Film - Philip Kerr finds living proof of the descent of man in this latest cinematic turkey
In the beginning was the movie, and the movie was good. And verily, it did beget three sequels, which were found wanting in the eyes of men. But this mattered not, as by then there did exist a Franchise, which resulted in a TV series and a range of toys. And the Franchise produced lots of money until it ran dry. And lo, after many years, a new voice was heard in the land of Twentieth Century Fox, and the voice said: "Cannot the Franchise be made to work again? Come, let us remake the first movie, and receive lots of gold." But there were some who said: "This is a really dumb idea. It could never be better than the original." But they were not listened to. And so it was that Fox brought forth Planet of the Apes, directed by Tim Burton and starring Mark Wahlberg. And verily, it was dreadful - so dreadful that a better title might have been Planet of the Turkeys - just as the doubters had predicted it would be.
For all the money that has been spent on this new film, nothing about it improves upon the original. To my eyes, even the make-up looks hardly better than John Chambers's Oscar-winning work for the 1968 version. To reverse the descent of man and transform a human being into a convincing ape requires more than just a rubber mask. The principal ape characters as played by Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall also had the advantage of a script that gave them well-defined characters. For all their screeching and chest-beating, these modern apes, played by Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter, exhibit no more character than the plastic toys once found in toyshops. To bowdlerise a phrase of Wittgenstein's, these apes might talk, but we cannot understand what drives them.
Elsewhere, sad to say, there is a great deal that is worse about this latest version.
Franklin J Schaffner's direction of the original film, starring Charlton Heston, was subtle, imaginative and full of impact. For all its Frank Gehry-style architecture and G-Plan furniture, Schaffner's Ape City always managed to look like a real place; Burton's tenebrous city - more Gotham than Ape - never looks like anything except the inside of a film studio.
The scene in the first version where the astronaut Charlton Heston first sees rifle-carrying apes on horseback is still one of the most arresting sequences in any sci-fi movie. But attempting the same scene, Burton throws away any sense of the astronaut's shock and horror. Wahlberg looks less astonished to find himself chased by a gang of apes dressed like Isabella Blow than I was to see his name above the title of this film. How on earth did Marky Mark get where he is now? On the evidence of the streamlined mediocrity of his acting skills, the name of Mark Wahlberg belongs on a list of the world's most unlikely film stars, alongside those of Cheetah the Monkey, Trigger the Horse and Emilio Estevez.
While Wahlberg hardly acts at all, Burton manages to coax performances of truly Baroque awfulness from almost everyone else, but especially from Roth and Bonham Carter, who are so camp that they would not look out of place in a Welsh Independent Ballet production of Tarzan.
Worst of all, however, is the script, which contains dialogue so risible and burlesque that it might easily have been written by French and Saunders. But it is the sheer paucity of new ideas in the script that most appals.
The original, written by Rod Serling and based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who is perhaps better known as the author of a story, mercifully not yet remade, called The Bridge over the River Kwai), was genuinely witty and intelligent - even provocative of our man-in-God's-image Weltanschauung. But this new, cliche-ridden version is proof - if proof were needed - of the dumbing down of Hollywood, and that ideas no longer matter a damn to the big studios. Because it is they who sell you the lie that clever special effects, dazzling art direction and deafening THX sound are all that matter in making today's films.
This lie reveals a truth, which is that no one in Hollywood wants ideas in pictures. Ideas need dialogue and, in this new age of movie globalisation, dialogue has to be translated into a dozen other languages. The fewer the words, the better. Words get in the way of the action.
But worst of all, dialogue needs a writer. Hollywood regards the writer as a necessary evil - tolerated, but something infinitely replaceable; as an ape, or creature, if you will. And the writer's vision counts for nothing against that of the director, whose sedulous ape the writer must become if he is to survive the film-making process long enough to be given his credit.
The Cambridge physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington wrote that "if an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum". On the evidence of this film, it seems that they have at least made a start by writing some of the screenplays in Hollywood.
If you want to find living proof of the descent of man, that is where you must go, because the real Planet of the Apes is Hollywood itself.
Planet of the Apes (12) is at cinemas nationwide
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