Planet of the Apes (PG-13)
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This is a 2001 remake of the 1968 film of the same name. I didn't see it until 2024. It was directed by Tim Burton, with music by Danny Elfman. The movie did well financially, but poorly with critics, so a planned sequel was never made. Personally, I didn't think the movie was that bad, but I certainly wouldn't call it good, either. For the most part I thought it was just okay, but there were definitely some parts that I thought were... less than okay.

It starts out in 2029, on the space station Oberon. Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) trains apes for space missions. When a space storm approaches the station, an ape named Pericles is sent out in a pod ship to study it, but the pod disappears. So, Leo goes out in another pod to find him. The storm causes his own pod to crash land on a planet that he soon discovers is ruled by talking apes, and humans are used as slaves. Unlike the original movie, in this one all humans can speak, so Leo doesn't really seem special. At one point, he asks a chimpanzee named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) why she helped him, but I couldn't make out her answer, so that kind of bugs me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Leo gets captured by apes, along with a bunch of other humans. Ari buys him from an orangutan slave trader named Limbo (Paul Giamatti), along with a human woman named Daena. Leo soon escapes, taking Daena and some other humans with him. They get help from Ari and a gorilla named Krull. They are pursued by ape soldiers led by chimpanzee general Thade, who had unrequited romantic intentions toward Ari. Leo makes a terrible discovery that I don't want to spoil, though it's quite different from the discovery the protagonist made in the original movie. There is eventually a major battle between humans and apes, which gets interrupted by another thing I don't want to spoil, but it seemingly puts an end to the conflict. And then... well, I don't want to spoil what happens at the very end of the movie, either. But it definitely seemed like a sequel hook, and I'm mildly disappointed in not getting to know where the story would have gone from there.

Well, this is definitely more of an action movie than the original. It obviously has better production values than the original, and some of the differences are interesting, but ultimately it's not as good as the original, because of some oddities in the story that don't really make sense, and the fact that it barely scratches the surface of some interesting plot points that were more fully explored in the original. And I don't think Leo was a particularly interesting character, though I did like Ari. And there are plenty of characters I haven't even mentioned, whose roles mostly weren't as important as they could have been. Humans in particular were just sort of there, but a few apes (including one played by Charlton Heston) were a bit more important to the plot. I suppose I should mention that Daena's father was played by Kris Kristofferson, and Ari's father, Senator Sandar, was played by David Warner. And... I don't really know what else to say. But at least I don't feel like I wasted my time watching the movie.