Ultimately, a pretty ape is sufficient on this planet

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 8, 2001

In which our humble narrator ventures into amateur film criticism and explains why he misses that great liberal actor, Charlton Heston.

The novel La Planete Des Singes, which translates as Monkey Planet or the more familiar Planet of the Apes, was published in 1963. Author Pierre Boulle often drew upon his experiences as a prisoner during World War II. (He also wrote Bridge on the River Kwai.) By creating a world ruled by apes, where humans are brutes to be hunted and caged, Boulle got in quite a bit of dark and intelligent commentary about the human condition.

The 1968 Hollywood film Planet of the Apes at least made a stab at these themes. Charlton Heston stars as Taylor, a cynical astronaut whose ship crash-lands on you-know-where.

The movie is 1960s political allegory barely disguised. The orangutans represent the politicians, the gorillas the military, the chimpanzees the scientists. Young apes stage sit-ins against the old order. The script mocks human racism by having the apes say all humans look alike, smell bad, and so forth. In a veiled commentary on Vietnam, the ape military prevails over weak politicians.

At the end, Taylor proves that humans once ruled the planet and escapes with his Eve-figure. They ride on horseback down the beach to freedom, only to find -- come on, it's been 33 years, you know the surprise ending by now -- the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand up to its neck. Taylor falls to the ground in anguish. He has been on a post-apocalyptic Earth all along.

Several schlocky sequels followed.

This brings us back to the present day, and a rewritten version of Planet of the Apes now playing. The star is Mark Wahlberg, the erstwhile singer and underwear model whom we last saw bobbing in the sea at the end of The Perfect Storm. (For those who missed the last few hundred waves: The storm wins.)

As you would expect from modern Hollywood, the technical aspects are excellent. The makeup will win many awards. The apes are portrayed far more convincingly than the people-in-monkey-suit acting of the original.

But the rewritten story is much different. Now the hero is a headstrong young astronaut who ignores all training and common sense, not to mention a direct order, steals a spaceship and disappears into a space-storm. He crash-lands and is nabbed by the apes in short order. (Hey, if you spend all that dough on makeup, you want to show it off.)

Almost all of the allegory of the original is gone. Humans have not been reduced to dumb brutes. The planet is not Earth. Humanity did not inflict an apocalypse on itself. In the original, it was the chimpanzee scientists who dared to consider the true nature of the humans. The theme of science versus prejudice was prominent. In the new version, there is no science needed; the humans' champion is an ape-senator's liberal daughter, properly steeped in the modern value of "diversity." The military-political tension is barely mentioned. At just the right moment, a key scene demonstrates how a well-behaved ape should be subservient to humans after all.

The movie ends up being a standard defeat-the-bad-guys story with a series of plot twists that must have seemed like a good idea to somebody. Perhaps out of a sense of obligation, the new filmmakers tack on a surprise ending of their own that makes no sense whatsoever. Ta-dah! Next project.

So the new Apes is a political commentary anyway, not for what it says, but for what it avoids. Today we don't want a cynical, ambiguous everyman like Heston, who starred in several we-are-doomed films of the era (Soylent Green is PEOPLE!) We don't want to Hold Up A Mirror To Society. So get rid of anything troubling, cheer for the hero and if the story doesn't quite make sense, who cares? It sure looks good, which, in politics as well as movies these days, is the whole point.

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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