That two films about human entanglements with chimpanzees, a feature-length documentary and a fiction feature, should be showing in London at the same time is presumably an accident of distribution. That the two works, James Marsh’s Project Nim and Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, should resemble each other so closely begins to look like a message or a clue, a movieworld sign that we actually are rethinking our relation to other animals. You’ll see how eerie this notion is when I say that Wyatt’s film, for all its allegiance to a long franchise, is more like Marsh’s film than it is like any of the films to which it is supposed to serve as a narrative prequel. There was Planet of the Apes (1968), with a remake in 2001, and various relocations in between: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from (1971), Conquest of (1972), Battle for (1973).

LRB 8 September 2011 | PDF Download