The Big Picture: Planet of the Apes (12)

Director Tim Burton, starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, 120 mins

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Read Jonathan Romney's review

The final image – of a man standing alone and defiant on a jungle raft while hundreds of monkeys skitter around him – crowns the most remarkable picture of the month. The tale of a mission into a land with its own laws, its own customs, where civilisation and savagery meet in a struggle to the death, it's also a parable about imperialism, enslavement and the lust for glory of a crazed idealist.

In a summer starved of truly epic entertainment, here, at last, is a movie worth going ape for. But more about Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God below. First we have to deal with the rather less awesome prospect of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.

Times have changed since the first Planet of the Apes, back in 1968, when the heady atmosphere of civil rights and Vietnam made its social and political resonances sing. Budgets have changed, too, but while this new film has had far more money (more than $100m) to spend on the visual design, its allegorical power feels vastly diminished. Not that people will generally queue around the block for a hymn to racial togetherness – the reason this has been the most eagerly awaited of all the summer "event" movies is more straightforward: it had the best trailer. Does it repay our anticipation? A little, but not a lot.

On the plus side, Burton can always be relied on to deliver a spectacular-looking movie, and here, working with his long-time production designer Rick Heinrichs and the brilliant cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, he burnishes the strange planet with a dark-toned menace.

The jungle in which Mark Wahlberg's earthling astronaut crash-lands is wondrously eerie, and Burton gives us an immediate jolt when a hairy, wild-eyed creature suddenly bursts out of the undergrowth – yes, it's Kris Kristofferson, playing a runaway slave.

There are more frightening things to come, chief among them Tim Roth as the glowering ape general, Thade; like Napoleon, this militaristic monster doesn't let being a short-arse stand in his way. Encased in black neo-Gothic armour, he is quite often seen astride a horse, and when he's riled he has a neurotic fit to rival the maddest Roman emperor. He gives a new twist to the phrase "go up the wall". Thade regards humans as a verminous sub-species whose very touch will pollute, so when Wahlberg's spaceman arrives with unsuspected news about primate genealogy, he is hell-bent on keeping him quiet.

For about an hour, this through-the-looking-glass world is persuasively sinister, and Roth's tightly coiled performance heightens the foreboding. Indeed, all that stands between his jackboot and Wahlberg's head is the presence of a comely and well-connected ape activist named Ari, played with a game contrariness by Helena Bonham Carter. "It's disgusting the way we treat humans," she opines at an ape dinner party. "It demeans us as much them." An impeccable liberal sentiment, but one that sounds so blithely pro forma that you shiver at its calculation.

The satiric swipes at the doctrine of racial superiority are pointed by the likening of simian vanities to our own – so there is the ape senator bringing his trophy ape wife to dinner, and the elderly ape who removes his toupee before going to bed. These scenes may get a laugh, but their cartoon giggliness is way out of kilter with the dark brooding on tribal difference. Paul Giamatti's ape slave-dealer has some cowardly fun with his lines ("Why can't we all just get along?" he whines, echoing Rodney King) even if this also trivialises the film's engagement with ideas of otherness and reconciliation.

The most widely publicised story from the film's production concerns the cast going to "ape school" to learn the tics and idiosyncrasies of simian behaviour. Some of the training proves quite effective. The way the soldier apes end their sentences with an exhortatory grunt seems authentic; so, too, their pounce-and-pound fighting technique. Their movement, whether leaping about or advancing in battle formation, is also more convincing than that of the original movie (and its TV spin-offs).

But the question nags: did they send the screenwriters to ape school, too? Once Wahlberg organises a break-out from the ape encampment, the movie declines with alarming speed into platitude and stands revealed in all its shallowness. There's no emotional connection we can give a damn about. Hard to imagine a more insultingly underwritten – correction: unwritten – role than Estella Warren's as Wahlberg's love interest (although let's not speak too soon).

I lost count of the number of times the camera turned to her looking goggle-eyed with dismay; if the film-makers had been really daring they would have rigged a little sexual tension between Wahlberg and Bonham Carter, but that might not have played well down at the mall. Wahlberg himself is a pleasant but unexceptional hero, and his callowness doesn't naturally stir one's sympathy: he actually looks a bit dim.

Will this bother the film's target audience? I suspect not. Sorry to harp on a theme, but Planet of the Apes is just the latest in this summer's queue of movies – Lara Croft, Pearl Harbor, Rush Hour 2 – designed specifically for the entertainment of 12-14-year-old boys.

Earlier in the week, David Thomson wrote in this paper about the way film-makers have doctored their product simply to get around the ratings system; insiders reckon that the violence in Planet of the Apes has been trimmed so as to secure a "12" certificate and thus the young adolescent market. "It is that kid audience," Thomson observed, "that is setting off the big bangs week after week and then drifting on to the site of the next explosion."

What chance does complexity of feeling or force of character have in a movie when a director's thinking becomes that cynical? Planet of the Apes is by no means the worst of the season, but it offers an empty, childish sort of agitation, when one might have hoped more for a story that mixes tension with argument – something, in short, to engage adults. Sadly, the only story here is of a talent that's gone for a Burton.