahlberg's prima donna prudery makes Charleton Heston, who wore his loincloth with pride in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes, seem downright bohemian. By the way, one of the funniest scenes in Burton's Planet features Heston in an unbilled cameo, playing a dying chimp chieftain, spoofing his real-life role as president of the National Rifle Association by delivering a passionate anti-gun message against this hazardous human invention. Of course, he's in the only ape in Ape City to actually own a gun.

But back to the flesh, and baring it. This is a story, in part, about humans being treated like animals.


A barechested Charleton Heston (what an animal!) flanked by the ape-masked Roddy McDowall and sultry Linda Harrison in the original Planet of the Apes
Animals generally don't wear clothes. Nudity, or semi-nudity, enhances vulnerability. In the original Planet, Heston, a Republican, wasn't afraid to show his chest, abs and a nice piece of tush, even when he was over 40.

Wahlberg shows nothing-body, mind or soul. His distressed spacesuit covers almost every inch of skin, and his lack of character development reveals little interior life. I'd have to agree with simian Sadist-in-Chief General Thade, played with fantastic menace and beastly grace by Tim Roth, when he pulls Captain Leo's head down on his lap at a dinner party, stretches open his mouth, looks inside and rasps "Is there a soul in there? I don't see a soul." Neither do I. That's why I'm rooting for the apes.

This is partly the fault of the script, committee-written by William Broyles, Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, plus a couple of uncredited chimpanzees, I imagine. Even for a brainless summer blockbuster, the lines are pretty lame. The original Planet may have been corny, but this dialogue, especially the stuff the humans have to say ("Never send a monkey to do a man's job"), is just plain lazy.

The other principle human is played by another model-turned-actor: the athletically gorgeous, bee-stung-lipped Estella Warren is Daena the hunted warrior woman.

Warren's another one who, having already posed nude in various advertising campaigns to break into Celebrityville, has decided not to go bare--or even skimpy--now that she's on the cusp of movie stardom. What a waste! What a crass career move. And what a horrible outfit it has spawned!


Delicious Daena
(Estella Warren)

Clothed in glittery rags reminiscent of Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, but much more conservative and verging on dumpy, Warren appears lost most of the time--not on the Planet, in the movie. The way she delivers her uninspired lines, she would have been much better off in the 1968 version where the humans couldn't speak at all. But hey, she's got luscious lips and great gams. A fine specimen of a female human. If she were cooked up just right, I'd eat her.

The rest of the human species, a motley horde of extras hightailing through the rain forest, cowering in cages or milling directionlessly about in the sand, are so ludicrous, they're hardly worth saving. I wouldn't have minded a bit if, in the end, they were all caged up again. Also, the fact that they can speak (unlike the original where they can't) makes the whole premise pretty illogical. If the humans can talk to each other, organize, develop technology and have opposable thumbs, how come the apes are able to maintain dominance? That's just one of the many things that don't make sense--even sci-fi sense--about Burton's Planet.


Captain Leo among the scraggly humans

But back to the apes. I just go ape over those apes! But then, I always have. Especially imaginary human-ape hybrids that take that 98% genetic similarity which real chimps have to humans, and turn it up to 99.8%. My long-time favorite was big old King Kong who loved Fay Wray with a passion that scaled the Empire State Building. Even at the age of five, when I first saw the King on the tube, I knew I wanted a lover who lusted for me like a big powerful animal. I couldn't sleep a wink that night, fearing and half-hoping that King Kong's huge hairy hand would come reaching into my bedroom window for my irresistible pajama-clad self, spiriting me away to the jungle to play mysterious animalistic games. The next morning, I drew a secret series of cartoons of a giant hairy King Kong capturing and caressing a tiny, smiling Fay Wray. This was my first venture into comic erotica. I never showed anyone. When my brother found it, I freaked. We both knew it was porn. Ape porn.


King Kong & Fay Wray: Interspecies Love & Torment

I liked the original Planet of the Apes apes too, though they didn't seem so sexy to me. But they were a bit more believable than the mechanical, stop-action Kong doll. The masks were pretty realistic (for the time), but they didn't move, and the actors didn't walk like apes, so though their dialogue resonated resoundingly with the civil rights and anti-war battles of 1968, their physicality didn't quite satisfy.

The apes on Burton's Planet take the whole unnerving but compelling fantasy of the Ape-Human Hybrid a great leap forward. Burton wanted his apes to be "80% human, 20% ape," and his cast has, for the most part, attained that balance. The magic begins with their make-up, extraordinarily lifelike latex masks created by six-time Oscar winner Rick Baker, which move with every inch of the actors' faces to express even the subtlest emotions.

But their apishness is not only skin-deep. An integral part of Burton's vision involved sending the actors to Ape School (which sounds like a place I'd like to study!), where instructors like former Cirque de Soleil performer Terry Notary taught them how to ape the apes. In hyper-physical, Commedia dell'Arte fashion, actors learned to sniff and snarl, slink and lope, and generally get in touch with their Inner Ape.


Michael Clarke Duncan is transformed into
Attar the Gorilla Commander

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