AndyDursin wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:53 am

Monterey Jack wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 10:27 amSame. It's an obviously compromised movie (and Mark Wahlberg is gravely miscast), yet it's far more entertaining than the critical drubbing it received would indicate. Great Rick Baker makeup, Danny Elfman's percussive score is fantastic, and all of the ape performers were clearly having a blast (especially Paul Giamatti). Just a shame almost none of the excellent extras from the 2-disc DVD set (from the early-00s salad days of the format, when every studio was going for broke in providing top-notch supplemental content) were included on the Blu, as the chances of this getting a 4K upgrade are practically nil.

Also odd that people always bitch about Burton "making the same movie over and over", yet when this one was first released, people professed disappointment that it wasn't "Burtonesque" enough!

I've got an urge to watch it again. And you're right, we'll have to live with that old Fox Blu-Ray (few extras, MPEG2 encoding) since Disney is going to lock it up -- like most Fox movies -- and never let it see the light of day outside streaming on one of their services.

The one thing I appreciated was that it was PLANET OF THE APES -- not CGI APES doing a Mad Max rerun out in the forests of Vancouver. Plus its sense of humor and art direction were all playful. By contrast the humorless, glum Fox "prequel trilogy" became less inventive and interesting with each subsequent installment.

The amazing thing -- for all the vitriol, Burton's APES is still by far the most successful of the modern Apes films when adjusted for inflation. (Even unadjusted, its 2001 gross nearly equals DAWN and still outranks the others)

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchise ... s_table_36

I have issues with the Burton's APES, not the least of which is that ape could kill ape without any repercussions. Not to be too nerdy about it, but I found that commandment/law/rule to be critical to the whole filmic world of PotA. Without it, what makes the story compelling (aside form an ape being able to talk)? I like Elfman's score, and there are some cool visuals in it. It is watchable, but not his best.

Burton never did explain the ending, did he? (I know he was riffing on the original novel's ending but he supposedly had some other "explanation" he was saving for the sequel that never was?)

Eric Paddon wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 12:39 pm Burton never did explain the ending, did he? (I know he was riffing on the original novel's ending but he supposedly had some other "explanation" he was saving for the sequel that never was?)

He barely said anything on the commentary about it. I always assumed the end was due to the Tim Roth bad guy going back in time and screwing everything up -- which a continuation would've picked up with (and like you wrote, it was also a homage to the original novel's end, which may have been more the main point).

I always wondered if Cameron's aborted attempt to make a PLANET OF THE APES sequel (direct sequel to the Apjac movies) would've turned out decently. There was an article a while ago (referencing a defunct Apes fan site) on it -- https://screenrant.com/planet-apes-jame ... lot-about/

BTW the aborted Terry Hayes and Sam Hamm scripts which preceded Burton's I posted in a thread back in 2014. It's probably just as well these didn't get made, but you can still read them here:

https://andyfilm.com/mboard/viewtopic.php?t=4602

Eric Paddon wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:59 am

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:38 am I don't besmirch anyone's affection for Samantha Mumba

Likewise. It's just that her character was totally out of place and not right for this story, and given the short running time in which we have this driving conceit of Pearce's obsession with changing the past to save Siena Guillory, the film never really gives us a properly developed relationship between Pearce and Mumba other than the fact that we know she's hot, and she'll be the perfect consolation prize for his failed efforts!

But at least Guy Pearce didn't wear a leisure suit!

LOL, that one was just as bad if not worse! The worst part of it was the fact that John Beck was the lead and the *only* thing I had ever seen him in before I caught this piece of junk was when he played a rapist posing as a cop in one of the most disturbing episodes of "Hawaii Five-O."

PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
6/10



Our discussion yesterday spurred me to dust off the Tim Burton box-set and watch this one afresh for the first time in many years. And, honestly, I admit it -- I didn't like it quite as much as before.

