Planet of the Apes (2001)

Like I said last week, I was sort of looking forward to this one. My only memory of it from the last time I saw it ten years ago was that the ending felt corny and forced. Like they wanted to do a twist ending to compare with the 1968 film, but didn’t know how to make one properly. My disappointment at the ending combined with the general loathing that fans throw at this movie to create a recollection that I hated it, so I was curious to see if that was still true now that I knew what kind of ending to expect. Turns out, I don’t hate it, but it’s very flawed. Not as flawed as Return to the Planet of the Apes, but certainly more so than the other live-action versions.

That doesn’t have a lot to do with the story, though the script isn’t anything that the screenwriters should be proud of. I did like a couple of things about it – they came up with an interesting way to get the hero into the future and they also get to the apes much more quickly than the ’68 version – but for the most part the plot is paint-by-numbers. An unheroic protagonist, Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) finds himself in a dangerous world and has to hero-up in order to lead the oppressed to victory against their oppressors. The main bad guy, Thade (Tim Roth) is irredeemably rotten and the hero’s main ally, a chimp named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) is insufferably good. There aren’t a lot of gray areas in the movie. The closest it gets is Paul Giamatti as an orangutan slave-trader named Limbo and Michael Clarke Duncan as Thade’s second-in-command, Attar, but even then…

Limbo gets thrown with the humans against his will and is forced to their side when Thade and his army think he’s betrayed them. So even though he reconsiders his position against the humans, there’s no real thought behind it other than survival, and later, “I guess you guys aren’t so bad after all.” The message of his story is that you’ll like us if you get to know us. That’s not very deep, but it’s still better than Attar’s motivation.



Attar is a religious zealot whose faith crumbles once he realizes the truth about the apes’ origins. I’m not saying that that’s not a realistic motivation for changing his mind. It could even be an interesting one if the script had the courage to explore it. Instead, it simply tells us that Attar’s changing sides because he feels lied to. Like most things in the movie, his transformation is too quick; too easy. Leo's another example of that. He spends most of the movie telling everyone that he’s no hero until the climax when of course he decides that he is.

But you know, the banality of the script’s not the biggest problem. It’s a movie about talking warrior-gorillas; I don’t need Shakespeare. Had the apes been as cool as the ones in the ‘70s movies, I could have overlooked the deficiencies in the story. I mean, I liked Battle for the Planet of the Apes for crying out loud. Unfortunately, Burton tried to improve on the apes and wound up with a mess.



I appreciate his trying. I really do. I understand where he was coming from. The ‘70s apes don’t look much like real apes. That’s not so much a problem in the first three movies, but it becomes one in the last two. I can see why it would be tempting to try to fix that. The thing is though, even in the movies where it’s a problem, I cut the ape designs a lot of slack, because they just look so cool.

Their closeness to human shape and posture makes them that much more disturbing. It drives home in a subtle way that the apes have replaced us. They’ve become us, and in many ways, they’ve become better than us. I don’t get that feeling looking at Burton’s apes. They still look like real apes, but worse than that, they act like real apes. There’s a thin surface of civilization over them, but in times of stress, they revert. The subliminal message that delivers is that humanity deserves to retake the planet from these creatures. And that takes away an important layer of the story.

One of the biggest themes of the original movies and the live-action TV show is that neither humans nor apes are inherently better than each other. As human viewers, we’re naturally inclined to side with our own species, so it’s very important that we understand that - in many ways - the apes have built a culture for themselves that has improved on ours. That keeps some tension in our allegiances. Of course I don’t want humans to be mistreated, but I also like the ape way of life better than what humans came up with by the twentieth century. By making his apes more beast-like, Burton robs his movie of that tension. Like all the rest, it’s too easy; too black-and-white. The humans, we're told, should win and the apes should fall.



There are exceptions to the animalistic apes, but I’m not sure what to make of them. It may be important that they’re female chimpanzees, especially Helena Bonham Carter’s Ari and Lisa Marie’s blasphemously-named Nova. (Sidebar: The various references to the ’68 film are irritating. The filmmakers take classic lines, characters, and actors that were originally human and hand them over to the apes. That only reminded me that I like the original better and made me resent the apes even more.)

