Planet of the Apes: A Species Misunderstood

The Plan­et of the Apes film fran­chise began back in 1968, and it enjoyed a good run dur­ing the 1970s. Now Hol­ly­wood hopes to reboot the series with the release of Rise of the Plan­et of the Apes, a new film star­ring James Fran­co, Frei­da Pin­to, John Lith­gow and Andy Serkis. You don’t need to watch the film to get the gist of the plot: Chimps pow­ered by a genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered retro­virus go wild and start tak­ing over the world. Watch the trail­er and see for your­self.

At Emory Uni­ver­si­ty, Thomas Gille­spie, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Pub­lic Health and Bio­di­ver­si­ty Con­ser­va­tion, has turned the block­buster release into a good teach­ing moment. In this five minute video, Gille­spie dis­cuss­es the real char­ac­ter­is­tics of this often mis­un­der­stood species, cov­er­ing every­thing from their real tem­pera­ment to their breed­ing habits and com­mon social struc­tures. Take a look and get the real­i­ty behind the fic­tion.


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Comments (3)
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  • Ann Kittenplan says:

    This would make more sense if the film was about goril­las — it’s not it’s about chimps. Am I miss­ing some­thing? (Not seen the film.)

  • Enenennx says:

    Might any­one know the piece of music (starts off most­ly piano) they use in this video. Some peo­ple have said “Inter­stel­lar” or “I Still Have a Soul”, but I don’t think those are it.

  • Ryan says:

    Yeah, this does­n’t real­ly apply to the movie. Any time the apes got vio­lent it was suf­fi­cient­ly pro­voked. Also, the genet­ic mod­i­fy­ing virus is what made them act in this way, which iron­i­cal­ly made them act more like humans.…

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