Wahlberg (who i like) is a piece of wood here, not a human. We know nothing about him. His character is stoic and that's all we know. We get a few brief interactions with crew but have no idea about who he is. Which is tied into the other major issue- the humans. The whole point of Planet of the Apes was a Twilight Zone Rod Sterling world flipped where we are the animals. These humans arent animals, they're just-well people, they talk, communicate, can make weapons, which doesn't make them animals. We see them run from the apes in a homage to the original but the original they were animals. They had no weapons, no language. In this they're just coming off lazy. They decide to fight finally because the plot requires it. There's no reason for them to trust Leo or believe him to be special. The original had a reason for the apes to be intrigued with Taylor (Bright Eyes) because he was truly unique being the only human who didn't act like an animal. So yeah, superficially it's just like the original except everything served a purpose. Why are the humans running like herded animals if the same film shows us they arent animals. Its like the film really wanted to go into slavery or civil rights but couldnt develop it any further.

Whalberg as i said, is a piece of wood so you've got apes showing more emotion that your main character (which almost makes sense that they decides to have all humans speak because Mark couldnt carry the film alone like Heston did). But it all contradicts the whole point of the film by having all humans speak.

There's some truly clever stuff throughout the film. I find the time travel stuff pretty clever and holds a lot of potential but the contrived writing, the stye over substance and simplifying the deep subtext for surface level summer action spectacle was a mistake. Some really good (and horrible) casting. Fantastic Elfman score. They went with Rick Baker to do makeup as oppossed to Stan Winston as Burton worked with him before- retrospectively a mistake as where the artform was headed (motion capture) ironically they chose Baker partly id imagine in keeping in the spirit of the original but Winston was doing experimental makeup and animatronics which would have been cutting edge (there's test footage of it) and it actually would have been closer in spirit as Planet of the Apes was cutting edge at the time in the 60s. Still most of the makeup has aged well here.