By Philip Weiss

August 26, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

Earlier this summer at a media forum in Cambridge,

John Scherlis, a zoologist, rose from the audience to issue a challenge to Hollywood. "All the best data show that the great apes are headed for extinction," he said. "Possibly in just 20 years. Best case, 100-but that will only be isolated pockets of apes who happen to be in protected areas where research is going on. Meanwhile, $80 million is spent on a movie like Mighty Joe Young that says nothing about the 600 real mountain gorillas on earth-when $15 million could set up a permanent endowment for their protection. And now, again, $100 million on Planet of the Apes , when it appears that earth is about to become the Planet of the Ape, where the only ape is us. "Isn't there a way for the great apes to have their story told? To let real-world issues piggyback in some way on the hype? There's product placement-what about issue placement?" Mr. Scherlis' questions nagged at me (we were boyhood friends, growing up in Baltimore), and I went to Planet of the Apes in a zoological frame of mind. The most obvious thing about the film is that it fully deserves its dismal reviews. It's about nothing. Poorly written and thinly plotted, it is in essence a war movie in which a group of wild humans is captured and enslaved by apes, then escape and wage a liberation struggle. There's lots of action and little character. Mark Wahlberg is wasted. The surprise ending is silly and unearned. Compare the new Planet of the Apes to the Charlton Heston version and it's even more dismaying. The original had a prideful character (Mr. Heston) in the lead, whose humiliations made for wrenching drama. The moral climax came when Mr. Heston saw that a fellow astronaut had been surgically rendered an automaton. The film is disturbing, caught up in issues of intolerance and racism. It was made in the late 60's, when somehow the expectation was that an entertainment could be about something real. Jump cut to 2001, and an era of global companies focused on international markets, and the new Planet of the Apes is about nothing but Tim Burton's ability to create an exotic world. I can't remember a thoughtful moment in the picture. (Right-wing nuts used to say that globalism would cost us our sovereignty, and in this respect they're being proven right: Our media grow less and less pointed as they're pitched not to an elite people schooled in 200 years of democracy, but to a world audience brought up on authoritarian newspeak.) As for the extinction issue-well, in one scene, Mark Wahlberg does mutter that apes were wiped off the planet Earth. But it's an aside. ("It's a cavalier statement," says Steve Baer, of the Coalition to End Primate Experimentation. "The atrocities enacted on the humans don't begin to approximate the atrocities we practice on non-human apes.") It doesn't really get at the issue. Some of the apes in the film seem to be based on orangutans, because they're orange. "New research shows that it's entirely possible that orangutans will be extinct within 10 years," said Josh Ginsberg, director of the Asia program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, at the Bronx Zoo. "I don't think people get that we are about to exterminate one of our closest relatives on the earth. We're not shipping them off to another planet, we're killing them right here," Orangutans live chiefly in Indonesia and depend on large trees in forests for food and shelter. Their habitat is being overtaken by loggers and palm-oil plantations so that we can have exotic hardwoods and cosmetics. The great apes in Africa are also on a steep curve. "Gorillas and chimps are facing tremendous pressure from the expansion of all kinds of commercial exploitation," said Tony Rose of the Gorilla Foundation. "The incursion of logging roads and mining roads and pipelines has given people access to forests they could never reach before with trucks, guns and bullets." Here the issue is one that has only gained serious attention in the last three years: the bushmeat trade-illegally hunted meat from wild animals. Expanding human populations are moving into areas where they've never been before in the Congo Basin. They need food. Poaching numbers may be as high as 6,000 to 8,000 apes a year. With experts putting the ape population at 100,000 chimps and 100,000 gorillas, they have 30 years at the outside, and the crisis will only deepen if it's not addressed. (For more information, check out the Web sites www.bushmeat.org and www.4apes.com.) "Virtually every species of animal that is visible to the naked eye in African forests is threatened by the bushmeat trade," John Scherlis said. "More elephants are killed in Central Africa for their meat now than their ivory. Apes are more vulnerable because of their low reproductive rate and the consequences to such a social animal of losing individuals." Mr. Scherlis has spent years in Africa, and last year he helped to get great apes on the American agenda. The Great Ape Conservation Act was passed by Congress last November. Jane Goodall showed up on Capitol Hill to explain the issue in her intense, soft-spoken way. The bill drew bipartisan support and was authorized at $5 million. So far, Congress has only appropriated $750,000 for the apes. The money is to go in small contracts to projects that work on the ground in Africa (where the real heroes operate-people like Eugene Rutagarama in Rwanda, who kept the mountain-gorilla conservation program alive through the genocidal wars there). But imagine if Twentieth Century Fox had done what Mr. Scherlis suggested this summer and put some energy into the plight of the real creatures from which it was making such great art. At the very least, it could have fostered public pressure to fund GACA at its ceiling of $5 million in public money. Or set up a Planet of the Apes matching fund. Or put together a short of Mark Wahlberg with Jane Goodall talking about the real apes. What if such a promotion had been tacked on to the end of the film? "Attention on these animals is entirely lacking," said Josh Ginsberg. "One could have woven a really wonderful conservation message through the film. Why were they angry at humans? Well, why not? The kernel of their hatred was they were being eaten by men …. " O.K., nobody wants wildlife guys at the Bronx Zoo dictating the plots of movies. But Planet of the Apes shows what a blind alley the culture has wandered into. Is there any connection between our pleasure and obligation, between making money and idealism? The first Planet of the Apes actually thought so. But now we're globalized, and markets stop our tongues. Everyone believes in the rain forest-but look who's buying sport-utility vehicles: urban liberals who always vote environment. (Lately one public radio reporter claimed to have seen Joni Mitchell, of all people, driving an S.U.V. in Los Angeles.) It is only to be expected that a highly accomplished Hollywood director makes a big movie about apes that is a piece of idiocy. "There's a dissociation," says Mr. Scherlis. "You see the nymphet from Planet of the Apes [Estella Warren] offering a chimp a baby bottle on the cover of Talk magazine [August], or Mark Wahlberg holding a chimp on the cover of Premiere [July], and there's not a word about the real life of these animals. They're just a prop." We won't even talk here about the unhappy lives of chimps that are used in the entertainment business. This kind of stuff makes me cynical, but John Scherlis is engaged, and he's optimistic. When African hunters are shown videos that demonstrate the family structure of apes and the consequences of killing them, scales fall from their eyes, he said. "They say, 'I'm not going to do that anymore.'" Americans need education just as badly, and Mr. Scherlis is something of a connector, to use a pop-psych term. He's courtly, passionate and charming. He has integrity as a conservationist (several years in the bush in Tanzania, along the way suffering many illnesses and losing some sight in one eye) and is media-savvy; he knows how to use the word "mega-fauna" in a sentence. "We seem to be ambivalent about apes," he said. "Perhaps because we're apes, and they remind us of ourselves. But they tend to get left out of the vision of many philanthropists who support the charismatic mega-fauna-elephants, rhinos, tigers, pandas, whales." Last year, Mr. Scherlis spent weeks on end working to connect the conservationist community to the political one in Washington. For instance, he got the only scientific report with hard data on ape extinction from one colleague and helped convert it into language that Congressmen could understand. "I'm only acting on something that I care about," he said. "I don't want this to be a world where apes are extinct. You look in their eyes and you know these are fellow beings. I don't want our grandchildren to talk about apes and elephants as if they're talking about dinosaurs." I found myself desolated by seeing Planet of the Apes , but Mr. Scherlis still has hopes for the media. "The challenge is telling the story right. How do you tell it so that it works?" he said. "It certainly won't happen if we feel anything other than that it will."