"Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"- Taylor, Planet Of The Apes.



The original Planet Of the Apes has been regarded as one of the best movies ever made and Tim Burton has directed a re-make (re-imagining is what he wants to call it) and it will appear in theaters starting July 27th, 2001. The original movie and the remake are loosely based on a novel by Piere Boulle who also wrote The Bridge On The River Kwai which was also turned into a movie. The novel isn't as interesting as the movies, but the first movie drifted far from it when it came to ape technology. In the novel, the apes had cars, airplanes, and spaceships where the movies show the apes riding horses. The novel and the first two movies saw the humans as mute with no speech except for Nova calling out Taylor's name in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes. Tim Burton has taken a different approach with the humans as they can speak like our astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) who crash lands on a world ruled by apes. He is captured and the apes are perplexed by his behavior until he eventually escapes to start a human slave revolt against the apes. Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) , a chimpanzee who is a human sympathizer, falls in love with Leo while Tim Roth plays an ape general who hates Leo. The re-imagining of the Apes universe looks like it will be an interesting movie. The movie has suffered some slight delays like the press screenings being held a couple of days late so that the filmmakers can complete work on the movie including last minute special effects work.



"It's going to be Gorillas In The Mist meets The Terminator- a humongous rethinking of the entire concept."- Producer Don Murphy on an Apes re-make that never got made, Sci-Fi Universe, July 1994



Planet Of The Apes has been the subject of a re-make for years. Chris Columbus and The Hughes Brothers were once interested with their own takes. Before Tim Burton came in, James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger were attached to the remake (but we'll never know how different a movie that would have been if those two did the remake). Back in 1994, Oliver Stone was attached an executive producer to the remake with Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher producing. Terry Hayes (Road Warrior, Dead Calm) wrote a script that was a radical departure from the original movie series. The story begins in the present and babies are being born dead because of a genetic defect at the dawn of time. A scientist uses DNA to travel back through time where a superior ape society rules the planet. He is there to fix the defect at the moment it was caused. It might have made an interesting movie, but I'm glade this version didn't get made. Before Oliver Stone, Murphy, and Hamsher were attached, director Adam Rifkin tried and failed to convince 20th Century FOX to do another sequel called Return To The Planet Of The Apes: World At War. It was thinly-veiled re-take on Spartacus. The sequel would have probably appealed to the same people who liked Ridley Scott's Gladiator.



"Planet Of The Apes was the only science-fiction script I'd seen with acting in it. I found it a very complicated with considerable social comment."- Charlton Heston, Planet Of The Apes Revisited (Cinemaker Press)



The original movie series has it's ups and downs. I liked the first two movies and the fourth one. Beneath The Planet Of The Apes just happens to be my favorite because it features a cult of mutant religious fanatics who worship a Nova bomb that happens to burn the world to a cinder at the end. Escape From The Plant Of The Apes is so-so because I find it hard to believe that Corneilius and Zira managed to operate Taylor's spacecraft and get off the planet before it was burned to a cinder. Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes is supposed to be an allegory for blacks, but some blacks called the movie racist and the ending was toned down to let the humans live. Battle For The Planet Of The Apes just is a bad movie. I hope Tim Burton's remake is as good as it looks. This $100 million dollar production looks like it will rule the planet. It has five endings shot and Time picked the best one (and the other four will show up on DVD). If the movie doesn't rule the planet, it will probably rule the box office.



this article is (c)July 2001 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission. send all comments to lord_pragmagtic@hotmail.com This article has been revived on 7-7-2007