It’s mostly just males running around and shooting each other.” A true portrayal of ape society-even one based on a science-fictional premise-would include typical behaviors like feeding, grooming and sex.
“The apes’ nonverbal communication has been humanized,” he says.ĭe Waal’s other complaint, albeit a minor one: “This is very much a macho movie,” he says. To the extent that that and other forms of ape body language are shown, they’re misrepresented. They don’t use spoken language, either, and while de Waal believes they could if they really wanted or needed to, it’s not clear why they would prefer speaking to signing-something apes are already physiologically equipped for. Real apes don’t produce tears when they’re sad, but Dawn apes do real apes don’t walk on two legs nearly as much as the Dawn apes. But still, bonus points for truthiness.ĭe Waal notes a few other, less defensible inaccuracies.
#Caesar the chimpanzee hand Patch
I’ve studied this for many years.” In real life, he explains, chimps patch up their differences by kissing on the mouth, whereas in the film they make up with a more conventionally manly hand-clasp. “They fight,” says de Waal, “but they reconcile afterward, which is something chimps really do. The apes want peace in the beginning.”Īlso realistic is the stormy relationship between noble Caesar, the apes’ leader, and Koba, the cranky ape who was scarred both physically and psychologically by cruel humans. “I was afraid they’d portray the apes as aggressive and the humans as angelic-but it’s the opposite.
“They’re quite territorial.” As an admirer of chimps and other primates, he was worried that his cross-species friends might be stereotyped. It’s also not at all unrealistic that the primates in Dawn would band together to fight their human antagonists. But de Waal adds, “chimps do have many mental capacities-thinking about the future, planning ahead,” which are necessary for the sort of strategic thinking they do in the movie. For one thing, he says, chimps may never be fully as intelligent as humans, gene therapy notwithstanding (“our brains are physically three times bigger-this is not a small difference”).
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