Planet of the Apes A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG-13 It's 1:50 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

For you youngins, this "Planet of the Apes" is a remake of a movie from 1968. Me, I vaguely remember the first movie and didn’t go out of my way to see it before I saw Tim Burton’s attempt at a story that remains a classic. This time we get Captain Leo Davidson as a renegade astronaut. He’s on an outpost station which is training chimps to fly space probes and investigate this crazy space cloud. Well, when the first chimp disappears, Leo steals a probe and heads to find his chimp buddy. So Leo heads to the space cloud which turns out to be some kind of bridge through time, transporting Leo thousands of years into the future and crash landing him onto a strange planet which isn’t earth but might as well be. First Leo is surprised he is even alive, but then after being caught, he’s even more surprised that on this world apes are the rulers and humans are considered subspecies.

Leo isn’t one to stay a prisoner, and actually gets befriended by Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), an ape who thinks it sucks the way humans are treated. He also hooks up with Daena because she can lead him back to his space probe. With Leo and Daena on the run with a few other humans, meanwhile being helped by Ari and a couple of other apes, the ape leaders aren’t happy, in fact Thade (Tim Roth) is a little leery of Leo, especially when his dad (Charlton Heston in a great cameo as an ape) tells him that Leo would be trouble, especially if he makes it to the ape holy land. Now it’s a race to the holy land, Leo winning the race, and the other humans now looking to Leo for guidance on how to beat the apes. Thade lies his way into getting the okay to exterminate all humans, gathering his ape troops, and it’s time for the big human vs. ape fight and also time for the truth to come out.

Is this remake of "Planet of the Apes" better than the original? Who cares? It’s a fun action movie poking fun at various aspects of humanity. The apes have some of the same problems as we humans do, and even though the movie does get a little preachy, it’s still a great visual spectacle as the apes look real and the humans look scared.

The only problem I really had with the movie is, and this is my own idiosyncrasy, is that I’m always looking for foreshadowing and "Planet of the Apes" had a lot of it. I won’t explain any of it to you because it really kind of ruined a few of the plot twists, but other than the ending I saw how things were going to end up about half way through the movie. Oh well.

There are some really fun things with "Planet of the Apes," especially Paul Giamatti as the slave-seller Limbo, who was just fabulous in his role, and there are some let-downs, like the lack of using Kris Kristofferson to a better role, but all in all Tim Burton’s remake of "Planet of the Apes" works on most cylinders. Take it for what it’s worth and just enjoy it. It’s 4 stars out of 5 for "Planet of the Apes."

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!