Planet of the Apes (12)

Don't monkey with a great ape

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According to one definition, a myth is a narrative so powerful and coherent that not even the worst translation can spoil it. In that case, cinema myths should be doubly impervious to damage; for in film, it can take just one strong image to colonise our consciousness, regardless of narrative execution. It doesn't matter much whether the 1967 sci-fi fantasy Planet of the Apes was a great film, or even a good one. The important thing is that its premise was a dream of comic-book simplicity – a world ruled by apes, with humans as the shambling underclass. And the visual hook was unforgettable – suave gibbons in futuristic safari suits, Charlton Heston in all his chest-baring agony.

Still, there's no image in the world that a literal-minded remake can't drain of its mythic power. In many ways, Tim Burton's new Planet of the Apes is more visually striking than Franklin J Schaffner's original: Helena Bonham Carter as a chichi chimp, with shaggy chops and silky bob, made one of the more engaging Premiere covers of recent times. Yet Burton has little to offer but a refinement of the first film's imagery. He may have Industrial Light and Magic and make-up wizard Rick Baker on his side, but what's missing is a single sharp new idea or a searching critical angle on the original. No-one involved seems to have thought much about what the story meant in the decade of civil rights, Vietnam and rising environmental awareness, and what new meanings it might possibly acquire today.

This remake shows that middle-budget Hollywood sci-fi in the Sixties was more alert and more zeitgeist-attuned than today's blockbusters, which inhabit only their own numbed void of opening-weekend grosses. The rhetorical point of Schaffner's original, a pop-Swiftian cartoon about racial intolerance and oppression, is taken pretty much as read here, and handled with the ironic subtlety of a fifth-form debating match: "You can't tell them apart," growls one simian bigot, eyeing up the humans. But however explicitly spelled out in the script, the allegory is effectively sabotaged by species stereotyping among the primates: while the enlightened chimps, led by Bonham Carter's liberal aristo, are characterised as sophisticated white Europeans, Michael Clarke Duncan's laconic warrior gorilla is cast as a black henchman with barely any narrative function.

There's a strange inconsistency in the playing too. Both Bonham Carter and David Warner are uncannily recognisable, and surprisingly expressive, under their four hours' application of make-up – Bonham Carter with a pert, flirtatious repertoire of pouts, sniffs and knowing eye signals, and a distinct touch of Katharine Hepburn in her delivery. Paul Giamatti too works his elastic features to droll effect, as a sleazy slave-trader gibbon. But if they can emote through all that latex, why does Tim Roth's chimpanzee general have the same expression of curled-lip rage throughout, like Klaus Kinski with lockjaw? It could be anyone behind those flared nostrils: you wonder whether Gary Oldman didn't pop in as substitute on Roth's days off.

There's one neat in-joke, Heston himself as a primate doyen, explaining human firepower. One gun, says the figurehead of the National Rifle Association, has "the power of a thousand spears". But it's a mistake to give Heston's original role to the clod-hopping Mark Wahlberg, whose entirely unfazed astronaut hero, trying to rouse the humans to insurgency, is like a high-school football captain pep-talking a losing team. And Estella Warren is a pure waste of space, pouting vacantly in the skimpy buckskin last modelled by Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

It all finally goes off the rails when Wahlberg is saved at the height of battle by a scandalously silly deus ex machina. The lazy premise of the conclusion relies on our willingness to accept that if it's sci-fi, then there's probably a time-warp involved somewhere and no questions asked. As for the new surprise ending, it's not quite the original's Statue of Liberty revelation but a variation on that, and based, I suspect, on an excruciating unspoken pun: it feels like the product of a panicky brainstorming session just as the coffee was running out.

This extremely mainstream effort clearly isn't giving Burton anything like the good time he had with Ed Wood or Mars Attacks!. There's only a smattering of characteristic touches: some eerie scarecrows, an ape child frilled up like a Victorian moppet, Lisa Marie's larky turn as an orang-utan's simpering trophy wife, and a passing moment of ape jazz, bass fiddle plucked with the feet (tree-bop, I guess).

There are other impressive design touches – the apes' helmets with their bizarre scimitar curves, and the army's scarlet tents, which seem like a terrific merchandising opportunity, just the thing for avant-garde camping holidays. A lot of thought has also been given to making the apes actually move like apes, leaping and swinging, or charging into battle on all fours. Their marching formation, though, lurches along in a way that made me think they were going to strike up the "Oh-ee-oh-ohhh-oh!" chorus of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

As for subtext, forget it. The hovering spectre of miscegenation is summarily dispelled – despite their coy glances, there's no chance of a truly hairy moment between Wahlberg and Bonham Carter. Who'd have imagined that Burton, Hollywood's pet maladjusted adolescent, would play it so straight or so impersonally opulent? You wish he'd followed in the spirit of his erstwhile role model Ed Wood, and kept it chimp and cheerful.

j.romney@independent.co.uk