Planet of the Apes (2001) – Nostalgia Central

Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of the 1968 sci-fi classic begins in the year 2029, with Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) stationed aboard the space station Oberon, where he trains primates for space missions.

When a chimpanzee pilot named Pericles disappears into a mysterious electromagnetic storm, Leo defies orders and follows in a rescue pod. He is pulled through a space-time wormhole and crash-lands on a strange planet – which he discovers is called Ashlar  – in the 51st Century.

Almost immediately, he discovers a society where intelligent, talking apes are the dominant species and primitive, speaking humans are hunted and enslaved.

Leo is captured and sold as a slave to an orangutan named Limbo (Paul Giamatti).

He is eventually purchased by Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), a sympathetic chimpanzee activist and the daughter of a high-ranking senator, who believes humans deserve rights.

Leo escapes with Ari and a group of other humans, pursued by the brutal and human-hating General Thade (Tim Roth), who seeks to seize absolute power.

Leo leads the group to the Forbidden Zone to reach “Calima,” a site the apes consider holy ground. There, he discovers the ruins of his original space station, the Oberon.

By reviewing the Oberon‘s logs, Leo realises that the station followed him into the storm to attempt to rescue him, but crashed centuries before his own arrival due to the time-warping nature of the anomaly.

The apes on board the Oberon, led by a chimp named Semos, staged a mutiny against the humans.

Over the following millennia, the descendants of the Oberon‘s apes became the rulers of the planet, while the descendants of the human crew became their slaves.

A massive battle breaks out at the Oberon ruins between Thade’s army and the human rebels. In the midst of the fighting, Pericles (the original chimp Leo was searching for) descends in his intact pod.

The apes, mistaking Pericles for the return of their god Semos, cease fighting and bow.

Leo traps Thade in a secure room on the Oberon and uses Pericles’ undamaged pod to fly back through the electromagnetic storm to return to his own time.

With its confusing final twist, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes ending gets a little messy,

Leo returns to Earth and crash-lands in Washington DC on the steps of what he believes is the Lincoln Memorial. Looking up, he is horrified to see that the statue of Abraham Lincoln has been replaced by a monument to General Thade.

Leo is then swarmed by police officers, firefighters, and reporters, all of whom are revealed to be apes, signifying that he has arrived on an ape-dominated Earth

The remake proved divisive with fans. While it updated the original film’s visuals, it failed to add anything meaningful to its story or underlying themes.

Instead, it came off as a pointless rehash with needless changes, all of which were thrown into doubt by the confusing ending – which lives on in infamy as a prime example of how not to execute a remake.

Fortunately, Burton’s uncharacteristic misfire didn’t doom the franchise completely, though it would be another ten years before the 2011 reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, did the original 1968 classic justice.

Burton himself claimed the ending was not meant to make sense, but rather a cliffhanger to be explained in a possible sequel. “It was a reasonable cliffhanger that could be used in case 20th Century Fox, or another filmmaker wanted to do another movie,” he explained.

He also said that he would rather jump out of a window than direct a sequel to this film.

Captain Leo Davidson
Mark Wahlberg
General Thade
Tim Roth
Ari
Helena Bonham Carter
Attar
Michael Clarke Duncan
Limbo
Paul Giamatti
Daena
Estella Warren
Krull
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Senator Sandar
David Warner
Karubi
Kris Kristofferson
Tival
Erick Avari
Birn
Luke Eberl
Gunnar
Evan Dexter Parke
Senator Nado
Glenn Shadix
Bon
Freda Foh Shen
Commander Karl Vasich
Chris Ellis
Lt. Col. Grace Alexander
Anne Ramsay
Major Maria Cooper
Andrea Grano
Major Frank Santos
Michael Jace
Specialist Hansen
Michael Wiseman
Nova
Lisa Marie
Leeta
Eileen Weisinger

Director
Tim Burton