The wonderful thing about Tim Burton's "retelling" of The Planet of the Apes is that most of the people involved with the original are dead and, thusly, can't make annoying cameo appearances like we've gotten used to seeing in the remake genre (who cares if Roddy McDowall plays an ape again if you can't see his face?).  Sure, Charlton Heston is in it, but he's practically dead.  His brain is, anyway.  It's a prerequisite for membership in the NRA.

It's been over 30 years since Apes' initial release in 1968, and while the special effects, which include a barber pole in the spaceship, don't exactly hold up, the story does, even though it's better suited for something like The Twilight Zone (in fact, Rod Serling was one of the film's writers).  The Gen-Xers to whom the new film is targeted probably see the original as a cheesy sci-fi adventure, thanks to four sub-par sequels (they got worse and worse) and the lame-o television spin-off that followed.  Sure, it was cheesy, but the original was so much more than sweaty actors in plastic monkey suits.  Apes examined difficult issues like bigotry and evolution in a unique and thought-provoking way, making it a whole lot more interesting than, say, 95% of the sci-fi films that followed it.

After a brief monologue from Heston (a previous Oscar winner for Ben Hur) explaining that he and his three-person crew have been traversing space for hundreds and hundreds of Earth years, his Colonel George Taylor straps himself into a space-bed with the intention of waking up as his ship approaches Earth.  But like they so often do, things go wrong.  One of Taylor's shipmates doesn't survive the journey, and to make matters worse, the craft has somehow veered off course, leaving the three survivors believing that they're 320 light years from home.  The ship crashes into a body of water on a strange planet and quickly sinks just after the men escape (they don't bother checking the composition of the atmosphere, but that's just one of the film's many unintentional laughs...like when they wake up after years of space-sleep with full beards but the same haircut).

It isn't long before Taylor and his men are rounded up, like so many Jews and Africans, by the apes that control the planet.  While the message isn't at all blunt (Taylor and crew are White; apes are Black), it's delivered extremely well.  The monkeys think all humans are filthy, smelly and disease-ridden, and spray them down with high-powered hoses (the original was more of a straight role-reversal than the remake). And if the stereotype-smashing isn't enough for you, there's also a debate on evolution, in which Drs. Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) clash with the old, conservative Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans).

So the story (written by Serling and Michael Wilson, based on Pierre Boulle's novel) is cool and the effects are dated – what about the acting?  It's god-awful.  Is there any actor alive capable of overacting like Heston does here?  He makes Rob Schneider and Troy McClure look like Olivier and Gielgud.  The highlight of Apes is the 30 minutes that Heston is unable to speak.

Apes landed Oscar nominations for its costumes and Jerry Goldsmith's unmistakable score, and won an Honorary Award for the cutting-edge makeup used to create the apes.  The film's sets are strikingly similar to those recently seen in the Oscar-nominated Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and the scarecrows that the apes use to frighten the masses away from The Forbidden Zone probably inspired the stick man figure from The Blair Witch Project.  And it was rated G, despite Linda Harrison's skimpy outfits and the nude swimming scene Taylor shares with his crew before the apes show them what for.

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