I think the obvious thing is to criticize the casting -- and sure, Mark Wahlberg is totally out of sorts, as is Estella Warren, who I had forgotten about. They obviously don't help matters. Weird peripheral elements also abound, like why Kris Kristofferson is even in the movie (first "below the title" billing and he doesn't last the first half hour!). But the real issues come down to three central problems:

-The fact Fox wanted this movie out for July '01 and on-time was, in the end, probably its undoing. The movie was rushed through most every aspect of the actual shoot and, as a result, doesn't look or feel polished -- apparently it was even being rewritten as it was being shot. And all of that comes across when you watch it again. Artistically and narratively it's compromised.

-Secondly, the screenplay, which you'd have thought after countless drafts and years in development, was going to be more exciting and polished than it was. William Broyles had come off CASTAWAY and it's been reported his script was supposed to cost upwards of $200 million -- instead they made the movie for half that and hired the SUPERMAN IV writers to rewrite it...and it shows.

This story is just charmless. It makes no emotional appeal to the audience, really at any point, which is probably its biggest failure. The picture is hellbent on moving along that it forgets to develop characters -- it wants to hurriedly set up the movie's premise and get you onto the planet, introduce us to the ape society and all the major players, as quickly as possible. It basically does that, all in the course of 30 minutes -- surely at the behest of studio executives.

Yet what that does is rob the movie of interaction between these characters and, more over, emotional investment on the part of the audience. We scarcely know a thing about Wahlberg's character -- the picture jams these participants into the first third and then it becomes a standard-issue pursuit movie for the rest of its duration. There's no sense of joy about understanding the ape society, no sense of discovery for Wahlberg's character about what he's going through. The only attempt it makes is the relationship between Helena Bonham Carter's scientist and Wahlberg, which is undone by how stiff he is.

-The third element is the art direction, which I remember thinking was a big draw before, but bothered me here. I love the work of Rick Heinrichs and most of Burton's crew (and it wasn't all their fault), but the Ape City sets are a huge letdown: claustrophobic, dreary and lacking a sense of scale. It's funny -- I always thought this film carried a huge budget, but that wasn't entirely the case, and it certainly feels like little was expended on this portion of the picture. The first half is so confined to the stage, the visuals are murky and I'm sure it's not just this ancient Blu-Ray transfer -- it never feels like you're in a real, lived-in world but nailed down to sets, all shot in tight spaces at that. Again, mostly a result of the hurried production schedule and reduced budget it sounds like.

The make-up design, music, and occasional flashes of humor all serve the movie well -- I love the Heston cameo and the Paul Giamatti character -- but it could've used even more of that. More Burton zaniness. In many ways this is as "impersonal" a film Burton ever made -- perhaps even more so than the first "Batman." It's just all kind of "blah" and engages only on a surface, comic-book type of level. It's still entertaining enough to have compelled me to watch it all in a single viewing -- but yes, it should've been a lot more, starting off with the lead casting and more drafts of the script, and more time for Burton to hone what he wanted. I'm surprised he didn't push harder to get what he needed if he was working under that type of schedule and pressure.

One last thing: the ending often gets grilled for lack of explanations (I still took it that somehow Roth's villain got off the planet and caused mayhem), yet I was more bothered by basically the entire premise of this film. So the ship Wahlberg was on crashes on the planet, in the past, through some kind of time-bending intergalactic storm -- there, the apes on the ship get smarter and kill the humans after living there for some time? But how are there all these humans on the planet for them to enslave -- they were already there to begin with? And if not, if they're supposed to be descendants of the humans on the ship, they should've shown more people and made it somewhat believable that could've happened! Little of that makes sense...and why would the Apes have even let the humans evolve off the ship in the first place?