Ari and Nova and a couple of other female chimps look less ape-like than the other simians in the movie. They even have distinctively human hairstyles. My initial suspicion was that Ari’s looks were meant to endear us to her since she’s a friend of humanity, but that doesn’t explain the others, who are all disposable characters. Even Nova’s only there to give Burton’s then-girlfriend a role in the film as he’d done in all of his other movies back to Ed Wood. She’s nothing more than the wife (concubine?) of one of the apes’ leaders. If you take her out of the movie, you change nothing.

The only common denominator between the two, main, female chimps is that they’re both played by attractive women. And if we’re being especially cynical, we can note that both of them are attractive women with whom Tim Burton has had long relationships: Lisa Marie prior to Planet of the Apes and Helena Bonham Carter ever since. Is the answer really as shallow as Burton’s wanting them to look hot? I don’t know, but I can’t figure out another explanation that makes sense.



And speaking of things not making sense: there’s the ending. Actually, that’s not true. That’s what I wrote on Facebook Tuesday night right after I watched it, but as Snell pointed out, it’s not that the ending can’t be understood. I’m assuming that everyone reading this has already seen the movie, but in case you haven’t, I’m about to spoil it: Leo makes it back to his own planet and time and finds that Earth is now controlled by apes as well. His first hint at this is that the Lincoln Memorial now carries Thade’s face (APEraham Lincoln, as Jamie Baker says, rescuing the concept) and an inscription about Thade’s decisive role in helping the apes take power.

It’s easy to imagine how this happened. There were two space capsules on the ape planet (which is not Earth in this version). Leo took the working one, but it’s conceivable that Thade escaped custody of the new ape/human regime, raised Leo’s sunken capsule from its watery grave, got it working again, and piloted it into space and through the temporal storm back to Earth’s past. It’s conceivable, but not at all set up by anything in the movie (other than Thade’s knowing where Leo’s capsule was). It’s out of nowhere and I feel cheated by it. It’s like getting to the end of The Sixth Sense and learning that Bruce Willis was actually an orc or something.

It wouldn’t have been hard to foreshadow it either. In less than a minute of screen time we could have seen Thade escape his prison and return to the sunken capsule. They still could have had their “shock” ending, but instead of throwing my hands up and wondering, “What the hell?” I would’ve thought, “Oooh! I want to see the next one!” Though I still would’ve hoped the sequel was better.

Brains in Jars Attached to Robot Bodies Hate Cephalopods

By my friend and partner-in-awesomeness Jason Copland, who's birthday is today. Happy Birthday, pal!

Western Wednesday: Gotham City

I'm sure I'll have more to say later about next month's relaunch of Jonah Hex as All-Star Western, but for now, I'm pretty happy with nineteenth century Gotham as imagined by Moritat. Should be fun to watch Hex run around there hunting a serial killer. iFanboy has more art from the first issue.

Valley of the Dinosaurs (1974)

I’ve been wanting to watch Valley of the Dinosaurs ever since I stumbled across an article about it a year-and-a-half ago. It’s basically Hanna-Barbera’s stab at Land of the Lost and that’s something I wanted to see.

As I’ve watched this and other Saturday-morning adventure shows from the '70s lately, I've remembered that one of things that made Land of the Lost unique was its continuing story. Valley of the Dinosaurs is like Thundarr the Barbarian and The Herculoids; it explains the premise in the opening credits, but otherwise throws you right into the action with the first episode. Land of the Lost sort of does that too, but there’s a definite sense that the Marshalls are very new to their world in the premiere. They have a lot to explore and you get to see them do it. As Valley of the Dinosaurs opens, the Butler family may have been living with their cavefriends for a year as far as we can tell. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though.

While I like the world-development of Land of the Lost, disappointment eventually sets in when you realize that the series ended perfectly at the end of Season One, but kept going anyway. I’ve already written way too much about all of that, but even though I enjoyed a lot of Seasons Two and Three, the show ultimately didn’t fulfill its promise that it was presenting a complete, thought-out world. Valley of the Dinosaurs’ goals are much simpler, so it meets them easily and there’s no frustration. Some of the episodes do feature the Butlers’ trying out ways to get home, but it’s not the focus of the show. The show’s about themes like friendship and cooperation, as well as teaching simple science lessons.



