Planet of the Apes (2001 film)

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This article is about the 2001 film. For the book, see Planet of the Apes. For the 1968 film, see Planet of the Apes (1968 film).
Planet of the Apes

Film poster for Planet of the Apes (2001)
Directed by Tim Burton
Produced by Richard D. Zanuck
Written by Pierre Boulle (novel)
William Broyles Jr.
Lawrence Konner
Mark Rosenthal
Starring Mark Wahlberg
Tim Roth
Helena Bonham Carter
Michael Clarke Duncan
Paul Giamatti
Estella Warren
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
David Warner
Kris Kristofferson
and Charlton Heston
Music by Danny Elfman
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Release date(s) July 27, 2001 (USA)
Running time 119 min.
Language English
Budget $100,000,000 US (est)
Gross revenue $359,100,000
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Planet of the Apes is a 2001 science fiction film directed by Tim Burton and adapted by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal from the novel La planète des singes by Pierre Boulle and the earlier film adaptation. The film features an astronaut who crash-lands on a planet where humans are enslaved by apes. It stars Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, David Warner and Kris Kristofferson. It was released on July 27, 2001. Charlton Heston, star of the 1968 version, also makes a cameo appearance, as does Linda Harrison.

The film was panned by critics and attracted much derision from many fans of the older Ape films. In particular, the film attempted to imitate its earlier namesake by revealing a plot twist at the end. This twist resembles the one featured at the end of the original Boulle novel. However, this remained largely obscure and was considered by many to be a (perhaps deliberate) non sequitur. Burton's DVD commentary suggests that the ending was intended as a cliffhanger rather than a twist, to be explained and resolved in a sequel which, due to the film's poor response from critics, and despite the film's reasonable financial success,[1] never materialized. Prior to the film's release, Tim Burton indicated his desire to "reimagine" the other films in the Apes movie series.

Contents

[edit] Plot

In the year 2029, onboard the USAF station Oberon, we are introduced to a young astronaut, Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), who works closely with primates who are trained for dangerous space missions. His favorite simian co-worker is a chimpanzee named Pericles.

Suddenly an alert sounds - an enormous electromagnetic storm is approaching the station. The Oberon's commander decides to send out a small space pod piloted by Pericles to probe the storm. Pericles' pod heads into the storm and disappears. Against his orders, Leo steals a second pod and goes in pursuit of Pericles. Entering the storm, Leo loses contact with the Oberon and his pod tumbles through a vortex, finally arriving in orbit over a strange world in the year 3002. Leo takes his vehicle planetside and crashes it into a dense jungle.

Emerging from his damaged vessel, Leo hears the sound of people running. Suddenly, a group of primitive humans emerge and, after staring strangely at his attire, continue to flee in terror. They are being pursued by large humanoid apes on horseback, who speak in human tongue. While running, Leo meets General Thade (Tim Roth), a chimp-like humanoid who is first in command of the ape military forces. He also meets Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), an enormous gorilla who appears to be Thade's right-hand-man and Colonel of the army. The humans are eventually rounded up and hauled back to the Ape City, where they are to be sold off as slaves.

Once freed from the cage, Leo meets Limbo (Paul Giamatti), an orangutan who works in the trade business of human slaves. In Limbo's human pet shop, a female chimpanzee named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) shows up to protest the awful treatment of the humans. Taking an interest in Leo, Ari decides to buy him and a female slave named Daena (Estella Warren) and have them work as servants in the house of her father, Senator Sandar (David Warner).

Upon being introduced to their new owner and the other human servants, Leo and Daena are to wait on General Thade and his henchmen, who are having a dinner meeting at Sandar's house. Thade briefly discusses his dying father, but then attacks Leo. As a result, Leo and Daena are sent back to the kitchen for disturbing the peace. After the meeting, Leo escapes his cage and frees the other humans, Gunnar (Evan Parke), Daena's father, and her brother whom he enlists as his new allies. They are in the midst of escaping when Ari spots them. Leo manages to convince Ari to join their cause and she accompanies the escapees along with her protector Krall (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), another enormous gorilla who is not sure of Leo's intentions.

After Attar and Thade kill Daena's father (Kris Kristofferson), Attar informs him of the facts. Thade believes that Ari was kidnapped by the humans, and makes use of this situation to gain absolute power as dictator of Ape City. Thade then marches Ape armies in pursuit of the renegade humans.

Leo and the others flee to Calima - (the temple of Semos), a forbidden but holy site for the apes. Once there, Leo discovers the holy temple is in fact the remains of the Oberon, his former space station, which has crashed on the planet's surface and looks ancient (the name Calima coming from the sign "CAution LIve aniMAls", the letters Calima being the only ones not covered in dust). According to the computer logs, the station has been there for thousands of years (Leo explains the ship's nuclear power source was built to last forever). Leo deduces that when he entered the vortex he was pushed forward in time, while the Oberon, searching after him, was not - and it crashed on the planet long before he did.

The Oberon's log reveals that the apes on board, led by Semos, organized a mutiny and took control of the vessel after it crashed. The human and ape survivors of the struggle left the ship and their descendants are the people Leo has encountered since landing.

Thade's forces soon arrive at the Oberon and begin their advance. Leo ignites the fuel inside the ship which knocks back the first wave of ape warriors, gaining a temporary reprieve. Then the apes regroup to battle the humans anew.During the battle Gunnar is killed after killing a couple of apes and Tival is killed by Attar.

In the middle of the battle, Attar and Krall begin fighting, which soon results in Attar's victory. A familiar vehicle descends from the sky and is identified immediately by Leo. It is the pod piloted by Pericles, the chimp astronaut. Pericles was pushed forward in time as Leo was, and had just now found his way to the planet. When Pericles lands, the apes interpret his landing as the arrival of Semos, the first ape, who is their god. They bow, and hostilities between humans and apes immediately cease.

General Thade chases Leo into the Oberon, where he attacks Pericles and breaks his leg. After a brief skirmish with Leo, Thade becomes trapped in a portion of the ship and cannot get out, as Leo has closed the sliding bullet-proof doors. Thade tries to reason with Attar, begging him to let him out, but Attar declines, as does Ari (who is actually Thade's love interest). With the ape leader defeated, Leo decides it is time for him to leave the Planet of the Apes, after he says goodbye to Daena, who loves him.

Leo climbs aboard Pericles' pod, which is undamaged, and uses it to travel back in time. Leo crashes on what appears to be a futuristic Washington DC on Earth in 2029. He looks up to see the Lincoln Memorial is now a monument in honor of Ape Lincoln. As a swarm of ape police officers, who are still against humans, descend on Leo, he (and the audience) wonders what has happened to his world.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Critical response

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The film received mostly negative reviews from critics, mostly because of the contrast of its ending compared to the original 1968 film.[citation needed] Roger Ebert commented that "Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting". Other critics commented on the disappointment they suffered after expecting a good film from the highly regarded director Tim Burton.[citation needed] Kirk Honeycutt said "The movie fails to rise to the high emotional and imaginative standards Burton has set for himself".

[edit] Awards

Group Award Won?
2001 Golden Raspberry Awards
Worst Supporting Actress to Estella Warren Yes
Worst Remake or Sequel Yes
Worst Supporting Actor to Charlton Heston Yes

[edit] Ape Lincoln

In Kevin Smith's Q&A DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith, he recalls, along with his connection to Burton on a failed Superman project, an odd coincidence about this film. Smith explained that, while talking to reporter friend Lou Lumenick about Planet of the Apes, he saw that the film's twist ending, which depicted an ape head in place of Lincoln's at the Lincoln Memorial, was similar to a panel from Smith's comic book mini-series Chasing Dogma, in which apes take Lincoln's head off the monument and replace it with the ape head.

