I remember it like it was yesterday...

It was early in the fall of 1998, and I was pitching this screenplay that I had written to the folks at Universal. It was the epic story of Petunia, a wealthy young woman, yearning for something more than her upper class life, and Jake, the third class scallywag who just wanted to get laid by a rich chick. The two main characters meet and fornicate during a dramatic and deadly storm on Lake Superior. It was called Edmund Fitzgerald.

While I was getting my "unoriginal plagiarizing" ass thrown into a dumpster outside the studio lot, that scraggle-haired nightmare clown Tim Burton was across town at Fox, shaking hands over his "reimagining" of Planet of the Apes. I can just imagine the meeting...

Suit: You want to make another sequel to Planet of the Apes?

Burton: No, this doesn't come after the old ones. It's like... different and stuff.

Suit: So... you want to do a remake of Planet of the Apes?

Burton: Not a remake, more like, the same movie, kinda, but like, different stuff happens. It's a reimagining.

Suit: You mean like how Tornado! was a reimagining of Twister?

Burton: Exactly!

Suit: Well why didn't you just say so! Here's a big bag of money!

I suppose I had a very high tolerance for Burton's dicking around with the franchise canon, as I was never a big fan of the Planet of the Apes series. I've never seen any of the sequels or TV shows. I never owned the lunch box. In fact, I saw the original movie for the first time last year at some special screening in Hollywood where they wheeled in Charlton Heston's withered corpse on a dolly and let the audience ask him questions about guns and what it's like to decay.

I like to think of the new Apes as the old Apes adjusted for inflation.

To the same extent that a dollar is worth less in 2001 than it was in 1968, special effects are better in 2001 than they were in 1968, and people are stupider in 2001 than they were in 1968. Screw that "somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man" existential bullshit! 2001 wants to see BOOBIES and FLYING MONKEYS!

I mean, sure the movie is kind of dumb, but the special effects are amazing. *Sigh.* After Jurassic Park III and The Mummy Returns, I've actually set up a macro key that types that sentence. Still, every monkey sounded like he was spittily slurping his lines through a set of fake teeth.

Monkey: I scchay, have you schheen my scchpectacles?

Other Monkey: Scchertainly not, but I did scchpot a schhertain sschomeone sschtealing them, Sschunday!

Sean Connery: ENUNCCHHIATE! You schhtupid sschimians!

Our story begins on a huge space station deep in outer space in the unimaginably distant future of 2029. Didn't anybody notice that that's only 28 years away? I don't mean to disrespect mankind's immense potential for creation and ingenuity or anything, but come ON! I'll betcha we don't even have comical robot servants like the Jetson's Rosie by 2029, let alone manned deep space exploration.

To be fair though, in the 2029 of the movie, they haven't invented robots yet either. Not even to the extent that we have today. That's why they have to keep a flock of monkeys on hand to fly their probe ships.

I'm not kidding. That's how the movie starts. The station finds a Voyager-esque "generic time warping space anomaly thing," and they send in a small scout ship, piloted by a very obedient, DNA enhanced monkey.

Marky Mark: (over comm) Okay monkey, launch your ship.

Monkey: (launching ship) Oooh oooh.

Marky Mark: Now fly it away from the station.

Monkey: (flying away from station) Oooh oooh.

Marky Mark: Okay, now fly it into the cloud and disappear.

Monkey: (flying into cloud and disappearing) ...

What the hell? In the year 2029 is it easier to train a chimp to do exactly what you tell it to than it is to make a damn spaceship that does exactly what you tell it to? I mean, you can buy a BMW today that responds to voice commands. Yet in the future, they throw away all of this fancy technology in favor of using banana munchers. Whatever.

And then some loud THX stuff happens, and before you know it, Marky Mark is on A PLANET WHERE APES SAY DIALOGUE THAT HUMANS USED TO SAY! "Get your stinking hands off of me, you damn dirty human!" Ah haaa! Ha ha ha! Ooooh... don't ever do that. It's stupid.

As if that isn't bad enough, they actually slip in the line "Can't we all just get along?" It's true. Don't do ever do that. It's stupid.

The native humans can talk and clearly have a sense of non-savage reason, which suddenly turns the original message of "How would you like it if monkeys put you in a zoo?" into "Apes are the master race, and humans are our slaves. We could discuss this, as you talk and all, but we do not acknowledge your opinions as worthy, since you are inferior creatures." It's like the difference between 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd and the Dredd Scott Decision.

And what's with that blond hottie that we've seen in all of the advertising. Betcha thought she was going to be important to the story, didn't you. Heh. Is she supposed to be Marky Mark's love interest? Because if "frequently walked nearby" and "talked to twice" count as passionate romance, then that cute cashier at Kinkos really does love me!

But it's not like ALL of the apes hate humans. In fact, mostly it's just Tim Roth's General Thade who hates the humans enough for everybody. Then again, he seems to hate pretty much everything, including other apes.

You see, Thade is angry. All the time. Through the whole movie. For no apparent reason. I mean, I'm not Jane Goodall or anything, but even pissed off, human-hating monkeys must chill out once in a while, don't they? Then again, the sensitive, caring chimpanzee chica totally wouldn't have sex with him, and if I learned anything about primate behavior from watching Friends, it's that monkeys start to tear apart your apartment if they're not getting any.

And it goes on from there, pretty much how you expect it will from the original movie, but slightly different.

I guess in conclusion, the thing that I really took away from this movie is that Lisa Marie is so hot that I even want to see her naked as a monkey.

That Tim Burton is one lucky circus freak.

Again with the technology. I'm gonna pretend like this was supposed to be a powerful story about struggling against class and race prejudice and not a lobotomized summer blockbuster ripped off from a movie that came out when our parents were in high school.

As such, it's excusable that the thick, spaceworthy, cybertitanium hull of the spaceship was completely rotted away after 2000 years, yet all of the delicate, sensitive electronics, right down to the viewscreens, were undamaged. It's also easy to overlook the fact that they kept entering the crashed ship through the FREAKIN' ENGINE, yet said engine was still intact enough to fire one sickly blast that apparently burned through one full third of the ship's fuel capacity.

But the movie isn't about the amazing technologies that will be available to us in the far distant future when I'm still not quite old enough to cash in my 401(k). We'll let those things slide.

We'll even let it go that Charlton Heston appears as an ape, both "cleverly" rehashing his old dialogue, and "ironically" saying that guns are bad. Don't do ever do that. It's stupid.

What is inexcusable is the way that from the big battle sequence on, the rest of the plot is, as they say, telegraphed in.

Did anyone NOT know that super remote control space monkey was going to show up and stop the fighting? Jeez louise, I've seen more than one episode of Star Trek, I know that a purply cloud never just throws away stuff that flies into it. If it appears to be gone, it's just gonna show up again in the third act.

And what about the facelift to the Lincoln Memorial. The "suspense" building up to that didn't even have the cracked out hoochies in the audience buying it. The whole theater just had this air of "Wait for it... waaaaaait for it..." from the second Marky Mark burst through the atmosphere. Maybe Burton was targeting people who have only lived on this planet for a few days.

"Oh my GOD! It's not LINCOLN! It's a MONKEY! I'm surprised! Wait! I spilled my drink! It's WET! Whoa, that's surprising too! And now the lights are coming on, and it's getting BRIGHTER in here! I'm shocked! Absolutely shocked!"

Please. I've seen more surprising twist endings on A Pup Named Scooby Doo.