We learn in the title sequence that the Butler family (parents John and Kim, teenaged Katie, pre-teen Greg, and dog Digger) fall into a whirlpool on a rafting trip and end up in a locked valley filled with prehistoric life. There’s no time-travel; the dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals simply never went extinct here. That explains why there can also be a family of cavepeople who rescue the Butlers from a menacing sauropod. The demographics of the cavefamily match up pretty nicely with the Butlers’. Gorok (looking a lot like a prehistoric Charles Bronson) and Gara are the parents; Lok is a teenaged boy and Tana is a girl just a little younger than Greg. There’s also a baby stegosaurus named Glump for Digger to play with.

The kids get paired off a lot, somewhat to Greg’s chagrin. He seems to enjoy Tana’s company, but he’s always whining about having to do menial labor instead of getting to help the teenagers and grown-ups with the exciting stuff. As for the teens, I’m sure there has to be some Katie/Lok fan fiction out there somewhere, because they’re both extremely attractive teenagers who obviously enjoy each other’s company. In a show about cavepeople and dinosaurs, one of the least believable things is that Katie and Lok aren’t romantically involved.

In spite of Greg’s complaining, the show is remarkably angst-free. The Butlers are making the best of being stuck and apparently see their situation as an adventure. There’s some requisite missing of luxuries like restaurants and air conditioning, but for the most part they’ve accepted their situation. Katie does the most reminiscing about home, but it’s always with a sense of humor. In fact, Katie’s always the quickest one in the group with a corny joke.



As for Gorok and his family, they’re happy to have the Butlers around. John is a science teacher back home, so he’s always teaching Gorok new and better ways to do things. His knowledge comes in especially handy whenever there’s a dinosaur attack or a natural disaster or an invading tribe or whatever danger threatens the two families this week. That’s when we all learn how to make diving bells, winches, and siphons.

There is the occasional conflict between the two groups though. Sometimes the Butlers’ concern for getting home conflicts with Gorok’s family’s priority of eking out an existence in the dangerous valley. That makes for some nice drama, but the frustration never grows to an uncomfortable level and rest assured that everyone will have learned to work together again by the end of the episode.

It’s really a nice show for kids with lots of positive messages, but it’s entertaining for adults as well. It’s Hanna-Barbera, so there’s a lot of recycling and corner-cutting with the animation, but the initial designs are all extremely nice and makes the whole thing pleasant to look at. There’s some fun voice work too. Jackie Earle Hailey (Watchmen, Human Target) plays Greg, but there are other recognizable voices in the cast as well. John is played by Mike Road (Race Bannon on Johnny Quest); Kim is Shannon Farnoni (Wonder Woman on Super Friends); Katie is Kathy Gori (Rosemary the Telephone Operator on Hong Kong Phooey); Gorok is Alan Oppenheimer (both Thundarr and Skeletor); Gara is Joan Gardner (Santa Claus’ adoptive mother in Rankin-Bass’ Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town); and Lok, Digger, and Glump are all played by Frank Welker (Fred from Scooby Doo).

There were only 16 episodes and all of them are equally engaging, enjoyable, and unobtrusively educational. I can easily see myself revisiting them soon.

Flick Attack: The Thin Man and Mr and Mrs Smith

I'm ramping up my participation in the Flick Attack blog lately and my most recent reviews were for The Thin Man and Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I'm working my way through the Thin Man series, so there will be more of those later.

In the comments for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, someone joked about my leaving out mention of the "assassins-for-hire" subplot. I smiled when I read that, but it reminds me that I wanted to bring up the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie movie in my review and didn't have room to. Before watching Hitchcock's version, I always assumed that there was some kind of espionage angle to it a la Foreign Correspondent or The Man Who Knew Too Much. There's not though and the 2005 movie's only debt to Hitchcock's film is the bickering couple. It may have gotten its spy angle from the short-lived 1996 TV series starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello, in which the couple were a spy-team, but not married to each other.

A word from our sponsor...

As I type this, AdSense is running a couple of political ads on the blog. Which... ick.

That's never happened before as far as I know and I've asked them to filter those out, but I don't know how long it'll take before the filter kicks in. In the meantime, I know nothing about the candidates whose ads are currently appearing and certainly don't endorse them. Maybe they're fine candidates; maybe they're not. All I know is that I don't want political ads on the blog.

