IF YOU’VE SEEN THE PREVIEWS or read the Hollywood hype, then you know that this summer’s latest blockbuster, Planet of the Apes, is a movie that asks its viewers deep, deep questions. Across America, we’ve been warned for months that director Tim Burton—famous for his lushly dark versions of Batman and Sleepy Hollow—had taken a semi-schlock film from 1968 and remade it into a powerful allegory of man’s inhumanity to man and bestiality to beast. There’s just one problem: It isn’t true. The 1968 Planet of the Apes was a fairly silly science-fiction outing from before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey redefined the genre, and its production values have not stood the test of time. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Roddy McDowell shuffling along in his monkey suit in one of the lead roles.) And yet, that original film, co-written by the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and starring Charlton Heston, actually did try to raise some deep questions about humanity and inhumanity by telling the story of an Earthling stranded on a world ruled by apes. What it lacked in modern computer graphics, it made up for by being a tight little allegory about the Cold War, racism, and the future of mankind. Tim Burton’s new version has all the modern over-production anyone could want—but, curiously, what gets lost is the allegory. This Planet of the Apes is just a story about a man among some apes. On the whole, that may not be a bad thing, given what passes in Hollywood these days as an idea worth allegorizing. The new version does have its cringy moments. While helping the stranded hero, Leo Davidson (played by Mark Wahlberg), escape Ape City, two “socially conscious” apes smash his gun against a rock before he has the chance to shoot the armed gorillas pursuing them. “Don’t stoop to their level,” Ari, the daughter of an influential ape senator, tells Leo. (What, better to be six feet under?) But there are some balancing moments, too. After being nearly killed by a band of warriors seeking the marooned astronaut, Limbo, an ape who peddles human slaves, cries, “Can’t we all just get along?” In Burton’s version, the year is 2029. Space station Oberon is zapped by an electromagnetic storm, and Captain Leo Davidson is instructed to dispatch a genetically engineered chimpanzee in a reconnaissance pod to survey the storm. The pod, its chimp commander at the controls, is swallowed up by the storm, never to be heard from again. “Never send a monkey to do a man’s work,” Davidson says and straps himself into another pod. Batted around like a pinball, Davidson’s ship comes out of the storm to crash land on a jungle planet. Emerging from his disabled ship, Davidson is immediately caught up in a crowd of rag-clad humans fleeing ape hunters. Captured and sent in a horse-driven slave cart to Ape City, the confused Davidson is purchased by Ari—a young female known throughout Ape City as a staunch fighter for equal rights for humans. This raises the ire of the militaristic apes, particularly Thade, the chief of the great Ape Army, who is suspicious of Davidson and eventually discovers that he is from another planet. While Davidson is working as a kitchen servant in Ari’s house, the film makes a gesture toward allegory—and it proves typical Hollywood pabulum. At a dinner party hosted by Ari’s father, a debate ensues about how to handle the human race. “We can’t just keep throwing money at the problem,” one of them says. The soldiers want to kill all the humans, the politicians want to keep them as slaves, and Ari wants them to have equal rights. We’re supposed to be like Ari, sharing her concerns for equality, environmentalism, justice, and animal rights. Fortunately the rest of the film distracts the viewer with action scenes of human-ape battles and Davidson’s escape. Perhaps the biggest difference between the original Planet of the Apes and the remake—and something that may account for the slow pace of the earlier film—is that the humans couldn’t talk back in 1968. The marooned astronaut, Charlton Heston as Colonel Taylor, spent most of the movie trying to figure out what was going on because he could not communicate with his human compatriots. In the 2001 version, Davidson gets the low-down right off the bat, moving the story straight to his escape and his rousing of his fellow humans to fight back. What’s lost in the action is the surprising intelligence of the 1968 version. Rod Serling was known for using his 1960s television series, The Twilight Zone, to raise interesting science-fictiony questions about ethics, technology, politics, metaphysics, and the meaning of it all. You can see what he brought to the film—based on a tale written by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai—by comparing it with the sequels that followed: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), all of which lacked Serling’s touch. There is, for instance, the Cold War allegory that Serling hammers home at the end of the original Planet of the Apes. Taylor is riding down the beach after escaping from Ape City—still not sure what planet he’s on—and suddenly happens upon the Statue of Liberty, half buried in the sand. Realizing he’s actually been on a future Earth all along and that the human race had nuked itself out of existence, only to be replaced by the apes, Taylor shouts: “You did it! You bastards. You finally did it! Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!” Burton’s new version includes a cameo appearance by Charlton Heston (this time as the ape father of the villain Thade), who warns Thade about the dangers of the humans from space by saying, “Damn them! Damn them all to Hell!” But it has lost its punch, mainly because it is merely a gesture toward the earlier film. Shorn of the original film’s slow-paced intelligence, the line is just reference—reference without meaning. Still, taken purely as an action thriller, the new Planet of the Apes does its job. Burton constructs an ape civilization that is just primitive enough and just advanced enough to make its political structure and culture believable. The audience will cheer when Davidson eventually faces Thade in battle and the more sensitive ape warriors turn on their leader, embracing the principles of equality between the species. The story’s twists and turns will keep everyone guessing and entertained. And just like the original, there’s a major surprise waiting when Davidson at last lands back on Earth. If the cost of all this is the loss of meaningful cinematic allegory, well, be grateful: The kind of big ideas that Hollywood has these days about man and beast usually aren’t worth putting in movies. Christian Lowe covers aviation for Defense Week.
