Planet of the Apes (2001 film)

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This article is about the 2001 film. For the book, see Planet of the Apes. For the 1968 film, see Planet of the Apes (1968 film).

Planet of the Apes
Film poster for Planet of the Apes (2001)
Directed by	Tim Burton
Produced by	Richard D. Zanuck
Written by	Pierre Boulle (novel) William Broyles Jr. Lawrence Konner Mark Rosenthal
Starring	Mark Wahlberg Tim Roth Helena Bonham Carter Michael Clarke Duncan Estella Warren
Music by	Danny Elfman
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	July 27, 2001 (USA)
Running time	119 min.
Language	English
Budget	$100,000,000 US (est.)
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Planet of the Apes is a 2001 science fiction film in which an astronaut finds himself on a planet where humans are enslaved by apes. It stars Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, David Warner and Kris Kristofferson. It was released on July 27, 2001. Charlton Heston, star of the 1968 version, also makes a cameo appearance, as does Linda Harrison.

The movie was adapted by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal from the novel La planète des singes by Pierre Boulle and the earlier film adaptation. It was directed by Tim Burton. It was panned by critics and attracted much derision from many fans of the older Ape films. In particular, the film attempted to imitate its earlier namesake by revealing a plot twist at the end. This twist resembles the one featured at the end of the original Boulle novel. However, this remained largely obscure and was considered by many to be a (perhaps deliberate) non sequitur. Burton's DVD commentary suggests that the ending was intended as a cliffhanger rather than a twist, to be explained and resolved in a sequel which, due to the film's poor reception, never materialized.

Prior to the film's release, Tim Burton indicated his desire to "reimagine" the other films in the Apes movie series. Danny Elfman produced a powerful Planet of the Apes soundtrack for Tim Burton, spearheaded by resounding brass that highlighted the barbaric nature of the Apes and their planet.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Unlike the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film, the end of the film does not feature the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. Instead, it has Daniel Chester French's sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC replaced by a similar monument to the ape General Thade.

1 Plot synopsis
2 Extended plot summary
3 Trivia
4 Ape Lincoln
5 External link

[edit] Plot synopsis

After crash-landing on an unknown planet, brash astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) finds himself trapped in a savage world where talking apes dominate the human race. Desperate to find a way home, Leo must evade the invincible gorilla army led by ruthless General Thade (Tim Roth), who pursues the astronaut to a sacred temple that may hold the secrets of mankind's past.

[edit] Extended plot summary

In the year 2029, onboard the Oberon space station we are introduced to a young astronaut, Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), who works closely with primates who are trained for dangerous space missions. His favorite simian co-worker is a chimpanzee named Pericles.

Suddenly an alert sounds - an enormous electromagnetic storm is approaching the station. The Oberon's commander decides to send out a small space going pod, piloted by Pericles, to probe the storm.

Pericles' pod heads into the storm and disappears. Distraught, and against his orders, Leo steals a second pod and goes in pursuit of Pericles. Entering the storm, Leo loses contact with the Oberon and his ship tumbles through a vortex finally arriving in orbit over a strange world. Leo takes his vehicle planetside, crashing it in a dense jungle in the year 5021.

Emerging from his damaged vessel, Leo sees the nearby brush rustling. Suddenly, a group of primitive humans emerge fleeing in terror. They are being pursued by large humanoid apes on horseback, who speak in human tongue. The humans, including Leo, are rounded up and hauled back to the Ape City where they are to be sold off as slaves.

In the city Leo meets Limbo, (Paul Giamatti) an orangutan who trades in human slaves. In Limbo's building a chimpanzee female named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) shows up to protest the treatment of the humans. Taking an interest in Leo, Ari decides to buy him and a female slave named Daena (Estella Warren), and have them work as servants in the house of Ari's father (David Warner).

After serving at a dinner party at Ari's father's home where we meet General Thade (Tim Roth) the leader of Ape military forces, and Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), the noble ape soldier, Leo determines that he must leave. Enlisting the other human servants, Leo and his new allies are in the midst of escaping when Ari spots them. Leo manages to convince Ari to join their cause and she accompanies the escapees along with her protector Krall (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).

Thade believes that Ari was kidnapped by the humans, and makes use of this situation to gain absolute power as dictator of Ape City. Thade then marches Ape armies in pursuit of the renegade humans.

Leo and the others flee to the temple of Semos, a forbidden but holy site for the apes. Once there, Leo discovers the holy temple is in fact the Oberon, his former space station, which has crashed on the planet's surface and looks ancient. According to the computer logs, the station has been there for thousands of years (yet it still has power and all the equipment still function). Leo deduces that when he entered the vortex he was pushed forward in time, while the Oberon searching after him was not - and it crashed on the planet long before he did.

