In the intervening years, that idea has made steady progress. In 1993, Paola Cavalieri and I founded The Great Ape Project, an organization dedicated to the idea of recognizing that great apes have a moral status befitting their nature as self-aware beings who are capable of thought and have rich and deep emotional lives.Īt a minimum, they should have the rights to life, liberty, and protection from torture that we grant to all members of our own species, regardless of their intellectual abilities. Nim suffered various other vicissitudes - and narrowly escaped being infected with hepatitis as part of a medical experiment - until he was eventually released to an animal sanctuary, where he died in 2000. He demonstrated his view of that situation by signing "out" to passing humans. There, the pampered chimpanzee - who, when asked to sort photos of humans and apes, put his own photo among the humans - was locked in a cage with other chimps. Herbert Terrace, the Columbia University psychologist who was directing the project, decided to end it and sent Nim back to the primate facility in Oklahoma. He grew stronger and more aggressive and began biting his teachers. But he was taken from his first human family and handed over to other teachers with whom he did not have the same kind of bond. Reared as part of a human family, he learned to use more than 100 signs from American Sign Language, the language used by Deaf Americans. Nim was born in 1973, in a primate research facility in Oklahoma, and was taken from his mother when he was only ten days old, to be used in a sign-language experiment. The plot then takes another turn when Caesar becomes too big and aggressive to live in a human home, and is taken to what is supposed to be a primate sanctuary, but is in fact a dumping ground for unwanted apes, run by humans who display cruelty to the captive animals.Īs far as the treatment of apes is concerned, much of the film is firmly grounded in reality, as a viewing of Project Nim, a documentary based on Elizabeth Hess's book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would be Human, clearly demonstrates. Only when Rodman's superiors cancel his experiments and he takes home Caesar, an infant chimpanzee, does the scientist begin to care about others. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, however, portrays Rodman as, in Franco's words, "a cold, isolated person." Many films would have glorified a scientist seeking such a goal, and treated the use of animals for that purpose as obviously justified.
The central human character, Will Rodman (played by James Franco), is a scientist seeking a cure for Alzheimer's disease who experiments on apes. Wyatt's reluctance to join in the exploitation of great apes is understandable, given that the film itself tells the story of apes rising up in response to oppression from dominant humans. "To get apes to do anything you want them to do, you have to dominate them you have to manipulate them into performing. "There are things I didn't want to be involved in," he told me.
But he also understood the ethical issue. When I spoke with Wyatt last month, he acknowledged that there were practical reasons for not using real apes in his movie.
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES SPANISH MOVIE
Instead, "performance capture technology," originally invented for the movie Avatar, enables a human actor, Andy Serkis, to play the role of the chimpanzee Caesar, not by dressing in a chimp suit, but by having every gesture and facial movement, even the twitch of an eyebrow, transformed into the movement of an ape. Publicity for the new film claims that it is "the first live-action film in the history of movies to star, and be told from the point of view of, a sentient animal." Yet no live apes were used.
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES SPANISH SERIES
Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the seventh film in a series based on Pierre Boule's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, about a world populated by highly intelligent simians. Both dramatize insights and lessons that should not be ignored. Two new movies released this month - one a science-fiction blockbuster, the other a revealing documentary - raise the issue of our relations with our closest non-human relatives, the great apes.
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