PLANET OF THE APES (NOVELIZATION)

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Thursday, August 09, 2001

(WARNING: SPOILERS)
Astronaut Leo Davidson blasts off from the research station Oberon into a zone of unstable space to rescue a trained chimpanzee. His ship gets caught in a wormhole and ends up crash-landing on a planet where humans are hunted by super-intelligent apes and turned into slaves. After earning the animosity of chimpanzee General Thade and gaining the trust of human rights activist Ari, Davidson escapes and soon discovers that his own flight and Oberon's subsequent search for him have directly led to the apes becoming the dominant species on this planet. With the help of Ari and human slave Daena, Davidson persuades his fellow humans to rise up against their oppressors as he tries to find a way back to his own time and space.

A good novelization does more than just retell the basic plot of a film. A good novelization expands on the psychology and background of the main characters, redresses any logical problems with the plot, and adds to or expands the story in ways that could never have been shown on-screen. Examples of good novelizations include Vonda N. McIntyre's STAR TREK II-IV, Isaac Asimov's FANTASTIC VOYAGE, and even George Lucas' version of his own STAR WARS script. PLANET OF THE APES, however, is not a good novelization.

To begin with, the novel follows the events of the film shot for shot and line by line. There's no expansion of any key scenes, no innovation, nothing but the straight plot as it appeared in the film and a plot like this really needs expansion. Leo is just as much of a non-entity in print as he is on the big screen, but here he hasn't the arguable visual appeal of Mark Wahlberg. We learn nothing more about this man than we knew while watching the movie, other than he was greatly influenced by the book THE INVISIBLE MAN(!) and likens his passage through the ape city as a slave to being an invisible man. Not only does this sort of observation lack any profundity, it's simply hard to swallow.

When we do get Davidson's inner thoughts, they're the sort of surface level things we could extrapolate simply from watching Wahlberg's face on-screen when a book can't muster more depth than Wahlberg's performance, that's saying something. On top of that, since the story is told almost entirely from Davidson's point of view, all the other characters even the more interesting ones like Ari and Thade get even less development. This point of view also leads to some real boners, such as the fact that Davidson seems to instinctively know everyone's names without being told.


The book also never tries to explain or correct the logical problems in the plot, and they're far more glaringly obvious here. There's absolutely no explanation given for the fact that all the inhabitants of this uncharted planet speak English, for instance. And speaking of that uncharted planet...when Davidson finds the downed Oberon and plays back the logs, he discovers that the planet is not only uncharted but uninhabited. Now, it's hard enough to believe that an entire race of sentient apes could spring from the few genetically enhanced ones that Quick painstakingly lists at the beginning of the book but where did the humans come from, then? These are the sorts of inconsistencies that you might gloss over while watching a movie in a theatre, but in print they're impossible to ignore.

Also, instead of adding to or expanding the basic plot, Quick actually cuts back on it a bit. The so-called shock ending of the film is missing, for instance, presumably based on the argument that no one who's seen the film would ever ruin the ending for their friends, and so neither should the book. Chance would be a fine thing. Ironically, the back cover actually adds more detail than Quick does, revealing that the Earth of 2029 is in political and ecological turmoil; that the planet of the apes has "twin suns" (since when?); and that "in the all-consuming fire to come, a future will be determined...and a past as well" whatever that means, and you won't find out from reading Quick's novelization, either.

Rather than taking the opportunity to make more of the film's few truly good moments, Quick instead gives us more of Davidson's inner thoughts on such weighty matters as the weirdness of the triangle that he, Ari, and Daena form, punctuating it all with endless clichéd similes and metaphors, not to mention exclamation marks! Everywhere! All throughout the book, so that you're reminded time and again just how exciting the story you're reading really is! Ugh!

Had I not known that William T. Quick had authored several cyberpunk novels and "co-authored" the QUEST FOR TOMORROW books with William Shatner, I would have assumed "Quick" was a pseudonym actually, that's not the most convincing evidence to the contrary, is it? "Quick" certainly describes the slapdash, production line style of this book. If you really want to read the story of the movie, go get a copy of the screenplay instead. At least you'll get the whole story that way.

PLANET OF THE APES (NOVELIZATION)

Grade: F

Author(s): William T. Quick

Publisher: HarperEntertainment

Price: $6.99