![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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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