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Planet of the Apes (Single Disc Edition)

Planet of the Apes (Single Disc Edition)

List Price: $14.98
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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This Film Needs Redubbing
Review: Since the film LOOKS so good, not just in ads but on the screen, and thanks, not just to Tim Burton, but to the King Kong of ape makeup himself, Rick Baker, it should not be allowed to go to waste. All we need is some one to write a new script who has an ability to develop characters, to dramatize ideas rather than belaboringly state them, and some one who knows why Jar-Jar Binks is such a bad idea that insults the audience's intelligence and bores it. In other words, if they'd only hired a writer and fired the executives in charge of making "blockbuster" movies with insulting B-movie scripts, we might have had something here.

But instead what we have is hackneyed and tedious to listen to. Helena Bonham Carter is the only thing I liked watching and that was just because her beautiful eyes still communicate even through all the makeup. It was fun to WATCH the apes walk around and it was a stroke of insightful genius to see them express emotions like apes. It was delightful and thought-provoking to watch the enlightened, sophisticated, educated Helena Bonham-Carter ape break into terrified monkey yelps as she rode Marky Mark's back across the river in which she was afraid of drowning. This, the sniffing each other, the jumping around---all the behaving like real apes was great. It was like being able to see human emotion and its expressions from an exterior point of view. We would look funny when we laugh or shout or sweat or fidget, etc. if we could only see ourselves externally with the physicality and audibility of ourselves not understood from within, loaded up with cognitive content, but rather seen from without as the expressive quirks of animals.

Unfortunately they changed not only the ape way of behaving but they also changed the humans a little from the previous planet of apes movies. They made the humans capable of speech and then proceeded to give them nothing whatsoever worthwile to say. EVER. Instead we get a STUPID and UNREALISTIC boy who tries to take on an entire army of charging apes by himself with complete disregard for the larger plan that Marky Mark is trying to get to work, ALL so that we can see that Marky Mark, in trying to save him, has learned to think of others before himself like Helena Bonham-Carter does. AWWWWW. Isn't that sweet? And utterly lame?

Or there is Amazon Woman, pure human physical beauty who pines after our hero while he falls in love with an ape woman. How ever will this love triangle be resolved? Well, Marky Mark can always add to the male harem fantasy by getting to kiss the adoring women of two different species before flying away in his spaceship! My, oh my, have we evolved!

Prepackaged drivel loaded with cliche "morals" pasted into the script at random points by a team of trained monkeys apparently. What is this movie about? Animal rights? Race relations? The welfare state? Man's inhumanity to man? The O-Zone layer? Making lots of money off an assumed-to-be-unthinking public? AHH, I think it's the last one.

Last but not least the laughable, extremely boring and unimaginative plot ends with an ending which I almost thought made the whole preceding borefest worthwile. I got a kick out of our surprise ending, although in subsequent weeks I can't seem to find any one who can exactly decipher what it was supposed to mean. But there's the surefire way to make your ending unpredictable, have it make no sense. That way no one can anticipate it by using their good sense.

