Planet of the Apes
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Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham-Carter, Estella Warren, Michael Clarke Duncan
Directed by: Tim Burton
Running time: Two hours

One goes to Planet of the Apes expecting Tim Burton's trade-marked visual brilliance. There are no disappointments in that department. We are invited to a planet where the apes are granted remarkable visual expression of their intellect - they have personalities written firmly on their diverse faces. They inhabit a wonderfully developed ape-city and are served there by faceless humans. Our visual faculties are satisfied. Do we have a story to intrigue our other senses? Not really.

The film is based on the Pierre Boulle novel, and has been called a "re-imaging" of Franklin Schaffner's 1968 film of the same name about a surly space-pilot crash-landing on a planet featuring an evolutionary change-around. A planet where apes have outstripped humans on the evolutionary ladder and reduced them to house servants and preferred prey in wild forests.

Needless to say, a set-up along these lines is quite fertile for developing ambiguous undercurrents between characters, or for employing irony and satire as handy tools for telling a story. We get very little of either.

First a chimpanzee-piloted space shuttle is lost in a space-storm, to which his human trainer Leo (Mark Wahlberg) reacts with admirable loyalty. He boards another shuttle and goes to the rescue. (In the story's little irony, Leo gets into trouble with bigoted apes by trying to help a chimp in the first place. To be sure, he gets his pay off, of sorts, for being good to the chimp). In no time he is lost in the storm himself and crash-lands on the alien planet amidst the results of the strange evolutionary distortion.

The funny thing is that Leo fails to register the circumstances with the fitting awe. He stays largely unimpressed by the sheer scale of the change of his own evolutionary status. He is the type that just wants to get on with things.

His motivation for whatever he does is his desire to get away from the demonic planet. Strangely, it is unchanged even when things are complicated further by the fact that they find an ally who displays an unorthodox interest in Leo. The chimp Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), a daughter of a famous senator, is a champion for human rights. She sides with the small rebellion led by Leo, and develops a distinct romantic interest in him.

In a purely human setting, she could have been a capricious rich-man's daughter. Here she is gentle, intelligent and likable. We look at her crush on Leo with pity. If she was a human girl in love with a chimp, we would have looked at her with giggling disgust (which, of course, tells us nothing more than how we view ourselves with respect to others).

The script here, however, is more concerned with completing the core story, Leo's escape happens without much headache and mystery. The romance is moved to the background, all developments that could have brightened up the plot are tossed into the "too intellectual, too complicated" drawer.

It would be going too far to call the film a remake of the 1968 original. "Reimaging," Tim Burton's term for what he has done, is much closer to the truth. "Homage" would be even closer. Yet, paying homage to a film, inferring from the recent production records, can only result in one of two things. First, a sort of acting method applied to directing. Its value, if any, is restricted to the director and provides for painful viewing (consider Gus van Sant trying to be Hitchcock with his "Psycho").

Second, it could lead to 20th Century Fox's annual money-making exercise. On the evidence of the box-office charts, the latter is the case. To Burton's credit, his "Planet of the Apes" keeps at a comfortable distance from the empty and slick silliness of the regular blockbuster fare. The film is not bad, it is quite intriguing at times and its visual merits are unquestionable. Yet, one simply struggles to see the point of it.

The 1968 film is the one that will be revered by fans once the money has been squeezed out of the 2001 rendition.