A few years ago, at an exhibition of his work in Melbourne, Australia, Tim Burton named several films that had an influence on his career. Among the titles was Dracula A.D. 1972, a movie that even many an aficionado of Hammer horror can’t count as a good film. Burton acknowledged its shortcomings. “I think Hammer was on the decline, and they thought, ‘hey, let’s get hip,’” he said, “which was a mistake. But I enjoy mistakes sometimes.” Burton is no stranger to accusations of having made mistakes, and no film of his faces the charge more often than 2001’s Planet of the Apes.
This is a movie you may have heard is bad. That it was a negative turning point in Burton’s career. That it was disaster that demanded another reboot of the franchise. The last point is easy enough to refute by checking its box office take. The mixed critical and fan response may well have motivated Fox to pursue another direction, but the film made plenty of money. I would dispute the second charge too; Burton’s next film after Apes was Big Fish, and he’s gone on to great work like Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd, and Big Eyes.
RELATED: Edward Scissorhands: Tim Burton's Most Vulnerable Outsider
As to the claim that the movie is bad – I’ll give you that one. As a narrative, it’s thin, uneven, and fraying at the seams. The inflexible release date set by Fox resulted in a rushed production period with extensive on-set rewrites to a long-gestating script, and in recounting the experience for the book Burton on Burton, the director speculated that had he been able to start from scratch, he would have made a completely different movie. But if 2001’s Apes a mess, it’s a fun mess. It’s a “reimagining” that holds true to the implication of that term, being a completely new take on the concept of a planet of apes without attempting to retell the story of the original film (an undeniably superior effort). And there are good pieces to the film, the acting among the strongest of them.
A cast boasting the likes of Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti, and Helena Bonham Carter would have talent to spare no matter the script, but Burton’s Apes is a showcase for a particular skill: mask acting. Rick Baker’s brilliant make-up submerged all the ape actors underneath pounds of foam latex and yak hair, obliging them to project through all that cover to deliver their performances. Giamatti in particular excelled at working his face through the rubber, but every ape in the film from Michael Clarke Duncan to supporting actors like Glenn Shadix animated their appliances and offered up fully expressive characters.
All fine, you say, but what makes Planet of the Apes so special in this regard? The original had great actors working through masks too, and so do scores of other movies. But two things stand out about the mask acting of Apes: the integration of the masks into a larger concept for the ape characters, and a point of comparison with the motion capture apes of the Caesar trilogy of recent years.
The best conceptual element of the 2001 Apes’ story is that of a more primitive ape culture (compared with the 1968 original) in a state of flux. These apes do not have guns, agricultural fields, or a regimented class system that extends all the way down to species-specific uniforms. The apes of Ashlar (the planet’s name unspoken in the film itself) wear plated armor in battle or on the hunt, still dwell in the trees and the forest floor, and only display prejudice toward the human race. Their culture retains many traits of “animalistic” apes: grooming, inquisitively exploring objects and sentient beings with their hands, and more connected and communal dwellings.
All this factors into the make-up and costumes designed by Baker and Colleen Atwood. The apes here don’t have the evolved standardized faces by species of the original series. Every ape has a unique look, and they all adhere much more closely to real ape features: the sagittal crests of gorillas, the flanges of orangutans, the variety of coloring on chimpanzees. Oversized dentures distorted the actors’ faces to work with the make-up and affect their expressions. Without animatronic enhancement, this is as close as the human face can get to an ape’s through make-up. These wonderful masks were married to a carefully developed approximation of ape movement to enhance the effect. There were no arm extensions used to try and simulate the proportions of apes as we know them. Instead, Atwood’s careful cutting of outfits and muscle under suits suggested longer arms and shorter legs, while the movement illustrated a society that had evolved up to speech, housing, and government but still retained some of their animal roots.
