Planet Of The Apes Movie

Even the devilish Tim Burton couldn't have come up with a more amusingly incongruous anthropomorphic image for his upcoming remake of "Planet of the Apes" than the sight of British actress Helena Bonham Carter, in full primate face, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she picks her nose.

Even though he'd just come off another grueling shoot, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," and was faced with an attenuated lead time if he joined "Planet of the Apes," Rick Baker says, "I just couldn't pass this one up." There were three types of simian makeup for "Planet." The lead characters, Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti and Michael Clarke Duncan, had to be completely lifelike, requiring the longest daily application.

In 1913, the French serial master Victorin Jasset loosed the cinema's first ape-man in "Balaoo," according to "The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies." Remade twice, as "The Wizard" (1927) and "Dr. Renault's Secret" (1942), the early French fairy tale of a scientist's semi-human simian and the doctor's niece he adores is the prototype of "King Kong" (1933) and even of Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes." The attraction between two species is a recurring theme of horror and fantasy films.

As the superior simian creatures in "Planet of the Apes" might say, audiences "went human" for Tim Burton's foray into action adventure, resulting in an eye-popping, three-day estimate of $69.6 million--the best debut of the year and the second-biggest three-day total ever, trailing only "The Lost World's" $72.1 million in 1997.

Not every Hollywood producer is given an opportunity to live out what would certainly be a common fantasy: traveling back to your own past. Many might choose to do so to correct some misstep that affected the rest of their lives. But what do you do if your past needs little correction? Why, then, travel back at all? This in a sense is the question I put to Richard D. Zanuck.

Last week's release of the new "Planet of the Apes" makes us think about how much--or how little--we've evolved since 1968, when the original "Planet of the Apes" was released. To be sure, 1968 was a year of tragedy, including the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by what was then the Soviet Union and the continuing war in Vietnam. But 1968 was full of other kinds of news, much of it mirrored by events taking place right now.

When "Planet of the Apes" opened--and I'm talking about the 1968 original, not Tim Burton's ham-fisted, self-absorbed remake--I remember dashing to the theater, so anxious was I to see this movie that promised a whole planet full of non-human talking primates. And when the movie was over, I remember thinking it was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Three decades later, I decided the time was right to reacquaint myself with that sci-fi classic.

Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" set a box office record as the biggest non-holiday movie opening ever. Considering the 1968 version spawned four sequels, a television show and plenty of merchandising schemes, there's no telling what the latest band of apes might loose upon the world. But since nature abhors a hit movie with no sequel, here's what we anticipate: "Metamorphosis on the Planet of the Apes." A depressed middle-class man wakes up one morning in an ape suit--and it won't unzip!

Just as headlines have been trumpeting the coming together of urbanites and suburbanites, blacks and whites, to rid our cities of drug violence, the Hollywood dream factory is manufacturing hopeful and long-overdue images of racial and ethnic cooperation and coexistence. Well, glory day. On the surface, Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" and Brett Ratner's "Rush Hour 2" have little in common. "Planet" is a remake of Franklin J.