The Oberon's log reveals that the apes onboard organized a mutiny and took control of the vessel after it crashed. The human and ape survivors of the struggle left the ship and their descendants are the people Leo has encountered since landing.

Thade's forces arrive at the Oberon, and begin their advance. Leo ignites the fuel inside the ship which knocks back the first wave of ape warriors, gaining a temporary reprieve. Then the apes regroup to battle the humans anew.

In the middle of the battle, a familiar vehicle descends from the sky. It is the pod piloted by Pericles, the chimp astronaut. Apparently, Pericles got pushed forward in time just like Leo and has just now found his way to the planet. When Pericles lands, the apes interpret his landing as the arrival of Semos, the first chimpanzee, who is their god. They bow, and hostilities between humans and apes immediately cease.

General Thade chases Pericles into the Oberon, but Thade gets trapped in a small room and is unable to escape. With the ape leader defeated, Leo decides it is time for him to leave the Planet of the Apes.

Leo gets aboard Pericles' pod, which is undamaged, and uses it to travel back in time. Leo crashes on what appears to be Earth, in Washington DC. He looks up to see the Lincoln Memorial is now a monument in honor of General Thade. As a swarm of ape police officers descend on Leo, he (and the audience) wonder just what has happened to his world...

[edit] Trivia

Due to a series of remakes that were both critical and commercial failures in the 1990s, the term "Re-Imagining" was created to describe this film to distance it from the stigma that had become attached to so many modern-day remakes. The term would go on to be used by other resurrected franchises, most notably Battlestar Galactica and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Karl Vasich, the officer who commands the Oberon, is referred to as 'commander', yet clearly wears the three stars of a Lieutenant General and is, like all other Oberon crewmembers, a United States Air Force officer. This is not a continuity error, since 'commander' (in this case) refers to Vasich's status as leader of the space station, not his rank.
Lt. Colonel Alexander, at the beginning of the movie, clearly calls the super intelligent ape "Seamus" (shay-mus). This shows the corruption in ape society from the beginning (the crash of the Oberon) to modern (Thade's era) times.
This is one of the few projects that did not originate early with Tim Burton. Other directors who were attached to the project at various times were Oliver Stone and James Cameron who was interested with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. Terry Hayes, screenwriter for The Road Warrior wrote a draft Return To The Planet Of The Apes which was a sequel/remake to the original series.
James Cameron has stated the film's failure is because the studio fired the wrong director and although he loves Burton's films, his late involvement makes it the only film that doesn't look like one of his movies.
Tim Burton has stated the original plan was to have sequels that would carry the names of the original films although the plots would likely differ making the aborted sequel Beneath The Planet Of The Apes.
The symbol of Ape City (the open circle with the vertical line) represents the Oberon, their origin.
Mark Wahlberg refused to go shirtless (or wearing the loincloth Charlton Heston wears in the original film) because of his history as an underwear model.
The only gun in the movie is owned by Thade's dying father played by Charlton Heston, Pro-gun activist and former President of the National Rifle Association.
The remake's ending is actually closer to that of the book on which the original films were based. In the book, the protagonist returns to Earth from the planet of the apes only to find that Earth itself is populated by apes, and that after his hundreds of years (relative) of space travel apes are the dominant species in the galaxy. The famous Statue of Liberty ending revealing that the ape planet was really a post-nuclear war Earth was an alteration made in the original movie.

Spoilers end here.

Parts of the film were shot at the Trona Pinnacles.^[1]

[edit] Ape Lincoln

In Kevin Smith's Q&A DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith recalls, along with his connection to Burton on a failed Superman project, an odd coincidence about this film. Smith explained that, while talking to reporter friend Lou Louserman about Planet of the Apes, he saw that the film's twist ending, which depicted an ape head in place of Lincoln's at the Lincoln Memorial, was similar to a panel from Smith's comic book mini-series Chasing Dogma, in which apes take Lincoln's head off the monument and replace it with the ape head.

Smith and Louserman joked about releasing a tongue-in-cheek article about Smith contemplating legal action against 20th Century Fox. However, when the article was actually printed, it did not come off as a tongue in cheek remark. In the article, Burton stated "Anyone who knows me knows that I would never read a comic book and I would especially never read anything written by Kevin Smith". Smith jokingly remarked that Burton's statement "explains Batman".

In a similar twist, the famous Statue of Liberty ending is mirrored in Smith's movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back; when Jay theorizes that the company from which they steal the orangutan is breeding super-monkeys that will conquer the world, an image of Jay walking on the beach and falling to his knees before a Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. He then goes on to cry out "You maniacs! Damn youse! Damn youse all to Hell!"