Now let’s gossip. In his busted Planet of the Apes rehash, director Tim Burton cast Lisa Marie and Helena Bonham Carter as chimpanzees. The former was his girlfriend of seven years, had been a Mars Attacks! alien and a Sleepy Hollow witch. Then Burton and Bonham Carter got together. They made six more films and two children.
When a director toward the end of a long relationship winds up dating a performer from their newest movie, the end product can feel deliciously treacherous. Is the camera the filmmaker’s own roving eye? A list of equivalent projects would include Paths of Glory, The Last Picture Show, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and if you think the gaze is always male, recall the delirium around Don’t Worry Darling. Apes 2001 is bloated nonsense, so forgive me for insisting on its carnal pleasures. It is the movie where it kinda seems like Mark Wahlberg wants to fuck a chimp. Bonham Carter’s performance convinces you that would be a good idea, which is the last great weird thing Burton brought to cinema.
Wahlberg is Leo Davidson, an Air Force astronaut in 2029. We meet the pilot handling his pal Pericles, a “chromosome-enhanced” chimpanzee who steers small ships on missions too dangerous for humans. Their station suddenly goes on high alert. A storm in space causes time travel, and the hero crashlands on a planet where the local monsters’ secret origin ties to his own backstory. Because the previous sentence describes the plots of 2009’s Star Trek and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, now would be the moment to argue this shaky reimagining had a secret influence on Hollywood. But the ninth biggest hit of the year became the franchise’s missing link. Its willful stupidity feels further from our time than the original films’ paranoid hysteria. The summer of 2001 is lost to us. I think this is the only Planet of the Apes made by people not remotely worried about the end of the world.
Wahlberg’s boring, like all the humans. Estella Warren and Kris Kristofferson play tribal homo sapiens who are vaguely primitive despite speaking modern English. Because Warren’s Daena is the nominal love interest, it’s spiteful how little the movie notices her. There’s more acting artillery across the species divide: Tim Roth as history’s meanest chimpanzee, Michael Clarke Duncan as a gorilla zealot, Paul Giamatti as an orangutan who almost makes you believe the phrase “charming slave trader.”
Rick Baker’s makeup astonishes. The industry legend’s work on this bad movie is a magnum opus painted on toilet paper. Roth’s General Thade is a one-note villain with a magnificent face. He looks young, old, monstrous, pitiful. Then there’s Bonham Carter as Ari, a brash intellectual who supports Human Rights. She rocks a baggy boho-Edwardian outfit with, by my count, two knit sweaters underneath her wide-lapeled jacket. Her haircut, I swear, is the Rachel. Visually she’s apex zhuzh, without question the character Burton cares about the most. In a tie-in coffeetable book released by Newmarket Press, Baker says it took a long time to nail Ari’s look. He explains: “It was important to Tim that she be sexually attractive.” I’m sure it was.
Ari purchases Leo from captivity to save him from the abuses of her fellow citizens. As a Senator’s daughter, she lives in aristocratic decadence. All the essential characters attend a fancy dinner at her father’s house, where they discuss a “welfare state” and “growing soft in our affluence.” Apes 2001 seems to know it should have themes, but I say this with love, the boldest political statement in Burton’s filmography is that monsters might like Christmas, too. It’s only embarrassing how stray dialogue paraphrases Barry Goldwater and Rodney King. When the human hero gives a rousing speech inspiring his fellow humans to fight back, it’s the Conquest climax reclaimed by the oppressors.
So Apes 2001 is an atrocity, if you take it seriously. Treasure how Bonham Carter’s performance echoes Burton’s old freakiness. Ari rolls her eyes during ape prayer. She comes off Enlightened Colonial, maybe Activist Heiress, and her suicidally eager confidence is the closest thing the movie has to a vintage Johnny Depp performance. That dinner is the one scene she shares with Marie, who plays the vapid society wife to a vast orangutan politician. Sounds like a nasty bit of stuntcasting for a soon-to-be-ex, but all the gags are baseline vulgar. When Ari brandishes her (heinous) servant-designed coat to prove humans have their own culture, Thade responds, “Everything in the human culture takes place below the waist.” He also tells Ari, “You feel so much for these humans, yet you feel nothing for me!” That one line suggests his evil stems from erotic frustration, Thade the overlooked Gaston to Leo’s Beast.
We could discuss the final creature-army battle (old-fashioned the moment The Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters) or the memorably cruel twist ending. Burton had invented a whole landscape for the 1990s, new horizons of lush retro-cartoon goth, and now he was making an expensive sarcophagus of his career. Apes 2001 has resources unimaginable to the earlier budget-strapped sequels: An Arizona unit and a Hawaii unit, three people working just on prosthetic dentures, a Charlton Heston cameo in full chimp makeup. None of it matters as much as Ari’s barely explicit, floridly obvious attraction to Leo. Anytime Daena gets close to the astronaut, the camera cuts to Ari frowning, and vice versa. In the published screenplay, when Leo prepares to leave, Ari touches him “in a gentle, grooming manner” while Daena “kisses him deeply.” In the finished film, both women get farewell smooches from their space man. You only believe one kiss, and it’s illegal in 49 states.
Previous Planet of the Apes essays:
Planet of the Apes is anti-human from the beginning
Why can’t every sequel be like Beneath the Planet of the Apes?
Escape from the Planet of the Apes invents the franchise’s future in the past
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes burns it all down, again
Battle for the Planet of the Apes is only worth it for the orangutans