BURTON'S `APES': MONKEY SEE, MONKEY KILL.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

While not exactly a work to go - well, you know - over, Tim Burton's remake of ``Planet of the Apes'' boasts more pleasures than not.

As is typical of Burton when he plays with big budgets (``Sleepy Hollow,'' the first two ``Batman'' gargoyle-a-thons), most of the inspiration here went into the design. The intelligent simians' arboreal city looks like the most elaborate treehouse ever built. Rick Baker's monkey makeup marks a career best for this most-lauded of special effects artists; the emotional nuances that flash across all of that latex are nothing short of exhilarating.

And Burton certainly understands, far better than any ``Apes'' cycle directors of the 1960s and '70s ever did, the rib-tickling visual potential of lower primate moves made by beasts with higher intelligence. The real hero of this movie is Cirque du Soleil veteran Terry Notary, who trained the actors in apish expressiveness. Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti and many others (including, in his second brilliant, self-parodying cameo of the year, original ``Planet'' star Charlton Heston) transform themselves into sniffing, snarling, brachiating bundles of boundless physical amusement.

To a monkey, in fact, they're more convincingly alive than their furless co-stars. Considering the main humans are portrayed by a generally blank-faced Mark Wahlberg, Canadian Amazon Estella Warren and the ever-unimpactful Kris Kristofferson, it's no wonder the more accomplished ape players steal every scene that comes within their unopposable grasp.

Like the originals, Burton's ``Planet'' offers a thinly disguised parable about prejudice. Only the new script, credited to William Broyles Jr. (``Cast Away,'' ``Apollo 13'') and Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (lots of bad movies), has playful fun with the concept, mostly by piping contemporary reactionary rhetoric out of monkey mouths. The theme isn't exactly deepened as the movie grows more serious about itself, though.

Instead, a respectful but critical look at how religion develops provides a few bananas for thought. And there are neat comparisons to be made between the Cold War paranoia that informed the '68 original and the globalist issues this millennial version touches on.

Mostly, however, this is a flight-and-fight thing. Wahlberg's Capt. Leo Davidson is a near-future astronaut who leaves his space station to rescue his favorite, genetically improved chimp, whose exploration pod has been lost in an electro-magnetic storm. As such phenomena tend to do in stories like this, the cosmic storm rips a rent in the time-space continuum that sends Davidson's own capsule crashing onto, yes, a planet where talking simians have built a kind of late medieval society and dominate the more-or-less mesolithic human tribes.

Davidson is captured in a hunt for human slaves/pets, and soon after leads an escape party back into the forest and out to the badlands where he believes earthlings will rescue him. Before that, however, he encounters his fill of ape types.

Bonham Carter is the liberal rich chimp Ari, who abets the unusually talented (and, she notes in one coy bit, sensitive!) space human and eventually forms a cross-species love triangle with him and rebel chieftess Daena (Warren). Roth's fascistic General Thade wants permission from the ape senate to wipe out the inferior smoothskins, even more so after Ari proves more affectionate toward the animal than to his chimparrific self. Michael Clarke Duncan is Thade's loyal, devout gorilla lieutenant, and Giamatti's Limbo is a comic/sleazy orangutan who trades in human flesh.

It all climaxes in a desert battle royal that is both impressively staged and pretty dang savage for a PG-13-rated film. The main plot's climactic twist is both hokey and satisfying in equal measure. The subsequent epilogue twist could never hope to match the ironic/iconic power of the first ``Planet's'' final image, and it doesn't, playing like a beside-the-point afterthought.

Whatever its flaws, however, the new ``Planet of the Apes'' displays an abundance of highly evolved cinematic craftsmanship at a time when that's looking more and more like an endangered species in corporate Hollywood.

``PLANET OF THE APES''

(Rated PG-13: violence)

The stars: Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Kris Kristofferson, Charlton Heston.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Tim Burton. Written by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, based on Pierre Boulle's novel. Produced by Richard D. Zanuck. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: Two hours.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars