The "unique personal vision" of Tim Burton comes down here to the burgeoning field of science-fiction graphics: a new illustrated edition of an old familiar classic. (Rather dark and murky illustrations, too, with a forest-primeval feel to deepen the timeless mythicality of it all.) Sure, the ape makeup, to say nothing of the beetly battle armor, is an improvement over the 1968 screen treatment, but so what? (Myth doesn't demand verisimilitude.) Mark Wahlberg, meanwhile, whose notion of heavy emoting consists of breathing through an open mouth, is the farthest thing from an improvement on Charlton Heston. (The latter, content these days to be a joke, has an unbilled cameo in a monkey mask, reprising the curtain lines of the original.) The moral sententiousness, even in the absence of Rod Serling on the screenwriting team, remains very much the same. As does the lameness of the humor: "Extremism in defense of apes is no vice," "Can't we all just get along?" and the like. More fundamentally, the entire concept of an evolutionary inversion — talking apes and caged humans -- is too much a novelty to bear a remake, just as it couldn't bear four sequels. And the new and different surprise ending is apt to wring from the viewer a befuddled "Huh?" where the old one wrung an "Ah!" Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren. (2001)
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