The worst part of it all is Tim Burton's affiliation with this project. You would think that a man so bitter about studio control over Batman, a man capable of such works of beauty as Edward Scissorhands and the Nightmare Before Christmas, a man capable of fighting against formulas as he did with Beetlejuice, a man so willing to follow his artistic and thematic guts in Ed Wood and Mars Attacks!-- even at the price of financial humiliation, would not be capable, this far into his career, of becoming a puppet of a money-grubbing studio. Maybe the commercial failures of Ed Wood and Mars Attacks have ruined his ability to assert himself creatively. Or maybe, this was a chance to earn another IOU in credibility from the studios that he might go and make another Edward Scissorhands, like he did after Batman opened up his chance to do whatever he wanted. Maybe that's what this is all about. Paying dues to Hollywood before making real films again. Yeah, maybe that's it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I read the book a looooong time ago!
Review: I enjoyed this film much more than I thought I would. It didn't get the best reviews, but I feel the story was handled well, the characters were believable and easy to relate to, the action was enough without being too much and the ending, (which many thought was such a 'different' one) was actually the way it was written originally in Pierre Boullet's book. I was almost disappointed with the Liberty statue ending in the Heston version because I was expecting the author's ending. Well, that was Hollywood, I thought. It may still be Hollywood, but I think it was an improvement in spite of the fact I always liked the other one - mainly because of being a Heston fan.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: entertaining and well written story!
Review: I'm really staggered to see how this movie has gotten so trashed by everyone. Just because the story is different than the original? Just 'cause Mark Wahlberg wanted to return home and nothing else? Because the ending was different? Because Estella Warren wasn't a "fully developed" character? Well, damn you all! Aren't you able to simply sit back and enjoy a movie anymore? You americans obviously wanted a remake along the lines of Psycho, like a shot-by-shot reconstruction. But those kinds of films completely lack dignity and almost can't be called movies. More like imitations of movies. All this film has in common with its original is that there is a planet ruled by apes. It is not set on this planet, but in another time and another place. Mark Wahlberg replaces the legendary C. Heston as the lead, and some have said that the former just doesn't measure up to the latter. But come on, people, Wahlberg is playing a completely different character! Heston was 43 when he filmed the original, and Wahlberg was 29 when he filmed this! The former's character was cynical and gruffy, the latter's is young, confused, and inexperienced. He may not be as intriguing a character as Heston's, but it's still a well-written role in its own right. The script is also generally well-written, although it admittedly has some trouble in the scenes when Wahlberg first crashes on the planet. They are a bit confusing and messy. But from there it's all uphill. We meet a variety of imaginative and engrossing characters like human slave trader Limbo, human rights activist Ari, general Thade, colonel Attar, and two pleasantly funny and goofy old ape senators in a really funny dinner scene. Halfway through the film's plot starts unfolding and Heston has a really enjoyable little scene where he explains almost every loose thread of the story. Th battle scene between the humans and the apes is a little too low-key, but it doesn't hurt the movie at all. All in all, this is a quality effort that, for my money, really lives up to all the hype. Well done once again, Tim! The bad reviews had me fearing you'd delivered your first failure, but it's clear to me now that you can do no wrong!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Horrible "re-imagineering"
Review: The only good things about this new version (ie. Hollywood interpretation of Boulle's novel) were the makeup and special effects. But let's face it, that just doesn't cut it anymore. Any monkey (excuse the pun) in Hollywood can do FX these days. We need substance too!! Burton really butchered this one. I didn't care one bit about any of the characters. Davidson was uncaring about everything. Ari was just strange a aloof. And the model that was cast as the love interest was a waste of air, film, and space. The ending was just ridiculous! The ending of the original film version (even though it differed from the book ending) wrapped up everything into nice package with a bow on it. The ending of Burton's version simply said: "Cut, that's a wrap. Let's start filming the sequel in two weeks everyone! Nice job!" The ending had no meaning to the movie that came before it. It was pathetic and an insult to my intelligence.

Booooo to Tim Burton and Hollywood for making drivel like this.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A typically intelligent Tim Burton film.
Review: 'Planet of the Apes' is a very clever film, easily superceding the 'original', throwing ideas and allusions all over the place without ever really following them up. It plays with the old 'stick a bunch of apes in a room and they'll eventually come up with Shakespeare' chestnut, by alluding to 'Pericles', 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'Hamlet' etc. 'Apes' is not a futuristic warning, but a documentary about the way we live now, prey to our violent instincts, desperate for charismatic, fascistic leaders: degenerate, uncultured, unthinking beasts.

Like 'Mars Attacks', 'Apes' is an attack on American philistinism; like the aliens, the apes in the first section mercilessly mock the pretensions of humans, with their faith in science and technology. Neither race, human or ape, would come come up with Shakespeare today if you locked them in a room with the complete works of Shakespeare to copy.

This sense of degeneracy structures another mythic narrative, that of Christ - after the appearance of Charlton Heston, the film goes all Ben-Hur and Cecil B. Demille. Wahlburg is the man who arrives from the stars to deliver the human faithful from an ape empire deliberately modelled on the Romans. This millenial theme also figures in the allusions to another space/monkey classic, Kubrick's '2001: a Space odyssey'. Overall, the film is closer to the science fiction of HG Wells, with its anxieties about race and what it means to be human, than the late 60s that produced the original.

