Uh… blah ?

Oh, no, it’s okay, I posted pictures today, so I don’t need to force myself to write (oh, and you do know, I hope, that I wouldn’t force myself anyway if I didn’t want to). But I actually had something to say: the script of Tim Burton’s The Planet of the Apes isn’t so silly after all. The initial (or final) foundation stands, and incidentally justifies better than the original how the monkeys could come up with speech; the surprise ending is a bit too much, and not that clear (if I hadn’t seen the making of, I wouldn’t have understood the idea) but still acceptable (<SPOILERS> in a way, after all, I rather like the idea that going back in time sends you into a different, parallel world, because true travel through time can only be one-way, towards the future </SPOILERS>). It’s an acceptable synopsis for a science-fiction movie. And the makeup is amazing, Helena Bonham-Carter has never been so beautiful, eveything’s very well done.

Except that you can’t help but compare this movie with the original, and that’s a disaster, because every kind of message there was has been deleted totally or partially—even the racism parabole is less present, because humans are treated as monkeys as much as slaves (the caged little girl offered to a young monkey is a very bad idea, because it emphasizes on the monkeys/humans mirror effect, destroying the racism analogy in the process).

One has to wonder how Tim Burton ended up doing that thing. Mark Wahlberg is quite perfect for this kind of movie. But Burton?