"Listen, Boogie Nights was just a movie, okay? Would you stop staring?"

Remakes are tricky. Fans of the original are either delighted that somebody's paying attention to their beloved film, or outraged that anybody would dare mess with it. Everybody else needs a good reason to care at all. When it comes to Tim Burton's new version of Planet of the Apes, that reason is the apes themselves.

Where the original had people in ape suits, this version has people playing apes. There is a difference. These characters look like apes, move like apes, screech like apes. It's amazing. Credit should be divided between the actors who play these parts and the makeup artists who did such an extraordinary job in transforming them. (Early tip for next year's Oscar pool: Rick Baker for Best Makeup. They may as well just give it to him now.)

General Thade's first name is Bubbles.

The story, unfortunately, isn't particularly compelling. Mark Wahlberg plays Captain Leo Davidson, an astronaut in the year 2029 working on a distant space station training chimps to be pilots. When his furry friend gets lost in a space storm, Davidson sets out after it and crash lands on (cue dramatic music) The Planet of the Apes.

The plot seems like kind of an afterthought. More attention is paid to little slices of ape life, glimpses of them acting just like us that are supposed to be amusing but mostly fall flat. (A pampered ape wife complains of having a bad hair day. Yeah, that's cute.) Eventually we get a surprise twist, which most people will have seen coming, a big battle and a sequel-ready ending. Oh, and Charlton Heston, suiting up as an aging ape . . . gun-control advocate? Wow, did he read the script before showing up?

The most compelling scenes belong to the brutal General Thade. Tim Roth gives a remarkable performance, instilling in his character a human's intelligence and capacity for hatred combined with an animal's instincts and unreasoning rage. He stalks through his scenes, glaring, snarling, sniffing, lashing out. Thade is a larger than life character and Roth plays him that way. He's the most menacing screen villain since the T-Rex in the original Jurassic Park.

"Yes, just like in Boogie Nights, that's right."

Poor Mark Wahlberg never stands a chance. The problem isn't so much his somewhat bland performance as the fact that he's not given much to work with. Davidson is a poorly defined character and more than a little dense. Another actor may have been able to inject some personality into him, but Wahlberg seems to always be waiting for direction that never comes.

The movie looks great. Tim Burton and his crew did an amazing job creating this world. But art direction and sly jabs at the original aside, the characters and the story left me not really caring a whole lot.

Overall, though, I'd say the movie is worth seeing. But once you have, rent one of these other Tim Burton movies that do a better job of combining style with story.

Gorilla Pants rating: 2.5 out of 4 bananas