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>> Was Tim Burton gutsy or just plain stupid to remake the sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes?

by MATTHEW HAYS

I must begin this article by coming out of the closet. I always have been, and still am, a Planet of the Apes freak. The movies creeped me out as a kid, the first one knocking me for a loop with its nuclear-angst finale. I demanded all the toys for Christmas. I had the books. I watched every episode of the dreadful Apes TV series. I had Planet of the Apes nightmares, in which gorillas rode into out schoolyard and started lynching schoolchildren.

Thus when offered the junket for Tim Burton's remake of the '68 original, I signed up immediately. Understandably, it's become the most talked-about movie of the year, with many estimating Burton really is insane for trying to ape one of the quintessential movies of the '60s.

Though it sounds like trite Hollywood publicist spin, Fox types are saying the director behind such films as Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Pee-wee's Big Adventure, has not remade, but rather "reimagined" the original. This time, the publicists are right. Burton clearly took a few steps back, took a deep breath and sensibly decided to simply riff on some of the film's central ideas, while creating something completely new.

"Fox approached me with this," says the bespectacled Burton, flapping his hands about demonstratively. "I signed on because they assured me they weren't looking for a remake. If I was trying to remake it I may as well have just thrown myself off a bridge or something!"

Wahlberg does the time warp

Burton's universe has Mark Wahlberg playing an astronaut who's trying desperately to train apes to be able to operate spaceships so that they can explore outer space. When his commanding officer won't let him launch his own shuttle, a frustrated Wahlberg defies orders and blasts off anyway. He's soon caught up in a time warp and, true to the first film, sees the dials a-spinnin' several millennia ahead. One dramatic crash-landing later, and Wahlberg realizes he's on an upside-down planet, where apes rule and humans are despised underlings. Helena Bonham Carter plays a sympathetic chimp, the movie's granola type, a human rights activist who insists humans and apes can live together peacefully. Tim Roth plays a fearmongering, hate-filled chimp who loathes those damn dirty humans.

"I had followed the original five films, for sure," says Burton. "I liked the circular motion to their structure, the idea of the parallel universes. Are we coming or are we going? The tension between Darwinian and religious beliefs; the films made you look at things differently."

And simian purists might be put off by the film's entirely different tone. True to his style, Burton injects bits and pieces of campy humour at key points in the film, including ironic lines from the first film spoken once more by different characters. Burton even has one ape utter Rodney King's "Can't we all just get along?" line. Thus much of the nasty nihilism from the original films is gone. Wahlberg leads the humans in rebellion, almost making the film feel more like a Mad Max sequel than an Apes remake.

The chimpanzee as outsider

Though a number of big names were attached to the Apes remake, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to James Cameron to Oliver Stone, Burton does seem like a filmmaker who could bring something to one of Fox's most coveted franchises. "There are people who act like animals in my movies," he says, confirming the thematic through-line of his oeuvre. "There's this primal vs. intellectual thing happening. I tend to rely more on how I feel than how I think." And Bonham Carter, playing a sort of Cornelius/Zira hybrid, is a classic Burton outsider. "She doesn't feel a part of her own culture. She's a rebel. And she's one of those people who gravitates toward animals because they know they don't fit in."

But Planet of the Apes isn't really a precedent for Burton. He's been here before, of course, having taken on the legendary Batman comic book character and ripping him from throes of the campy Adam West TV series. The '89 film earned hundreds of millions and launched its own franchise. "It is hard to deal with these movies in terms of baggage," Burton concedes. "Because everyone has their own context for the films. That's why a more traditional remake was out of the question." One thing Burton refused to budge on was the costumes. "There was talk of computer generated apes," he reports. "The film had to have humans playing apes, I felt."

There may be some debate about Wahlberg's status. He appears like something of an ape, biceps and pecs bulging through his black shirt, clearly full of a new confidence after this month's Vanity Fair declared him a bona fide Hollywood leading man. "I'm over worrying what people think," he says. "I went from being dismissed as a rapper to being just a model to being homophobic to rumours of being gay. I'm fine with it. What I'm interested in is making good movies."

Charlton as ape

When his casting call was made public last year, Wahlberg did state, quite bluntly, that he didn't think much of his predecessor Charlton Heston's politics, specifically the gun thing. "Coming from the inner city, I have a different take on that." For the record, Wahlberg says of Heston, "he's a legend. I don't agree with all his views. Said he was honoured to be in a movie with me. He was lying, but I'll take it."

Heston does provide the casting equivalent of a cherry on top for the film. Here he plays a dying ape leader, who warns his warrior son of the dangers of those nasty humans. For producer Richard Zanuck, getting Heston on board provided a strange sense of déjà vu. "Because of my own personal history, I've been in my own time warp," he says (Zanuck produced both the original Planet of the Apes and the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes). After the success of the original, Fox wanted to fast-track a sequel into cinemas. Zanuck met with a reluctant Heston in a Beverly Hills café. "He said he'd only do it on two conditions: he'd give us six days and he wanted Taylor to get killed off. Otherwise, no deal."

Thus Heston became a supporting character in Beneath and James Franciscus took the lead. When Burton wanted Heston for a bit part, Zanuck booked a table at the very same Beverly Hills cafe and, some 30 years later, made the same begging plea. "I told him it was a tribute to him," Zanuck says. Heston paused. "'But you killed me in the second picture!'" Then Heston smiled, Zanuck recalls, and softened. "'Oh, I see. You're bringing me back as an ape, right? Oh what the Hell. We'll have fun with this.'"

Planet of the Apes: then and now

THEN	NOW
Couldn't speak in '68. Model Linda Harrison was the mute Nova who took a shine to Heston. She also married producer Zanuck (the two have since divorced).	Model Estella Warren becomes the hottie who's after Wahlberg. The humans can speak in Burton's vision. Harrison makes a cameo.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the original was that Heston was not an entirely sympathetic figure. Clearly misanthropic, he was something of a fascist himself.	Mark Wahlberg is pretty much a good guy, through and through. Which makes him kinda dull. Nice ass though.
Was always a gorilla in the original movies and series, played by everyone from James Whitmore to Claude Akins.	In a post-Jane-Goodall world, Burton says we've learned from chimp watchers that they are, in fact, quite capable of all sorts of nastiness, probably scoring a more devilish rating on the nasty scale than gorillas or orangutans. Thus the prime baddie in the new movie is a chimp played by Tim Roth.
The original city, inspired by the architecture of demigod Gaudi, was way, way cooler.	Ape City now resembles the Gilligan's Island huts (except there are more of them). Kind of a disappointment.
The original film was rife with nihilistic politics of the '60s. The ending is a stunning nuclear-angst moment. And the trial sequence was drawn from screenwriter Michael Wilson's own experiences (he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and dragged before the HUAC).	There really aren't any. Though there is the "peace is good and war is bad" theme going on, it's really not a terribly risqué film, made for fun and not for message.
Jerry Goldsmith's original score is simply astonishing. Relying primarily on percussive instruments, the composer can take the credit for at least half the film's creepiness.	Though Danny Elfman has created some brilliant scores (Batman and The Simpsons in particular), this one is fairly forgettable.
Almost certainly the greatest a-ha! surprise in movie history, right up there with those of Psycho, Diabolique or The Crying Game. Can anyone ever really look at the Statue of Liberty the same way again?	Burton's ending, kept a secret from everyone in the cast except Wahlberg, has a nice catch. But it would be truly unfair to expect Burton to out-do the original's.

Planet of the Apes opens Friday, July 27