What made Tim Burton’s much-hyped Planet of the Apes such a confusing mess 25 years ago?
The 2001 film with Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter featured a muddled script and awkward callbacks to the 1968 original
Released at the height of the American civil rights movement, the original 1968 adaptation starred Charlton Heston as an astronaut who crash-lands on a planet where humans are slaves to apes. It featured some iconic lines, a knotty racial subtext and one of the greatest twist endings of all time. In short, it left a lot to live up to.
The idea of a remake had been bandied about for years. At one point Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to star, with filmmakers as diverse as Oliver Stone, James Cameron and Peter Jackson attached at different times.
Burton – a Hollywood maverick with a flair for cerebral, left-of-centre fare such as Edward Scissorhands, not to mention 1989’s global smash hit Batman – promised to bring his own unique perspective to the material.
“I wasn’t interested in doing a remake or a sequel of the original Planet of the Apes film,” he told critic David Hughes. “But I was intrigued by the idea of revisiting that world. Like a lot of people, I was affected by the original film. I wanted to do a ‘reimagining’.”
It must have seemed like a good omen that Richard D. Zanuck, who was president of 20th Century Fox in the late 1960s, signed on to produce.