I finally saw Planet of the Apes last night. I didn’t enjoy it. And no, it’s not because I had high expectations or anything. I just found the first 2/3 of the movie incredibly boring. You remember in school, when you drew the classic “plot” structure as a flat line that then hits a conflict and inclines up, reaches a climax, and finishes in a denouement? Well, I hate films that don’t have a clear ending to the beginning. I just never felt like, okay, we’re settling into the movie now. Maybe it’s the fact that Marky Mark’s character never really stops to try and understand what’s happened to him. If you suddenly found yourself in a completely foreign place where existence as you knew it was turned upside-down, wouldn’t you freak out a little bit? Wouldn’t you need some time to, you know, come to grips with it? Instead he’s all just “Go! Go! Go!” You start out on the incline. It’s unsettling.

That said, the ending was pretty good. And by that I mean the resolution of that situation on the “planet of the apes”, not the surprise little bit tacked on at the very end. I hated that bit. Remember at the end of Jurassic Park 2 when the T-Rex was on the rampage in Los Angeles? It felt like that. It was a cool idea, but there’s no real way to work it into the story so they just tack it on. Ebert manages to rationalize it, but I think he’s reaching. But anyway, the climax is pretty cool, even if you’d already guessed ten minutes earlier what was going to happen. My final verdict is that this one is probably a renter. If you’re gonna be bored for the first 90 minutes, you might as well be at home with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.