But how deep those roots go is the flux that this culture finds itself in. Across the DVD commentary for Apes, Burton speaks about how terrifying and “psychotic” chimpanzees can be, in contrast to their public image as cute, curious, and affectionate. This dichotomy made its way into the film through the characters of Thade (Roth) and Ari (Carter). I’d hesitate to call Ari “cute,” but she is the most inquisitive and warm-hearted of the ape characters, in stark contrast to Thade’s unpredictable rages and violence. The two characters represent different perspectives from this ape culture on how to deal with human beings. Ari, liberal-minded if still holding benign prejudice, is disgusted by the use of humans for slave labor and hopes to achieve equality for them. Thade, general of the army, heir to the secrets of Ashlar’s two civilizations, wishes to go beyond enslaving humans to wiping them out entirely.
This clash is carried over into the characters’ make-up and movement. Ari, while not nearly as humanized as the chimpanzees of the original series, has softer features than any other chimpanzee in the movie, and her movement is a little closer to natural human gait. Thade’s make-up is a closer approximation to real chimps, and he has a much lower, animalistic walk paired with the sudden bursts of acrobatic energy you can find in apes. While these two characters best personify this tension, it permeates throughout the primate cast. Having to incorporate all these notions of a young, evolving civilization still clinging to animal traits on top of working with latex appliances is a very tall order for any actor, but the cast pulled it off. The civilization of the original Planet of the Apes was no less defined than Burton’s but because the story is so much weaker in his film, the exploration of the world stands out the more. Given further support by Rick Heinrichs’s vertical forest city and Danny Elfman’s eclectic, percussion-heavy score, it really does feel like a world depart, and I wish the film could have been a “day in the life” exploration of this society and its tensions rather than a cliché escape plot with a big, dumb battle at the end.
As for the comparison with more recent Apes trilogy: for as long as there’s been acting, there have been actors who don’t enjoy costumes and make-up. In the age of film, appliances of the type used by Baker and his team for Burton’s apes can take hours to apply and remove. Some are allergic to the adhesives, some are claustrophobic when submerged in the mask, and some find it annoying and uncomfortable. They would rather work with their own face. Motion capture provides that option. It’s been described as an advancement over prosthetics; Andy Serkishas routinely called it “digital make-up.”
But it doesn’t take away from the talents of actors cast in motion-capture roles, or the digital artists who take over in post, to say that there is a tangible difference between that kind of work and a performance given through a physical mask. This holds true for any comparison between digital and practical tools: it’s all hard work, but a different sort of hard work. Practical objects can be photographed just as they are, can change looks under natural and manmade sources of light without any wizardry, can move and flex and bend and break. When it comes to acting, masks also have direct physical impact on actors. They can’t move their faces the same way they normally would and have their performance properly register. If they have giant ape dentures, as Burton’s cast did, they can’t speak the way they normally would. Costumes and muscle undersuits lock in posture and limit movement, and present cuts of fabrics that can get in the way when caught by the wind or snagged in a set or location.
This forces actors to adjust their performances. They act in ways they wouldn’t act if they weren’t encumbered by make-up. It brings something new out of them. Some actors can’t meet that challenge, or just don’t want to. Others relish it or, if they don’t, at least make lemonades out of lemons. It doesn’t detract from Serkis’s work as Caesar to say that Paul Giamatti’s Limbo is a different experience for a viewer. The latter is an orangutan who was clearly there, in locations and on practical sets. His rotted teeth are huge, his nose is flattened by appliances, his ambling gait and sloppy posture don’t match how even the most slovenly of us walks, and yet it’s still clearly a human being inside physical appliances and wardrobe, performing wild takes and wonderful bits of physical comedy.
Duncan as the far more stoic Attar hadn’t the free rein to emote to that degree, but he was able to find a more subtle expression of his character and have it register through latex. Tim Roth – whose “big nose” (Baker’s words) were ill-suited to the ape make-up, necessitating thicker rubber pieces – could still sell going apeshit through all that rubber and a suit of armor more tailored for an ape’s physique than his own. To see them – to see all of this cast – create such expressive characters, part of a solid conception of an ape culture, all through practical means, is a wonderful experience. Without diminishing the digital option, I will always prefer the former approach.
And if that approach is attached to a story that doesn’t work and a movie that doesn’t gel, that amounts to a big mistake? Well, to quote an expert on the subject, I enjoy mistakes sometimes.
