I'll be honest. I can't utterly hate any movie that has the line, "Your monkey launches at 1600 hours." Or shows an ape wearing armor astride a horse. Or has a cameo by Charlton Heston. Or has Tim Roth dressed up in jaw-droppingly convincing chimpanzee make-up.
However...
Mark Wahlberg plays frustrated astronaut Leo Davidson. Part of an intergalactic
exploration team, Davidson must sit around 
and
train chimpanzees to do all the flying and exploring in tiny space pods. "They're
the canaries," Davidson's commander explains while gesturing out at the
infiniteness of space, "and that's the coalmine." When spacechimp
Pericles gets caught in a powerful magnetic storm, Wahlberg defiantly launches
after him. Soon Wahlberg crashlands on a mysterious planet and finds himself
running with a tribe of humans being hunted by a group of powerful armor-clad
apes.
I tried to be fair and not compare this movie to the original, which is one of my all-time favorites. Such a comparison would make Burton's "re-imagining" seem to suck big-time. So I put as many thoughts and memories of the original out of my mind and tried to judge this film on its own merits.
And on its own merits? Boy, does it suck big-time.
My main problem is that watching Burton's apes is like watching someone do one of Godel's theorems: each new detail just seems to further disprove the existence of the whole. One of Burton's spins is to accentuate how strong and how fast the apes are, capable of huge leaps, strongly scent-based, and having fully opposable thumbs on their feet; in short, these apes are more ape-like. Well, fine. But why then do they have any need for weapons? Or armor? Or horses? Or cities, even, on a planet that is shown to possess lush jungles?
Basically, they need those things because that's what Planet of the Apes is all about. I can't fault the group that sat down and looked at the original movie and made a list of all the things the remake would have to have ("(1) reluctant hero astronaut; (2) sympathetic chimp; (3) apes on horses") and then tried to come up with spins on everything. Nor can I fault that Burton obviously wanted to try and make it a planet of apes, not guys in monkey suits--but not only is there not much effort made to make that idea go more than skin-deep, every effort just seems to work against any momentum the story tries to get going on its own. At one point, it's shown that the apes fear water because they can't swim. Okay, fine. That works. But when Davidson and his group of outcasts ford a river, we're told that "[the apes] will go upstream to where they can cross more easily." Huh? Wha? How are they going to cross? You can't build a bridge if you can't bring yourself to get wet, right? And why don't the humans just build themselves a healthy "waterworld" type fortress and live safely out at sea? And then there's the events of the plot, which Burton, as always, will happily discard if he gets something to riff on in its place. When Davidson and chums escape from Ape City, they end up running through every house in the place. We get to see lots of little cuts to ape life (my favorite was the older ape taking off his toupee and dentures--an idea that is actually clever and makes sense in Burton's ape-centric world) and, okay, they're cute and funny, but it makes Davidson and all seem like utter idiots. ("Okay, we have to get out of here as surreptitiously as possible--let's go run through everyone's bedroom!")
You just can't help but think of this stuff because the movie leaves you with so much empty time on its hands. As cool as Tim Roth looks, he has only four different scenes that he gets to do over and over until the end. Which is the same for everyone, most of whom I could find nothing to complain about (Helena Bonham Carter's character was pretty lousy and confused, and her makeup was blechhy, but her chemistry with Wahlberg was terrific). I do have to say that although Roth looked fantastic, he sounded horrible with a dumb-ass growly voice that was supposed to be menacing but was just stupid and fake. A shame, because he honestly did some of the best acting in make-up since Lon Chaney passed. As for the "twist" ending, I'll only say that it's amusing that the Pericles the space chimp ultimately turns out to be a much better pilot that astronaut Davidson. It was a much better bit of irony than anything else the film has to offer. Although I watched this movie intently and there were moments that made me briefly happy and hopeful ("Your monkey launches at 1600 hours..."), most of this mushy movie can only be considered good when compared to the rest of the crap Hollywood's released this summer; by almost any other yardstick, the vast majority of this material is very much beneath the Planet of the Apes.