Burton is a great director of mise en scène. That useful French term indicates the look of a film: there is what the camera does, and then there is what the camera sees; the latter is the mise en scène. As with his Edward Scissorhands and his two Batman movies, Burton brings an extraordinarily fecund visual imagination to bear on his subject matter in Planet of the Apes.
Burton keeps the basic données of the original 1968 Planet of the Apes, but departs from its plotline (borrowing lightly, too, from the four sequels). Astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) crash-lands on a planet on which apes are the dominant species and humans subordinate, treated as pets at best, vermin at worst. Mostly, they are just enslaved. Humanity has reverted to savagery while the apes have achieved a higher level of civilisation, though the apes in Burton’s version have reached a stage roughly parallel to the late middle ages, it seems, rather than the reasonably modernist era of the original movie. There, they had no cars or flying machines but did tote guns, and the soldiery wore suits of leather rather than the gorgeously ornate armour Burton gives them.
The apes of Burton’s movie aren’t interested, as the 1968 ones were, in experimenting on human beings. Treating humans in the way our vivisection labs treat apes put an interesting spin on the relationship between apes and humans, and their relative status. In the 1968 movie, humans can’t even speak. They don’t even grunt. The possession of language is the key marker of consciousness, the dividing line between lower and higher forms of life. Confusingly, in Burton’s version, both apes and humans speak passable English, so the issue is, er, moot (though some of the apes do wonder whether humans have souls). The earlier film made much of the conflict between science and faith, between the expansion of knowledge and its restriction by dogma, which in turn raised pertinent questions about knowledge and power, and about how a species ensures its survival and a society negotiates between the past and the future.
This is absent from Burton’s Planet of the Apes (though it does play with the kind of founding myths societies develop). His remake is more straightforwardly an adventure, with its main moral issue being the ethical treatment of an allegedly inferior species. One could perhaps read something about slavery or colonialism into this, but the ghost of the battle between Darwinism and fundamentalist Christianity, which clearly informed the 1968 film, lingers only vaguely.
Davidson is captured by the apes; he is to be some sort of slave. He gets bought, however, by a human rights crusader, Ari (Helena Bonham Carter). Her sympathy for humans, naturally, disgusts her would-be suitor, General Thade (an excellent, snarling Tim Roth), whose overall view is that the humans are a menace and should be exterminated. Daring escapes and treks across wastelands follow, with a grand climax and a surprise ending to compete with the famous twist in the tail of the original movie, in which Charlton Heston as the lost spaceman realises he has been back on Earth all along, and cries out against humanity’s self-destruction.
With that in mind, it would seem that Burton had to assume his audience would understand from the start that Davidson is back on Earth, and he also had to come up with a new surprise ending. It is so surprising that it was kept under wraps until the last possible moment, with Burton performing all sorts of evasive manoeuvres like claiming he was shooting four alternative endings. Yet the twist bewilders rather than surprises, because it takes you a while to work out what it means and what its implications are.
The storyline also has weaknesses of execution, relying on adventure-story conventions and only gesturing towards the mythic substratum it apparently aspires to. In general, its shape is fairly predictable, and many opportunities for additional dramatic tension and character development — let alone interesting speculations about bioloical determinism and so forth — are missed. The issue of the interspecies attraction between Ari’s ape and Davidson’s human is barely touched upon before the story veers off again.
It is as though all Burton’s energies have been concentrated on the visuals, and in that respect he certainly triumphs. His reinvention of Ape City, for instance, is a marvel, tangled foliage over a labyrinthine citadel of molten lava. And the apes themselves (apart from the female apes, who are only a short distance away from a human conception of beauty) are superb. The make-up is brilliant, and they move like real apes, with rolling gait and hanging arms, leaping and swinging at their convenience, whereas the apes of 1968 were uprightly human, with very little to communicate their simian natures and behaviours. You couldn’t imagine them literally climbing the walls, as a furious Thade does in one scene. Burton allows one to imagine what a more civilised kind of ape might be like, instead of being just a kind of human with a funny face.
Still, the real issues of what constitutes human difference, and thus presumably the roots of our dominance on this planet, are not explored. There is a line in the script (published as a commemorative book) that I think I missed in the movie: the astronaut says to an ape, ”Attitude is the first human freedom.” Whether it appears or not, it is rather puzzling, because Burton’s apes most certainly have attitude.