Lost In Space (1998) 5 of 10

-I revisited this too in this theme of "busted late 90s-early 00s reimaginings". It is a much better film than "Time Machine" but it has two fatal flaws that are related to each other. First, is the obsession with wanting to portray the Robinson family as dysfunctional, which comes off as a middle finger to the original series in which the strong bonds of family was part of the enduring appeal of LIS even amidst all the silliness that unfolded. Showing a little bit of sibling rivalry and animosity as one thing but my God, they were just OBSESSED with wanting to show William Hurt's Professor Robinson as neglectful of his family at every possible opportunity and of course that tied in to the film's ridiculous climax where it *really* goes off its moorings with the "Older Will" and the "Spider Smith" etc. Honestly, just think how much better this film would have been if they'd just given us a nice suspenseful straight-ahead action climax of trying to get the radioactive core to get the Jupiter 2 off the planet safely in a race against the clock WITHOUT all this maudlin crap of John-Old Will and Spider Smith etc. in which they were just battling the natural elements of a planet breaking apart? That would have been far more entertaining and true to the spirit of the series (though I've said this before, had they had the sense to let Bill Mumy play the older Will, the scene at least would have been interesting from a novelty standpoint). For the most part, I think the cast of this film would have done fine in a more straight-forward, less idiotic script. The one exception though is Matt LeBlanc's Don West who is utterly unlikable and annoying, especially with his constant attempts to come on to Heather Graham's Judy (all of which is to give us one of the earliest stirrings of the kind of woke cinema we've been inundated today). You simply CAN'T give us a character who is just as annoying as your villain, Dr. Smith (Oldman does fine until they have him cross the line too much, culminating in the idiotic "Spider Smith" segment).

-The pity is I think this film did have potential, but they were done in by the fact they forgot completely what gave the original series its sense of heart and thought they were being somehow more "realistic" by showing family dysfunction being healed as the main subtext of the film which is NOT what it should have been about.

Ugh, I hated the Lost In Space movie. Bruce Broughton's thrilling score is the only good thing to come out of it.

I kinda liked it...I know it isn't very good, but I do find it very watchable. Gary Oldman was a good Dr. Smith. The FX (except for the alien pet blarp) are well done. The original animatronic alien pet was replaced with a CGI version, which was hard to do in 1998. There was some large scale puppet work cut out- see this deleted scene featured a grown up Blarp:


I have no love for the original show, so the family changes didn't bother me. Broughton's score (his last feature film?) is good stuff. I liked the time-warp angle and "spider-smith."
I remember being excited for this movie, mostly because the trailer used Goldsmith's "Judge Dredd" music and made it seem good!



I would recommend the netflix Lost in Space reboot. It's really good, and the family as a team aspect is really well handled.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Tue Sep 20, 2022 12:26 pm -The third element is the art direction, which I remember thinking was a big draw before, but bothered me here. I love the work of Rick Heinrichs and most of Burton's crew (and it wasn't all their fault), but the Ape City sets are a huge letdown: claustrophobic, dreary and lacking a sense of scale.

I remember finding it odd that during the sequence where the characters were on the run, they kept passing through various apes' homes. I wondered why all the homes were connected -- didn't this ape civilization believe in privacy or partitions?

I thought Burton's Apes was mildly entertaining at the time, but in truth the only really memorable image from that movie was Estella Warren!

^ Today, her character would be dressed like this...

Yeah I was hoping She-Hulk was going to be all sexy and fun. Not in 2022 from the Walt Disney Company!

The thing that got me with Burton's APES with the ape city is there are virtually no establishing shots. There's like a single matte painting and that's it. Like Paul says they run through a bunch of different areas and I can only imagine they had neither the time nor the money to design something that actually resembled a real location.

The visuals of the forest area Wahlberg crashes in are also horrific, marked by poorly implemented CGI on threadbare sets. If you watch it again look how tightly shot and claustrophobic everything is, to cover for the time and budgetary constraints they were working under.

I agree however that Rick Baker's make-up is brilliant. "Prosthetic creatures" have sadly become a thing of the past, as everyone has come to rely on CGI

The CGI apes in the later films -- however detailed -- looked fake.

