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Planet of the Apes (2001) WARNING - SPOILERS BELOW.
The Digest In 2029 Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is above earth in a medical research space station. Rather than flying, he is unhappily spending his time training chimpanzee's to fly space pods. They are being trained in an effort to save humans. If the crew comes across something dangerous, they can send a pod being flown by a monkey rather than risk the life of a human. Leo understands this, but he is upset nonetheless. He was born to fly and it's killing him to sit on the sidelines. All that changes, however when the monkey he has been training is sent to investigate what appears to be a magnetic cloud. The monkey gets lost in that cloud and Leo defies orders and goes after the monkey, resulting in Leo getting lost as well. Leo struggles to keep his space pod together and manages to crash land in a swamp. He is barely on land when he looks up and see some primitive looking humans run by him. He has no idea what's chasing them, but he isn't sticking around to find out. Leo follows the other humans as he runs through the forest, very quickly he sees that they are running from apes. But these are not ordinary apes. These apes ride horses and talk. Leo is captured with several other humans and is sold into slavery. He catches the attention of Thade (Tim Roth), Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) and Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan). Thade is a psycho chimp who leads the military and Attar is his right hand man ...er Gorilla. Thade hates all things human. In fact he wants them all dead. He hopes to be able to round them up from their villages and kill them all and Attar is happy to help. Ari, is a human-rights activist. She finds the way humans are treated to be deplorable and she wants to stop it. She wants and equal yet separate existence. Thade will hear nothing of the sort. Even his love for Ari is not enough to convince him that the humans should be treated um... humanely. Once Ari meets Leo, she is further convinced that she must save the humans. She helps Leo and several other slaves escape. She knows her actions will cause her to lose Leo, who desperately wants to get home, and cause a violent confrontation between the humans and the apes. But to Ari this is all worth is because in the end, humans and apes just may be able to co-exist. Whew! The Dish This is probably one of the worse scripts I've come across in a while. The story itself wasn't that bad, but the dialogue pretty much sucked. BUT I still liked almost every minute of this movie. It's clearly a "summer" movie. It's low on plot, but high on special effects. And let me tell you, those special effects were something else. I was completely enthralled. The way the primates moved; jumping against walls and onto horses. It was amazing. So amazing, that I was able to forget about the bad dialogue and just enjoy myself. In my opinion, the key to enjoying this movie is to visualize the apes as human. If you think of them as human then some of the stuff they do and things they say, will not seem so weird. The tribal humans seemed to be a bit of a waste to me (especially the hard-headed teenager. They should have let his butt get killed.). Other than helping to fight the apes, they seemed rather pointless to me. This was clearly about Leo, Thade, and Ari. Everything else was scene filler and bra filler... if you know what I mean. Those of you who have seen the original will appreciate the references made to it in this updated version. You should also appreciate the twist at the end. I really would like to talk about that so go put your 2 cents in on the board after you've seen the movie. The Directive See this as soon as you can, but remember... it's a summer movie. There won't be any non-technical Oscars. 
Planet of the Apes rocked my world.
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