Sunday, August 19, 2007
Planet of the Apes
A remake of the 1968 classic, which I’ve seen only as a TV movie, it benefits from the advances made in CGI and special effects in the last 4 decades. Whether or not Moses, the head of the NRA, AKA Charlton Heston’s acting chops are superior to Mark Wahlberg’s I’ll leave for others to decide though worthy of note is the fact that Mark gets to keep his clothes on and I’m fairly certain he has the buffer physique. Interestingly while the original was shot in California the remake needed to go to Australia and Hawaii to find suitable jungle locations.
Much of the movie is shot at night—an attempt to lessen the need for carefully detailed costuming? The final showdown takes place on a rocky desert plain. I’m assuming that most people are aware of the role reversal between humans and apes that is the primary conceit of both the original and this remake. Again I’d term this an amiable time waster. Both Planet and its sister movie Quest For Fire feature a talentless Darryl Hannah though in this movie at least she has the excuse that her prosthetics prevent her from showing any visible emotions. At least in this one there is some dialogue, Quest For Fire is limited to grunts and gestures.
I have a personal interest in Quest for Fire beyond the fact that I’ve read Jean Auel’s book of the same title as I’ve visited the caves on the Bruce Peninsula here in Ontario where the cave scenes were shot. What you don’t see in the movie is the fact that those caves are at least 50 feet down specially constructed stairs with a ledge in front of a 200 foot cliff above Georgian Bay. Unfortunately the pictures I shot were taken on slides decades before the aegis of digital photography and I’ve yet to scan them into a computer.
