This is it – pretty much the last of the summer’s big movies to be released. And I’m hearing much of what I heard last summer- “is that it?” There’s no “buzz” movies- the ones people tell you “you just have to see”. We’ve been through “Pearl Harbor” and “A.I.” and “Cats and Dogs” and just last week, “America’s Sweethearts”, and, still, I hear nothing about any of these movies once they’re released.

Now all hope is gone for this summer because I don’t think we’ll hear much about “Planet of The Apes” beyond this next week or so. Mark Wahlberg (don’t call him “Marky Mark”) takes the Charlton Heston role from the original, playing a U.S. Air Force guy by the name of Leo. He’s left stranded on “The Planet of The Apes”. But the similarity very much ends there. They tried awful hard not to do a simple remake of the original, and on that count they succeeded. Yes, Leo leads the humans in an uprising against the apes, and, yes, he gets help from a sympathetic chimp named Ari, played by Helena Bonham Carter. They’re up against a cruel ape general named Thade, played by Tim Roth, and his right hand “ape” called Attar, played by Michael Clarke Duncan. But I won’t say much else about the story because there are some pretty big twists coming. I will tell you I figured one out, but the other didn’t occur to me until right before it happened. I’m a little ticked off at the ending though, because as with “Jurassic Park III” last week, I felt set-up for a sequel. But I do think these twists do barely save this movie from my rating wrecking pile. The problem with this movie appears twofold. First, the premise of a planet ruled by apes years into the future is now not a new one. The preaching over man’s inhumanity towards ape and the parallels with our society’s treatment of blacks not that many years back seems dated now. Since the original movie came out in the 1960’s, we’ve had many far better depictions of the cruelty(movies like “Roots”). I think they saw this coming and attempted to crank up the humor and campiness here. Tim Roth’s ape character is a very over-the-top performance. He hisses, he grunts, he swings from tree to tree. Nice touch but it can’t make up for the sameness of this movie, which just takes us from chase scene to chase scene as Leo tries to flee from the ape guys over and over again. And I can’t say this was one of Wahlberg’s better performances. He’s kind of dull in the role and his back Boston accent starts to sound silly after a while. I think the other problem here is the PG-13 rating. The violence and action scenes are squelched to the point where most of this movie plays out like a TV movie. I’ve heard some call it nothing more than a “Star Trek” episode with Leo as Captain Kirk and it does seem that way sometimes. The make-up and costumes are great though. All in all, “Planet of The Apes” is not up to my standards of a great summer movie, but you could do worse. People I’ve talked to mostly mention “Shrek” and “Moulin Rouge” as summer movies they went out of their way to see. Who could have predicted that? I give “Planet of The Apes” a 6.0 on the 1 to 10 scale.