I am Finally Prepared to Review “Planet of the Apes”

I just re-watched the 2001 edition of “Planet of the Apes” (slow night for Scifi) , starring every incredible actor on the Planet of the Humans (Helen Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti and Michael Clarke Duncan… or maybe Ving Rhames), as apes. Mark Wahlberg somehow fell into the lead role as the human pilot who crash lands on a planet where apes rule and humans are slaves or renegades with great teeth.

Man, what a bad movie.

Seriously, this is just a DUMB movie. The script can’t decide whether this is a serious social commentary or a slightly goofy action film (It accomplishes neither). The apes leap all over the place in that ‘Whee, I’m on wires!’ look. Mark Wahlberg is unconvincing as a scientist/pilot in the future and his ‘stirring’ call to arms speech against the apes sounds like he’s reading the tags on the back of his shirt (those who are wondering what went wrong with his performance in “The Happening” should review this film for background). The ending makes zero sense (Wahlberg returns to Earth to find that the main bad ape somehow also returned to Earth to become the literal Abe Lincoln of ape emancipation… complete with a Lincoln Ape Memorial).

And yet there is one piece of brilliance in this film that I must commend right now.

Somebody snookered all those talented actors to dress up like apes.

The make-up is pretty amazing. Unlike the original, where you could see where the eyes and mask met as well as the bad mouth movement, this makeup is very convincing. These Oscar nominees and winner really DO look like apes, right down to their bad teeth (Wait, why do the apes get shafted on dental care?) It’s an amazing transformation and whomever created these creatures is a genius.

Just like the guy who got the actors to get in the gorilla costumes.

See, this had to take hours to put on. Many, many hours in some cases. It also had to take many hours to take off, leaving only a short time frame to actually ACT, thus extending the days they had to shoot this film. All in all, a pretty uncomfortable experience. And yet, there are all these great actors, eating grass shoots, climbing walls and doing all things simian.

I can see the various pitches to these actors. Work with Tim Burton, work with all these great actors, great acting challenge, revive a classic film – whatever worked. I can even see money being applied to grease the wheels, but in this case I don’t think that was the determining factor. To me, it was the lemming approach of “If all these other great actors are doing this, I need to do this!”. So one, by one, they signed the contracts. Suckers.

Now, there are four possible outcomes of any filming experience:

• 1. Good Movie – good time filming
• 2. Good Movie – bad time filming
• 3. Bad Movie – good time filming
• 4. Bad Movie – bad time filming

I’ve already pronounced judgment on the first part of that equation and I can venture that the second part falls into category #4 for the ape-actors. I can see them all sitting motionless in the makeup chairs for hours on end, drinking soup through a straw and listening to the makeup artist play country music on a tape deck (this was 2001) while they had their monkey foreheads slowly glued to their faces. They had to be meditating on the mantra “I’d like to thank the Academy… I’d like to thank the Academy” to keep from ripping off all the latex and running for the nearest limo. I can also see the looks on their faces as the lights came up at the end of the premiere screening. There’s a slight pause, then they all stand and slowly stare at each other. The culmination of all those hours in the makeup chair is symbolized by a giant bust of Ape Lincoln at the end of the film and at last, the joke is extremely clear.

Somebody made a monkey out of them.