![]() By the end (stick around for the credits), it’s clear how the apes will conquer the rest of the world. During an incredible battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s clear that the California Highway Patrol-and perhaps all of humankind-is no match for this army of super-simians. The apes revolt and descend on San Francisco. And Caesar must learn how to interact with other apes.Įventually, Caesar breaks out, steals some of the medicine that made him smart and returns to give it to his ape comrades. Several years later, a bigger, stronger Caesar attacks a neighbor while trying to protect Rodman’s father, and is sent away to a primate “sanctuary” that bears a striking resemblance to the Oklahoma lab where Nim lived, right down to the cattle prods. Rodman treats Caesar like a human and teaches him sign language. This is where Caesar’s life begins to resemble Nim’s. Rodman saves newborn Caesar and takes him home. After an unfortunate incident, Caesar’s mom is killed, and the lab manager halts the project and orders all the chimps to be put down. The ape passes down her superior intellect to her son, Caesar (played by Andy Serkis with the help of amazing CGI effects). note - Mild spoilers ahead, though its nothing you haven’t already seen in the trailers, so consider yourself warned. The treatment goes beyond the expectations of medical researcher Will Rodman (played by James Franco) it enhances the cognition of the chimp, making her super-smart. It is illegal to bring them in from the wild.) This chimp is part of a medical trial for a gene therapy to treat Alzheimer’s. (Today, chimps used in research are bred in captivity. In the next scene, she’s solving a puzzle in a lab. The movie begins in Africa with the capture of a female chimpanzee. Watching it, I was struck by how much the protagonist’s story paralleled Nim’s. He died in 2000 at the age of 26, quite young for an animal that can live up to 45 years in the wild and 60 in captivity.īy the time Project Nim ended, I was ready to cheer on the ape rebellion in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But there’s no real happy ending for him. Nim eventually gets some chimp companionship. ![]() He lives there in almost total isolation, as the owners don’t know how to care for an ape. Later he moves to a sanctuary-for horses. He is sold to a medical lab for vaccine testing. One former worker describes Nim as a “spoiled child.” The workers shock the animals with cattle prods to keep them in line. Nim gets locked up, forced to live alone in a small cage next to the cages of strange creatures he’d never seen before: other chimps. This scene is why you should bring tissues to the theater. Nim is then returned to the Oklahoma lab. “Nobody keeps a chimp for more than five years,” Terrace says. One former teacher claims Nim used the sign “dirty,” meaning he needed to use the bathroom (he knew how to use a toilet), to get out of the classroom.Īs Nim got older, he became stronger, unpredictable-and violent (his teachers have the scars to prove it he bit one woman’s face so hard that she had a gaping hole in her cheek for months.) This is normal for a chimpanzee. Nim also made trips to the university’s campus for language training sessions, which he apparently disliked. Nim lived there with a few college students who were his teachers. This time he brought him to an old mansion in the New York suburbs owned by Columbia. Lacking results, Terrace once again took Nim away from his mother. Life there was chaotic, with few rules, and no one in Nim’s human family really knew sign language. Terrace gave Nim to one of his former graduate students, a mother in a Brady Bunch-style household. The best way to do this, Terrace thought, was to raise Nim among humans. Because apes do not have the proper physiology to speak, Terrace decided to teach Nim sign language. Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, wanted to see if he could communicate with a chimpanzee through language (Nim was named after linguist Noam Chomsky). In 1973, just days old, Nim was taken from his mom at an ape lab in Oklahoma and brought to New York City. Project Nim chronicles the life of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee who was the focus of one of the most (in)famous ape language studies. The documentary Project Nim and the sci-fi flick Rise of the Planet of the Apes offer audiences very different forms of simian entertainment, but moviegoers will walk away from both wondering, “Is it ethical to use chimps in research?” It’s the summer of the chimpanzee, at least at the movies.
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