Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (film): This just doesn't appeal to me, but will to others

As someone who is old enough to remember the original Charlton Heston films and how amazing those were. I wasn't alive in 1968 mind you, but those movies were epic enough that they mad their way to me 10 or even 20 years later. I suppose the epic nature of such an undertaking was a bit more meaningful more than 50 years ago whereas today all it seems we have to do is throw 200 million dollars at a computer team and then amazing feats are accomplished that would have been impossible to do even as far back as 20 years ago.

I missed the one that happened before this and I guess you could say that I have never really had that much interest in the reboot from the start. This is why you can kind of take my opinion of this movie with a grain of salt because it was never really something that I was going to get behind for several reasons and the main one being that I don't care for it when Hollywood takes stories that were already famous and then CGI's them up for modern audiences.

This is a CGI-fest from start to finish for obvious reasons such as the fact that apes are speaking English all throughout.

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I will go ahead and admit that I didn't make it all the way through this film. When I saw that it was 2.5 hours long I groaned a bit but put it on anyway hoping that maybe they would lure me in with the action or a good story of some sort. This was the first problem I had with the film: The first 20 minutes is basically a recap of what happened in previous reboot films and then that is followed by a very slow-moving story that doesn't even get to the point of what might be the main objective of the story until something like 40 minutes of rather unnecessary "hey look at we can do with our powerful computers!" displays at the start.

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I will say this. The CGI is absolutely outstanding and at no point does any of this look fake. They definitely did a wonderful job with this. Credit where credit is due. But as someone that looks for a bit of substance in their films rather than just a technological display of how much money a studio spent, this is not enough to win me over. Also, while I appreciated how the apes had learned sign-language, which makes sense given the past of their species being taught that by their previous human captors, when they ALL speak English now thanks to Caesar, it just comes across as kind of dumb. They speak like children would and revert to "oooh oooh aaahhh aaahhh" whenever they get excited or angry. Choose a lane I guess.

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Everything about what we see seems real and it is a spectacle to be sure. When they interact with horses or other animals, and even once some human characters get introduced it all seems extremely real. At no point does any of it look even remotely fake but before you take my word for it, understand that by the time we got to that point I was already doing other things around my house and not really paying attention to it.

Also, and I don't want to spoil things, but this movie takes essentially the same path that the one before it did in establishing a main enemy that is a bit of a tyrant that has to be overthrown by the underdogs. Well, that's NEVER been done before has it?

As someone that has not really enjoyed any CGI heavy film including Avatar 2, I am not being fussy about where I direct my ire, I just don't like films that rely so heavily on CGI in order to make the movie watchable. To me, I would rather go back and watch the original 1968 film where they had to painstakingly put masks and loads of clay on the various ape characters in the film even if their movements aren't as awesomely fluid and they don't jump over a single giant ravine to retrieve an egg.

Should I watch it?

I think I can figure out in just a single sentence whether or not you are going to like this: Did you enjoy the Transformers movies? If the answer to this question is "yes" than you will probably enjoy this as well since it is basically the same thing but with apes instead of completely implausible vehicle robots with a splattering of human characters here and there. I really hate the Transformers films but can understand why it is that other people would like them. I believe that this film is formulaic and was designed entirely to appeal to a global audience (primarily China) in order to basically guarantee a return on investment. Hollywood figured out a long time ago that this system works and makes films that they know are not very good, but are visually pleasing for an Asian audience that has a thirst for impressive films, but lack the budgets to make them on their own.

For me this movie was a dud, but I can totally understand why other people would enjoy it. Therefore, I am not going to lambast it completely but think that if someone is looking for some sort of original and interesting plot, that this film definitely doesn't contain that.

_{This film is still in theaters and can also be purchased online from all the usual suspects for about $20. It has not yet been announced where it will stream but my guess is that it will be on Hulu at some point later this year}