Why I’ll never really be OK with talking monkeys

I don’t want to disparage my parents here in such a public forum. They were, and remain, great parents.

But they did have one critical lapse in judgment the night they left me and my two younger siblings with a babysitter, a box of pizza, and the movie they had rented from Blockbuster for us to watch — the original “Planet of the Apes” from 1968

The film stars Charlton Heston as one member of a crew of astronauts whose spacecraft crashes on a planet after 2,000 years of hypersleep. Upon their arrival, they discover that on this planet, apes have the intellect, societal norms and mannerisms of humans, while the humans act like feral, speechless creatures. There’s a couple of hours worth of plot, most of which I’ve forgotten, but I will never be able to forget the movie’s ending. At the conclusion, Heston finds the Statue of Liberty partially buried on a beach. He and the audience suddenly understand that this is not some foreign planet, but it is instead Earth where the apes rule.

That did not go down easy when I was 9.

Since that fateful night in the late ‘90s, I’ve had what some might call an “irrational fear of,” but I call a “healthy respect for,” great apes on the silver screen.

It is perhaps the uneasiness I feel toward our primate cousins that prevented me from seeing “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” when it premiered in 2011, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in 2014 or “War for the Planet of the Apes” in 2017.

But I did see the latest installment in the series, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” over the weekend because my action-movie-loving daughter wanted to and, despite my hesitation, I wasn’t about to project my own irrational anxiety onto her.

Much to my relief, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is not nearly as existentially traumatizing as the 1968 original, and it’s much more kid-friendly for kids with a long enough attention span.

The chimpanzee at the center of the movie, Noa, is a kind and courageous protagonist who is part of a tribe of chimps who raise and train eagles. Their village is pillaged by a militant crew of Silverback gorillas (which I recognized from my many trips to the zoo during my children’s younger years). The chimps who remain after the attack are kidnapped by the gorillas, and only Noa, who the Silverbacks took for dead, remains.

Noa sets out to find his tribe and encounters a wise orangutan named Raka on the way. This orangutan speaks often of an ape named Caesar, who I gather was a central part of the films I did not see, and is some sort of primate prophet. Noa and Raka find a hungry human following them, and the three continue their search for Noa’s tribe. It’s soon revealed that this human is not the typical feral being like most humans in this world, but is intelligent, can speak and has a name, Mae. She is on a mission to recover a piece of technology in a military base where the movie’s villain, an evil gorilla named Proximus Caesar, is keeping and enslaving all the kidnapped apes to order to build a new kingdom with the technology Mae hopes to find.

The overriding conflict of the film is the motivation of Mae, who hopes to restore humanity’s place at the top of the animal kingdom, even if that means the demise of the apes she’s befriended. It’s an idea compelling enough to keep me hooked for the next couple of movies planned in this new Apes trilogy.

The movie I can best compare “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” to is “The Ten Commandments.” Its big and grand with gripping visuals. Its content is somewhat religious, or at least Bible-adjacent. And its length is about 45 minutes too long.

My daughter fell asleep about an hour and a half in, and my mind started wandering around that same time. I found it difficult to focus during dialogue-heavy scenes, and was a little distracted by the uncanny way in which the apes’ mouths moved. While the effects in this movie are astounding, I was also distracted by the mystery of how it was made. And while the performances were strong, I couldn’t help but visualize the humans behind the apes wearing those silly motion-capture suits. Unlike the original movie, in which the apes are clearly humans in ape suits, the actors in “Kingdom” move like apes and insert grunts between words as an ape with the ability to speak would likely do. At times this was successful in creating the illusion of apes with human intelligence, but at other times, it was unsettling.

I temporarily forgot my qualms, however, in the exciting final act. My daughter woke up, my mind stopped wandering, and we were completely zoned in when the ape conflict escalated into a flood. It was some of the best water action since “Titanic,” which is possibly the highest praise I can give a film. The remarkable water sequence was followed by a cliffside battle between Noa and Proximus Caesar and employed CGI eagles to great effect. The last five minutes, featuring a conversation between Noa and Mae, were the most thought-provoking of the entire film.

Ultimately, the movie poses the question — can humans and intelligent apes coexist, or must one species defeat another?

Given my “irrational fear of” or “healthy respect for” apes, thanks to the original movie, I’ll forever be rooting for the humans. But regardless of which opposable-thumbed creatures come out on top, I look forward to watching the two sides work it out in the forthcoming films, and watching the films I missed. I think I’m healed enough for that.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is rated PG-13 for moderate violence.