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 nonhuman relatives, the great apes. Both dramatize insights and lessons that should not be ignored.
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. 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.
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.
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