It's tragic to me that a genius like Rick Baker is essentially unemployed today.

Sudden Impact (6.5/10)

The original Dirty Harry and Magnum Force are among my favorite films (and I am also a big fan of The Enforcer). But Sudden Impact -- while essentially solid and not without some fine moments -- is a big comedown from the 1970s Dirty Harry pictures. It is very uneven, sometimes slow-moving and excessively (and needlessly) grisly in places.

The idea of Harry tracking a serial killer who turns out to be a woman -- bent on revenge for being gang-raped -- is an intriguing premise. But this movie is very clunky, with comedic elements (such as the pet dog, and Harry commandeering a van full of pensioners to pursue a robber) which don't blend well with the exceedingly dark agenda of the femme fatale. The subplot of Harry's buddy, played by Albert Popwell (who for no logical reason gives Harry the pet dog, and is later murdered) is irrelevant to the overall story. (That said, it was nice to see Popwell cast as something other than a pimp or bank robber this time!)

Sondra Locke's repeated flashbacks of the gang rape -- while necessary to the story -- become excessive, and are ultimately too disturbing given their frequency and screen time. The villains are all over-the-top and come off as caricatures -- again not blending well with the more visceral (and grim) storyline concerning a rape.

Sudden Impact does have its moments, such as Harry's harassment of the mob boss, which amusingly (and satisfyingly) results in the latter having a coronary. Shooting the film in Santa Cruz (one of California's most attractive communities) adds some scenic interest. But overall it feels like Eastwood just wasn't "in the groove" when directing this film. Plus, Harry Calahan was really a character of the early 1970s -- a response to the social chaos birthed in the 1960s. As such, I'm not sure he really fit into the 1980s, an era of comparative prosperity and social stability.

On The Beach (2000) 2 of 10
=After enjoying the new Imprint Blu-Ray and its bonus features of the 1959 original, I took a look at this updated remake for the first time in 20 years. God, it's even worse than I remembered. They pad it into a 4 hour depressing slogfest and just NEVER let up in the sadism. And whereas Kramer's film kept politics out of it by not "blaming" any particular side for the nuclear war, this production feels a need to engage in America-bashing on all levels because America responded to a Chinese blockade/invasion of Taiwan. Yet not once do these arrogant Aussies ever say a negative word about the Chinese (I guess they were spending all that time looking the other way buying cheap goods from them and didn't want to rock the boat or be bothered with objecting to their warlike behavior).

=The original film and Nevil Shute's novel were often criticized for the fact it showed everyone accepting death with a British stiff upper lip quality of total dignity. But this version overcompensates in the other direction way too much showing chaos, anarchy, despair, looting, and silly moments of suicides in the middle of the action. And in the process, they harm the principal characters of the original by making them far less likable and far less interesting. It isn't helped by the fact that the casting is terrible on all levels. Armand Assante is grossly miscast in the Peck role, Bryan Brown and his arrogant potty mouth makes a mockery of the Astaire role and Rachel Ward exudes none of the tragic sense of waste and loss that Ava Gardner brought to the original. The power of the original film's narrative is making us care about the characters, but when they show EVERYONE going to pieces and going nuts and cursing, and pad this to nearly four hours, you just want this whole ordeal to be over and done with. These characters are so dislikable I found myself saying good riddance to the human race.

=I won't waste time with the other idiotic changes they make from the original. I'll note there's a howler of a scene where Assante discovers a frozen corpse in Alaska and you can see the "corpse" twitching her eyes repeatedly and not able to convey the illusion she's dead. Bottom line is this remake is a pathetic disgrace and is deservedly forgotten (the guy who did the commentary on the recent Imprint release and was an expert on the book and the film admitted he's never seen this version so he wouldn't comment on it). 20 years passage has only made it seem worse than it did to me the first time.