Update: This is undoubtedly interesting to no one but me, but I just noticed in the You Might Also Like links below this post that I struggled with political ads last November as well, but chose to keep them going. The difference this time is that one of the ads was of the smear/attack variety and I hate those so very very much.

Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975)

I sometimes mistake reboots and re-imaginings for a recent phenomenon. In fact, one of the earliest reboots that immediately comes to mind when I think of the concept is Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That’s certainly not true though. I mean, look at all the Tarzan movies. How many times have they rebooted that franchise? And Tim Burton’s not even the first to reboot Planet of the Apes. That would be Friz Freleng and David H DePatie.

I mention Friz Freleng first because he’s the one I’m most familiar with from his work on Warner Bros’ classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. That I’d never heard of DePatie before says more about me than him. He was the executive in charge of Warner’s cartoon studio when they closed it down in 1963. He and Freleng then formed DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and went on to create the Pink Panther cartoons, What’s New Mr. Magoo, and all those Dr. Seuss specials from the ‘70s. So these are guys who knew what they were doing. There was no reason for Return to the Planet of the Apes to suck. It must have been the director’s fault.

To be fair, Doug Wildey was no slouch himself. He’s best known as the creator of Johnny Quest, but he was also an artist for Atlas Comics (Marvel’s precursor) and several other comics publishers in the ‘50s. So if he’s a decent writer and a none-too-shabby artist, what went wrong with the Planet of the Apes cartoon? I’m guessing it has something to do with budget. The ‘70s were filled with cost-cutting, crappy animation and Wildey knew something about that. His only directing credits outside of Return to the Planet of the Apes are for those barely-animated Marvel “cartoons” from the ‘60s. The ones that everyone rightly compared “motion comics” to when those tried to get off the ground. I’ll come back to this later, but the cheapness of Return to the Planet of the Apes was its chief creative failure.



I’ve spent a lot of time in this series writing about reconciling timelines and building a dependable continuity, so it’s maybe a little odd that I’m not bothered by the extreme inconsistencies presented by Return. Rich Handley makes an attempt to bring it together with the live-action versions in his Timeline of the Planet of the Apes, but even he admits that that’s just for completeness. Writing about the most immediate, glaring difference between Return and the others – the apes’ advanced technology and culture – Handley says that sometime during the events of Beneath the Planet of the Apes the apes had to either experience a major technological growth-spurt or somehow stumbled across an un-ruined human city and moved in. In the same breath, he admits that this is extremely far-fetched, that there’s simply no time for it in Beneath, and that he’s grasping at whatever straws he can. Return, he says, is simply incompatible with the movies and earlier TV show.

There are other examples too. Brent’s experience on the Planet of the Apes is completely different than it is in Beneath. In Return, he landed on the planet when Nova was a young girl and it was he – not Taylor – who named her. Shortly after that he either got lost in the desert or became a hermit on purpose (I was losing interest by then and didn’t pay close attention) and didn’t even learn about the apes until years later when three new astronauts – the main characters of Return – showed up and found him again. Cornelius and Zira are also out of character from the movies, and the show replaces Beneath’s General Ursus with the live-action TV show’s General Urko. The mutant culture from Beneath has also been dramatically changed into a group of robed people called the Underdwellers. In short, Return gets extremely close to its source material, but changes important details to the extent that it can’t be considered part of the same timeline. It’s got to be a divergent timeline or an alternate reality.

And that’s okay. Once I accepted that this wasn’t my Planet of the Apes, I was ready to judge Return on its own merits. And there are some nice things about it. Some of the still art – the backgrounds and other elements that aren’t required to move – is really creative and lovely. I imagine that Wildey may be responsible for that with his comics background. The writing isn’t half bad either. Having not only excused, but also learned to enjoy the drastic changes that the writing staff made to the characters and their world, I was also able to appreciate the stories filled with giant spiders and sea monsters and other things impossible on a live-action budget.



Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end. What the animation staff did with those scripts is unbearable. Literally, because I didn’t even finish the series. The voice actors – if you can call them that – read their lines in monotone; even Austin Stoker, who plays one of the new astronauts and was also MacDonald in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Stoker’s the only PotA veteran in the cast, but one other voice was recognizable: Henry Corden (General Urko), who’s been the voice of Fred Flintstone since the ‘70s. Actually, Corden did a pretty good job. It’s just hard to tell once the other actors have lulled you to sleep.

