Planet of the Apes (2001)
Directed by Tim Burton

Film Review

Pity poor Tim Burton, having to attempt a big budget remake of one of the best loved and most highly regarded science fiction films of the 1960s, Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968).  Without this high benchmark looming over him, Burton may have been a little more willing to give free rein to his imagination and the film would have benefited as a result.  Instead, presumably daunted by the monolith that is Schaffner's classic, Burton's creativity appears totally stifled, and whilst his film is competently made, in no way does it compare with the brilliance of the original, nor, for that matter, with Burton's own earlier films.

This glossy reboot has some impressive effects work but it suffers from a hopelessly confused narrative and a lack of character depth.  Another let down is the ape masks, which are far less convincing than those wonderful 1960s creations and appear unintentionally comical for the most part, with the result that the film's tension and dramatic impact are massively reduced.  Despite a strong cast, the human characters are dull and uninteresting (to the point that you cannot care less what happends to them) and the ape humanoids have little to set them apart from each other.  The ending is admittedly quite ingenious, but that hardly makes up for the film's obvious failings in so many departments.  Can this really be a Tim Burton film?  Yes, but not as we know it...

Film Synopsis

In 2029, Leo Davidson trains chimpanzees for space missions aboard the United States Air Force space station Oberon.  When the station is threatened by an approaching electromagnetic storm, Leo is forced by his superiors to launch his star pupil in a pod to investigate the storm.  He then follows the chimp in a second pod but is caught up in the storm and crashlands on what appears to be an alien world three millennia into the future.  To his surprise, Leo finds that the world is ruled by humanoid apes who have enslaved all human beings...