Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (2001)

I saw this movie on channel Seven the other night and wasn't expecting much cause I heard isn't good.As the intro credit rolls, I saw it was directed by Tim Burton.Usually I might research a movie before I see it but this so happen to show on TV so I was unprepared to like WIKI it or something.Anyway, with Tim Burton titled, I thought "So is this going to suck" cause he makes pretty good movies, what with recent 'Charlie and Chocolate Fac', 'Sweeny Todd' and upcoming 'Alice in Wonderland'

[SPOILER STARTS]

Movie starts off with your space station doing deep space research with then leads one thing to another, having the main character Capt Leo Davidson, played by Mark Wahlberg, heading towards an anomaly to save his pet ape or something. He then ofcourse travels through time, ends up in the future and crashes down onto an unknown planet.

'Your doing it wrong'
He then encounters humans and apes in an all out confusing and gets cought by the apes. When jailed with a couple of 'damn dirty humans', one being your typical blonde chick, he encounters a she-ape who for some reason really really likes humans.

'Damn his a fine looking human'
The she-ape helps release the main character and the blonde chick, at then which the civilised space man starts to make a break for it, bringing with him the blonde chick, her family and the she-ape. He goes back to his ship to get supplies, a tracking beacon to find help and a gun which gets broken in 3mins. They get to a ship, apparently its the space station at the start of the movie. Supposingly, when he took off to rescuse his pet ape, the space station decided to follow, which like him crash landed on the planet but apparently didn't go through time.

'A man's only as big as the weapon he carries'
In any case, the space dudes and dudettes on board then gets over runned by the chimps and chimpettes and there you go, thats how the planet was infested with apes and humans apparently EPIC FAILED IT. The main character then does an uninspiring brave heart speech to his 'dirty humans' and fight with the army of apes heading their way. Eventually his pet ape, who is the only one that ever make a safe landing, shows up and stops the fight between humans and apes.

'Where is the rebel base?'
The main character then gets on the ape ship and leaves without him to head back through the anomaly hoping to go home. He gets to earth and see that everything in apes now, everything looks modern but just ape-man everywhere. THE END

I've seen the old school 1968 Planet of the Apes, and the difference between this and that one was that humans can't talk in 1968, 2001 they can, the famous 'damn dirty ape' was changed to 'damn dirty human', 'damn them all to hell' was said by an ape instead of a human and the planet was not earth in 2001.

[SPOILER ENDS]

Character

Your main selfish character that can't do anything unless his got a gun, no development from start to finish

Your main human chick, that does nothing but kisses the main character in the end

Your main bad guy who will never have a change of heart

Your main ape chick that has no explaination for her love for humans and also kisses the main character in the end

Your other apes who goes from evil to nice so quick and easy

overall, bad character development all around

Story

Way to many plot holes that makes no sense

Humans that can talk and stuff and still fail at everything

Unexplained ending, just made no sense

Can't remember them all...

Action

Its about as much as you can get from ape hand to hand combat

Alot of wire jumping for the apes

Final Thought

In the end, it tried to take on a different approach the planet of the apes story but causes more questions and headaches than answers. Not sure if it was trying to be realistic. The movie wasn't too bad, definalty not a highly recommended movie. Costume and makeup was top notch though. Its a movie that you wouldn't mind going through if your bored but would cause you to complain about crappy characters and story.

Overall, I give it 2 damn dirty apes out of 5