The biggest crime though – as I said earlier – is the animation, but it’s not just that it’s cheap. Like I also said, the ‘70s were filled with cheaply animated cartoons, but many of them were awesome. I’m a huge fan of Filmation, Hanna Barbera, and Ruby-Spears and none of those guys spent a lot of money. Return’s sin is that it’s boring. The good ‘70s cartoons recycled animation all the time, but at least it was exciting animation. Return shows action by having static characters move across the screen in some kind of equally-static vehicle, then draws the scene out by showing you that sequence over and over and over again until you’ve been watching it for what feels like an hour-and-a-half and your eyes are so glazed over they’re forming cataracts. I watched about eight of the thirteen episodes before I realized that I spent most of the last two playing on my iPod instead of watching the show. After that I just gave up.

Fortunately, this isn’t where the series ended. Early next week I’ll talk about Tim Burton’s attempt at a reboot and then the following week I’ll discuss Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which comes out today. I’m hoping Rise is worthwhile, but I’m also eager to see Burton’s version again. I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters and my distaste for the ending is all I really remember about it. Now that I’m prepared for that ending, I’m curious to see how I feel about the rest.

Captain Jack Sparrow Hates Cephalopods

[Dan Hipp]

Western Wednesday: Victor Santos' Justified

[Victor Santos]

Kona Coast on DVD

The Warner Archive is offering 1968's Kona Coast as a made-to-order DVD. I've never seen it, but based on the synopsis, I may just buy it unseen.

Brace for an explosive story of violence and reprisal set against the stunning backdrop of the Hawaiian Isles. To avenge the death of his murdered daughter, charter boat captain Sam Moran (Richard Boone) becomes a one-man vigilante squad taking on the wealthy, drugged-up punk that killed her – and the rich and powerful that protect him. A memorable big-screen villain in hits like The War Lord, Hombre and Big Jake, Have Gun – Will Travel star Boone here plays an ordinary man pushed to extraordinary limits. Directed by two-time Emmy winner Lamont Johnson from a story by bestselling thriller writer John D. MacDonald (the source novelist of Cape Fear and A Flash of Green), Kona Coast co-stars Vera Miles, Joan Blondell, Kent Smith and Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer Duane Eddy.

Anyone seen this who wants to give me a recommendation? I mean, Duane Eddy plays a dude named Tiger Cat, so I'll probably get it even if you trash it, but I'm willing to hear opinions.

Writing is Hard: Constructing a logline.

Image hijacked from Ancestry.com.

In the 17th century, a log-line was the way ships measured their speed. It's also where the nautical term "knots" comes from, but that's not what I'm talking about right now. I just thought that was cool.

The logline I'm talking about is the writing term: a brief synopsis of the story that summarizes the main character and the story's hook. According to Wikipedia, it started as a labeling system for Hollywood studios to easily identify and remember what scripts were about, but developed into a pitching tool. Not only for people pitching projects to producers, but also for pitching completed products to audiences - like the blurbs in TV Guide or DVR descriptions.

I don't know how much the term is used in the publishing industry, but the concept is certainly there. Writing a great pitch or query letter is a vital skill for writers, though one that a lot of new writers admit to having a problem with. How do you condense a novel or comic series into a one-sentence summary?

There's a really useful article on Scriptshadow that explains how to do just that. The boiled down version is this: "A good logline...gives us the main character, the main character’s goal, and the central conflict in the story (what’s preventing them from getting that goal)." There's a lot more to it than that and writer Carson Reeves makes it simple, including examples from famous movies. If you're a writer and unsure about how to hook an editor or agent with a pitch, it's important reading.

Come to think of it, it's good to have a logline even if you've self-published and are trying to sell your stuff online or at conventions. In the business world, it's called the Elevator Pitch: how you would describe your product to someone in the few seconds of time you have traveling with them in the elevator. I've been to a lot of conventions, traveled a lot of Artist Alleys, and heard a lot of sales pitches from independent comics creators. Most of them would have benefited by a strong logline.

It's also useful long before you get to the sales stage of your product. It's great for making sure you've constructed a good story in the first place. If you don't have a main character with goals and something that's preventing her from achieving those goals, you really don't have a story at all.