Visually, the film is frequently miraculous, with some lovely conceits, my favourites being the shuttling pod looking like an anguished tear-drop, the ape scarecrows that litter the desert to ward off humans (an eerily Gothic image) and the ruins of the spaceship. There are some truly haunting sequences, such as the 'Blair Witch'-like footage of the lost crew. The portentous epic form (especially 'Gladiator') is frequently invoked only to be bathetically undermined (although Burton is sometimes too convincing in replicating their dinosaur dullness).

The actual experience of watching the movie, though is dispiriting. The idea of inversing his usual narrative of outsider vs. settled community, with the WASP as outsider and the freaks as the hierarchical society, could have been interesting if the hero wasn't so stolid. Roth as a Mockney Darth Vader is annoying. The narrative is non-existent, simply capture, escape, revolt (I'm Spartacus!), and Burton's usual gallery of amiable and awful eccentrics is replaced by vacuous supermodels and the spirits of Jar-Jar Binks.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: One shouldn't "monkey around" with a classic!
Review: Being a longtime fan of director Burton, I anxiously awaited his revamping of the 60's classic. With make-up by Oscar winner Rick Baker, score by Danny Elfman, and featuring a cameo by ole' Chuck Heston himself, I just knew that the filmmaker had a hit on his hands.
Well, I have seen it and was marginally impressed. The movie doesn't come close to the strengths of the original. I realize that Burton claims not to have "remade" the classic but "reinterpreted" it. If this is so, then, why were some of the first flicks' lines so liberally "borrowed"? Why did the apes' march on the humans in the Forbidden Zone reminiscent of a scene in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes? Was Elfman consciously aware that he tried to duplicate the excitement of the wondrously innovate Goldsmith score from the original?
And the ending? I had figured that one out thirty minutes earlier. It even lacked the "punch" that the partially revealed Statue of Liberty did in the '68 great.
Acting nods go to Tim Roth, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Charlton Heston's brief but memorable appearance. Star Mark Wahlberg is rather bland, but that is due, in part, to the lack of development of his character.
It is films like this one that makes me thankful for matinees.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Action
Review: Planet of the Apes was good movie because the action
with great but the story was confusing!!! I would see it again!!! I think it was pretty good movie!!! I rate it a 4!!!
you should see it!!!Bye!! Thanks for Reading!!!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great graphics,Great acting, but confuseing
Review: Mark Whalberg brings a space guy in a space station in the year 2019 who goes threw a a hole threw time chaseing after a nother space capsul, Wile he crahs s in the feature (witch is after a nuclear war where most of man-kind got wiped out)witch also the space station carshÂ's on the planet sometime in the past witch was somewhat a thousand years back where Whalberg crashed. The ending of the movie will have on the edge of your seat rather at home or theature.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Depressing
Review: As I watched for about 20 minutes, especially when the Mark Wahlberg landed on the Ape Planet, saw the children apes behave so barbaric and unkind, I decided to leave and see The Curse of the Jade Scorpion which was more light and funny. Planet of the Apes is not for adult consumption, I can see where it was high tech and involved alients. Not monkeys, please. I was already stressed out from work, this movie is a "stress" jerker not buster.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This is a horrible movie.
Review: There are many lines that stick out from this movie that exemplify the aforementioned horrible-ness, namely:
"Don't leave a monkey to do a man's job."
The entire dialogue is so ridiculously contrived it is insulting. There are no character developments, no interesting plot twists, nothing believable about it. Specifically, the scantily-clad blonde comes to mind. She literally had maybe a half dozen lines before the end of the movie, yet we were supposed to believe there was some great love from her toward the main character just because she shot him some doe-eyed looks here and there. The plot was HORRIBLE. The characters were HORRIBLE. There was some nice special effects and the environment was lush and beautiful, and that's the only reason I gave it 2 stars.


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