Film Review: ''Planet of the Apes''

IT'S BIZARRE - the concept and the film, which as the director Tim Burton puts it, is being revisited from its original many years ago. Adapted from the book by Pierre Boulle the apes in the story are provocative - for thought. How much can science fiction stretch the limits of imagination and creativity? To what extent can animals mutate and imitate humans or is it the other way around? How effective is technology in the face of the age-old concept of territory domination and brutality?

Twentieth Century Fox Pictures' ``Planet Of The Apes'' is certainly something that makes you wonder about why fiction is so open to the strange and the morbid - and why something like this would be made into celluloid not once but twice and that too with such passion and vehemence. Perhaps artistic licence provides a chance to explore remote possibilities and gives many creative people an avenue to achieve almost impossible things.

If you only saw the magnitude of costuming and make up in this film (Colleen Atwood) you'll understand this uniquely envisioned journey to an incredible upside down world.

Just as a ``Jurassic Park'' displayed the kind of monsters that chase the humans here apes do all the terrorising. They are the masters and consider humans to be the monsters. These apes talk, dine and live like the humans and the dichotomy of good and evil is just a veneer - perhaps a comment on human civilisation and the animal nature that is beneath the surface.

Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) goes through a time warp and crash lands on a marshy planet. It's a harsh physical landscape - very different from his spaceships controlled environment. It's a brutal primal place where apes are in charge and humans are hunted and enslaved by the tyrannical primates. He sees how this world is and how good and bad coexist and desperately tries to get back into his world in the process taking with him the captured humans.

He is helped by an ape woman Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), daughter of their leader who is passionate independent and a human rights activist who believes in the co-existence of all species. And these are all very heretical ideas on her planet.

The escape, the chase and the highly cinematic end all compounded by heart thumping grim musical background score, make up this film. Can appeal only to a few.

CHITRA MAHESH

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Section  : Entertainment
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