It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century, 5.2), mainly because I’ve been off the Apes barge for many years now. I just don’t care any more. My investment is nil.

But I’m glad I finally sat down with it as Kingdom is obviously a first-rate, well-produced, technically excellent effort — as good as this sort of thing gets. As far as it went I respected the passion and exactitude that everyone apparently invested top to bottom, especially as it contains the most realistically rendered, subtly expressive CG simians I’ve ever seen.

Plus I found the performances uniformly excellent — Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy, etc.

Plus I loved, incidentally, the re-appearance of those ape hide scarecrows, which I haven’t seen since Franklin Schaffner’e 1968 original.

But at the end of the day I felt completely untouched and indifferent. Respectful but also relieved when it finally ended. Yes, I was annoyed by the 145-minute length, but all features are too long these days. It’s a plague.