WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW
If anyone else in the world wasted its resources the way this movie does the global media would howl.
Tim Burton has been quoted as saying he never went to film school, or that he never finished it. Sad to say, his movies show it. He's consistently come up with interesting outsider characters but at least the story revolved around them. Here, there are several out-of-place characters around whom no story is told.
On top of that, like in Burton's other movies he substitutes here a weak ending for a hard-hitting one that could have paid off all that gone into the movie. We get a miasma of red herrings and actions that drag on for no reason because neither Burton nor the writers had the neither the maturity nor the nerve to end their movie with any one thing. Murdered characters whose discovery leads to no further development. The fight with Thade ends not with a dramatic kill-or-be-killed but with him holing up undercover - but then we never see the consequences of his cowardice. One gorilla changes his alliegiance after the battle but we're never given a foreshadowing of this. The apes survive a rocket engine blast but we're never given an earlier clue that they can. What we're shown as a space station turns out to be a space ship as well but we don't see that until we see the wreckage on the Planet of the Apes, nor are we given a clue as to how it got there - did it come through the same vortex as our hero?
Then they had to end their movie with an post-ironic, self-referential, wise-acre college-student twist that said absolutely nothing about all that had gone before. Rod Serling these guys are not.
If this wins any awards it should be the 2001 Golden Rasberry. It certainly won't wins Oscars for writing or direction. I can only hope the Sci-Fi Conventions refuse to award it any prizes
If anyone else in the world wasted its resources the way this movie does the global media would howl.
Tim Burton has been quoted as saying he never went to film school, or that he never finished it. Sad to say, his movies show it. He's consistently come up with interesting outsider characters but at least the story revolved around them. Here, there are several out-of-place characters around whom no story is told.
On top of that, like in Burton's other movies he substitutes here a weak ending for a hard-hitting one that could have paid off all that gone into the movie. We get a miasma of red herrings and actions that drag on for no reason because neither Burton nor the writers had the neither the maturity nor the nerve to end their movie with any one thing. Murdered characters whose discovery leads to no further development. The fight with Thade ends not with a dramatic kill-or-be-killed but with him holing up undercover - but then we never see the consequences of his cowardice. One gorilla changes his alliegiance after the battle but we're never given a foreshadowing of this. The apes survive a rocket engine blast but we're never given an earlier clue that they can. What we're shown as a space station turns out to be a space ship as well but we don't see that until we see the wreckage on the Planet of the Apes, nor are we given a clue as to how it got there - did it come through the same vortex as our hero?
Then they had to end their movie with an post-ironic, self-referential, wise-acre college-student twist that said absolutely nothing about all that had gone before. Rod Serling these guys are not.
If this wins any awards it should be the 2001 Golden Rasberry. It certainly won't wins Oscars for writing or direction. I can only hope the Sci-Fi Conventions refuse to award it any prizes