Smith and Lumenick joked about releasing a tongue-in-cheek article about Smith contemplating legal action against 20th Century Fox. However, when the article was actually printed, it did not come off as a tongue-in-cheek remark. In the article, Burton stated "Anyone who knows me knows that I would never read a comic book and I would especially never read anything written by Kevin Smith." Smith jokingly remarked that Burton's statement "explains Batman", also saying "he got the Scissorhands out" (referring to the media spat between Burton and Smith).

The remake's ending is actually closer to that of the book on which the original films were based. In the book, the protagonist returns to Earth from the planet of the apes only to find that Earth itself is populated by apes, and that after his hundreds of years (relative) of space travel, apes are the dominant species in the galaxy. The famous Statue of Liberty scene was an alteration made in the original movie.

[edit] Trivia

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The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • Due to a series of remakes that were both critical and commercial failures in the 1990s, the term "Re-Imagining" was created to describe this film to distance it from the stigma that had become attached to so many modern-day remakes. The term would go on to be used by other resurrected franchises, most notably Battlestar Galactica, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
  • Karl Vasich, the officer who commands the Oberon, is referred to as 'commander'. His actual rank is shown on his uniform, as he wears the three stars of a Lieutenant General and is, like all other Oberon crewmembers, a United States Air Force officer. Commander refers to his commanding of the Oberon.
  • Lt. Colonel Alexander, at the beginning of the movie, clearly calls the super intelligent ape "Seamus" (pronounced "shay-mus," or "shame us"). This shows the corruption in ape society from the beginning (the crash of the Oberon) to modern (Thade's era) times. This is also shown with the name 'Calima' (the apes' name for the forbidden zone), later revealed to originate from a badly corroded sign on the Oberon: CAution, LIve aniMAls.
  • This project did not originate with Tim Burton. Other directors who were attached to the project at various times were Oliver Stone and James Cameron who was interested with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. Terry Hayes, screenwriter for The Road Warrior wrote a draft Return to the Planet of the Apes which was a sequel/remake to the original series.
  • James Cameron has stated the film's critical failure is because the studio hired the wrong director and although he loves Burton's films, his late involvement makes it the only film that doesn't look like one of his movies.
  • Tim Burton has stated the plan was for sequels to carry the names of the original films, although the plots would likely differ.
  • Charlton Heston had a small, uncredited role as Zaius, Thade's Father,[2] where he repeated the lines "Damn them, damn them all to hell."
  • The symbol of Ape City (the open circle with the vertical line) represents the Oberon, their origin.
  • Mark Wahlberg refused to go shirtless (or wearing the loincloth Charlton Heston wears in the original film) because of his history as an underwear model.
  • The only gun the apes have is owned by Thade's dying father played by Charlton Heston, gun rights activist and former President of the National Rifle Association.
  • Parts of the film were shot at the Trona Pinnacles.[3]
  • At the beginning of the film, ape soldier Attar says "Take your stinking hands off me, you damned dirty human," a reference to the famous Charlton Heston quote from the 1968 film: "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape."
  • In one scene, General Thade exclaims, "Extremism in the defense of apes is no vice!" This is a satire of conservative Arizona politician Barry Goldwater, who uttered, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," during his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination at the 1964 Republican convention. He lost the election in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Planet of the Apes (2001)
  2. ^ Planet of the Apes at the Internet Movie Database - Full Cast List
  3. ^ David Kelly, Stark Beauty, Solitude, Squalor and Sulfur -- Trona Has It All, The Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2006, Accessed December 28, 2006.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Planet of the Apes
Movies
TV
Characters
Print
Miscellaneous
v • d • e
Films directed by Tim Burton
1980s
Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) • Beetlejuice (1988) • Batman (1989)
1990s
Edward Scissorhands (1990) • Batman Returns (1992) • Ed Wood (1994) • Mars Attacks! (1996) • Sleepy Hollow (1999)
2000s
Planet of the Apes (2001) • Big Fish (2003) • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) • Corpse Bride (2005) • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
2010s