Planet of the Apes

Rating:
Summary: Dissapointimg, but OK
Review: I love the original "Planet of the Apes", and after watching the trailers i felt like it was going to be a great film, since the beginning scenes, the film looked very cool, the "ape suite" scene, but then it started to slow down, and i truly did not like the film a lot, though i was interested in what happened, but the character development i didn't liked it, Tim Roth looked scary and everything in some scenes, but i tried to hate him, but i didn't quite did it, i liked the music, and i liked a bit the movie, but i find it dissapointing, but it's okay, maybe renting it on DVD will make me understanding it and liked it more (that happened to me with "Cast Away")

Rating:
Summary: More than it seems - as usual
Review: Well, it seems most people expected a movie á la Gladiator or Braveheart and got dissapointed. Or maybe they just thought it was hard to spot the "Burton" character this time around. Perhaps this review can shed some light on the matter for those people out there who so desperately want to love/hate this film without first thinking about what it is. Here's my 2 cents. Please hear me out. Leo isn't supposed to be deep or interesting. He is flat and cold not because Mark walberg is a bad actor, but because Leo is a soldier. He is only there to get the hell away from there. He doesn't care how the apes got that way, it doesn't matter. He doesn't think like Taylor in the original, he simply tries to survive. That's why he isn't gladiator or Mel Gibson. He doesn't care about the people he "just happens to help" on his way out of this place. That's also why <MAJOR SPOILER> he doesn't deserve a happy ending. I mean he gets the girl with the looks(and the chimp-girl with the brains) he even finds his lost monkey and reunites apes and humans in peace. And yet he leaves them all just to go home. He doesn't deserve to be a hero, and he isn't a sympathetic character so Burton decided to play a little joke on him in the end and give him a nice surprise when he finally reaches Earth. And as for the "Burton" character, well, granted there is no Edward Siscorhands, Ed Wood or Ichabod in this one. There is however a combination of Thade and Ari. They both stand out in society (like most Burton misfits) and they are both morally strong about their ideas. That's why Burton lets Thade kind of win in the end. And Ari gets a happy endning and also gets to tell people about the human who fell from the sky and therefore became a legend and a myth. Or fairytale if you will. POTA is not a fairytale but more like "the making of a fairytale". And like most of burtons movies it's also more than that. There's film magic at work when we see Charlton Heston. And both Tim roth and Paul Giamatti RULE!! I love this film both as a Tim Burton fan, a sci-fi fan and a fan of film in general. People should lighten up, and realize, that in any other director's hands this movie would have failed miserably OR be a mainstream action movie. In the hands of Burton it becomes neither. Like Sleepy Hollow and Batman Returns this is poetry in motion - flawed but staggeringly beautiful. And much more than it seems.

Rating:
Summary: This is closer to the original ending
Review: This ending is much closer to the idea of the original (the book) story than the older movies.
In the book it was always clear this was a different planet. It has great images, and, really, the best characters here are played by the Apes.

Rating:
Summary: Not Terrible
Review: First off, to respond to those who claim that the ending is ridiculous and "beyond all logic" let's remember something--this is PLANET OF THE APES, it's not Shakespeare. This is a fantasy film, so let's keep that in mind. There's no reason to over analyze it.

While the originial was a classic, it was also a bit hokey in appearance. The best thing about the newer version is the make up and the set design. Very Tim Burton-esque---dark.

The story isn't great by any means, but the image that is on the screen makes it well worth watching.

Rating:
Summary: With a better ending, I'd have given it 5 stars!
Review: The whole movie was excellent! The characters were exciting, and they drew you in.

My only complaint is the ending. I was expecting a more happy ending (he stays on the planet or gets back to the REAL Earth.)

If a movie doesn't have a good ending, I will leave feeling dissapointed.

Rating:
Summary: I just don't get it.
Review: The only really big dissapointment I felt from this movie was the public reactions to it. I don't know many people who liked it and I will be the first to admit that it has it flaws. I am a huge fan of the original series and one thing you have to do is seperate the story. Basically he took the idea of a human landing on a planet run by apes and that was it. Everything else was new for the subject matter. People have put down ceratin lines like "Never let a monkey do a man's job" but that is brilliant. It lives up to the cheesy factor of the first film. Lines being over acted, kind of a campy scifi movie. I never took the orinals to be poetry but a fun movie. I thought this movie was a 5+ on the visuals. Let's face it, Tim Burtons eye is amazing and it is far better then most films I see from a visual arena. I loved his last film Sleepy Hollow, the story, the visuals, the atmoshphere, I love that movie. I loved Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice for the same reasons. I am not sick of any of them. Planet of the Apes did lack basic features like making you care about the characters. Tim Roth's character was amazing but that was because of the performance. I plan on buying this on DVD because I did like it allot. It did have room to grow. I loved the end but it was real quick. I am dissapointed that crowd reactions haven't been better because now he does not plan on making the sequel. I think people need to give this film a better chance. It is not "Gone With the Wind" but it is a very fun ride even if it is bumpy.

Rating:
Summary: Better than expected.
Review: This movie is much better than I expected. The apes are great! Some parts are confusing, i.e. where did the horses come from? The ending is terrible. Otherwise, it's a great movie. Not a remake of the original, but a different approach to the same story. Well worth the ticket price. Just wish Tim Burton had put a better ending on it.

Rating:
Summary: The Makeup is Amazing.
Review: But the rest of the movie is not.

This production has none of the tension and suspense of the original. In a blur, Mark Wahlberg's character goes through some kind of temporal thingy, survives a crash landing on a strange planet, is chased through the jungle and captured by ape-soldiers, then sold into slavery in a simian society where apes speak, yet he doesn't ever seem particularly shocked or surprised by any of it. Takes it all in stride. "Yeah, sure, I go through temporal thingies, crash on strange planets, and get captured by talking apes all the time - all part of being a U.S. Air Force astronaut". It's like watching a movie on fast-forward.

As I said, no build-up, no tension, and no suspense. You never get any of the "what's going on here?" of the original. No suspense - "Will he talk, or won't he, and if so, when?". In the original, Taylor doesn't speak the unforgettable line "Take your paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" until a full hour has gone by. I don't mean to imply that this movie should have exactly aped the original (pun intended), but that it should at least have had something of the same pacing and build-up.

Nor is there any of the real horror of the original, as when Taylor discovers that his crewmates have been vivisected and lobotomized.

And on top of it all, this movie makes one of the most egregious sins a sci-fi production can make, in my opinion - that of activley dispelling your suspension of disbelief. I'm sorry, but when the director has "simian sapiens" use modern American colloquialisms and cultural references like "I'm having a bad hair day", or "can't we all just get along" in an effort to make his movie hip or relevant, then he's lost me. Tim Burton screwed up Batman, and now he's screwed up Planet of the Apes. Why people like Burton insist on foisting their unconventional "interpretations" off on us I'll never understand. Why can he not just take the source material, whether book or comic, and simply put what's contained therein on the big screen without getting all interpretive, and relevant, and hip? I went to this movie hoping so see something closer to Pierre Boulle's book, but what I saw was Tim Burton's usual drivel.

In summary, the makeup is amazing.

Rating:
Summary: Planet of the Apes
Review: A great movie, better than Oringinal Planet of the Apes. If you haven't already seen this movie see it. And it has a twist at the end. Starring Mark Whalberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter,
Paul Giamatti, Michael Clarke Duncan, Estella Warren, Kris Kristopherson, Glenn Shadix, Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa and Charlton Heston.

Rating:
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.