This movie could also be called, "A Biography of Planet Earth." The film is definitely entertaining and the special effects are wonderful.It's too bad that Charlton Heston didn't have this technology when he made the first film. It was good to see him in this remake, even as an ape.
I thought that the film in trying to mix extreme humor with reality missed the mark–particularly with slave trader character. His statement, "Why can't we all just get along," ruined the picture for me right there. As an artist I certainly understand artistic liberty, but for me, when it borderlines on absurdity, the picture loses authenticity. You have to have the right director's and producer's touch (and quite a few million dollars) to get the "Star Wars" type of creativity, so why try it if you can't do it at the level in which it needs to be done.
The gentleness of some of the ape-mortals and the ferociousness of the majority of them was very understandable and realistic, but once again, trying to make the slave driver ape into a Billy Crystal comic figure just didn't make it and ruined the whole picture. Lovable he was, even in his "gorillaness," but they should have used him in a cartoon feature not as a sci-fi character.
Remakes of great classics will always be; however, there needs to be an improvement on the one made years previously. I felt that this remake was too comedic. Charlton Heston in the first movie, as he is in all movies, was wonderful, quite manly. The character, Mark Wahlberg, who played the lead, seemed more like he would have been more at home fishing on a boat. Although I liked him, he simply was not believable.
~Van of Urantia*MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America
