Unlike most other movies of the current summer aimed primarily at popcorn chompers, Planet of the Apes is not really infuriating many critics. Rather, the reviews are divided almost equally between those who find it somewhat disappointing and those who have gone, er, ape over it. Rita Kempley of the Washington Post is part of the latter crowd. Calling the movie an “astonishing new version” of the original story, Kempley says that it is “splendidly envisioned and boldly executed” by director Tim Burton. Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune is equally enthusiastic about the movie, calling it “a Hollywood super-spectacle loaded with voluptuous visual effects and graced with subversive blasts of playfulness and wit.” Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star labels it “a resounding pop achievement: a re-imagining that honors the essence of the original while fusing it to the temperament of the present.” And Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post promises that it will “keep you on the edge of your seat for nearly two hours.” Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News urges moviegoers to “let the gray matter rest and enjoy what may be the best two hours of nonsense you’ll see this year.” On the other hand, Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer remarks: “(Planet of the Apes) is provocative. It is frightening. It is a mess.” And Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times comments: “When Mr. Burton‘s Planet fixes on being entertaining as single-mindedly as the gorillas bearing down on homo sapiens, it succeeds. But the picture states its social points so bluntly that it becomes slow-witted and condescending; it treats the audience as pets.” (In the film, apes treat humans as pets.) Most of the reviews compare the new film with the 1968 original. Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail observes that it would be impossible for the Burton film to duplicate the charm of the first Apes. “Instead, it’s obliged to do something else, something different, and therein lies the problem … it doesn’t. … In fact the themes have actually been dumbed down.” Jay Carr in a review in the Boston Globe headlined “When Hairy Met Silly,” is more specific. “The original film was campy but resonant with social themes in a time of civil rights struggle,” he writes. “This new version is little more than a screenful of heavy-metal political correctness.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times acknowledges at the beginning of the review that he “expected more” from Burton, then writes later that the director “had some kind of an obligation to either top [the original], or sidestep it. Instead, he pays homage. … He’s made a film that’s respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that’s not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.”
