Caesar the chimp, a CG animal portrayed by Andy Serkis, is shown in a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Caesar the chimp, a CG animal portrayed by Andy Serkis, is shown in a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The big-screen appeal of the great ape



Whether towering above the Manhattan skyline in King Kong, swinging in The Jungle Book, or battling extinction in Gorillas in the Mist, apes have enjoyed a long and varied habitation in cinema. And their popularity seems to be growing.

Tomorrow sees the release of the big-budget sci-fi reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, telling the story of primates overturning the dominance of man. From the last week of July and through most of August, the comedy Zookeeper, "a buddy movie where the buddy is a gorilla", as the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert put it, was a steady feature on UAE movie screens. And proving a hit at film festivals is documentary Project Nim, about an attempt to teach sign language to a chimpanzee.

Jungle-dwelling primates got their first foothold in Hollywood thanks to the Tarzan movies. Based on the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs about a human child raised by African great apes who becomes a tree-swinging hero, the Internet Movie Database lists an incredible 89 movies with Tarzan in the title between 1918 and 2008. Because using real animals in the movies was considered too dangerous and costly, the films helped popularise the actor-operated "ape suit".

"There is hardly an American male of my generation who had not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape," the author Gore Vidal wrote in Esquire of his love of all things Tarzan, "while a thousand arms and legs were broken by attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the republic."

But while the idea of man living alongside ape created great drama, it also made fantastic comedy. In the 1932 Laurel and Hardy farce The Chimp, the bumbling duo were put out of work by a circus company and given a gorilla called Ethel (rather than a chimp, as the title might suggest) as compensation. Their attempt to smuggle the animal into their hotel room - by dressing her in a ballet tutu and hat - became one of the pair's most enduring visual gags.

"Apes are very close to us, so when we look at them, we see ourselves. They move similarly, they appear to mimic certain facial expressions and so on," says Max Reuter, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London.

"At the same time, they are wild animals and they don't have all the social norms and ways of responding to our behaviour that we would expect from another human being. The percentage of genes that humans and chimpanzees share, if you look at the genome sequence, is more than 95 per cent. That is why we find them fascinating."

Project Nim, made by James Marsh, the Oscar-winning director of Man on Wire, examines the story of Nim Chimsky, a chimpanzee who was raised as a human in the 1970s and mastered 125 words of American sign language.

The film examines the questionable scientific bases for the experiment, which saw Nim taken from his captive mother and raised by adoptive human parents who not only breast-fed him, but allowed him to smoke marijuana and drink beer. With Nim growing increasingly violent as he reached adolescence, the scientists discovered that chimpanzees, which are five times stronger than humans of the same weight, could never be fully domesticated.

While there is no shortage of lovable apes in the movies, their most famous appearances have been as man's adversaries.

Primates act as a device to provide human introspection in the Planet of the Apes films. The 1968 original sees Charlton Heston as an astronaut who believes he has crash-landed on an alien world, governed by tyrannical apes. Eventually, it is revealed that he has arrived in Earth's future, when man's short-sightedness has led to his downfall. Exactly how this happened will be revealed in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the seventh film in the franchise, starring James Franco and Freida Pinto and opening in the UAE on Thursday.

Unlike previous entries in the series, latex masks and hairy suits have been dispensed with and instead the motion-capture technology that created Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies will be used to create the titular apes, while Gollum actor Andy Serkis has been drafted in to "play" their ringleader, Caesar.

Although a thoroughly unscientific depiction of an ape, the oversized gorilla King Kong is perhaps Hollywood's most iconic monster, angrily scaling the Empire State Building in 1933, 1976 and again in 2005. The story sees Kong taken against his will from his home, Skull Island, and displayed as an exotic wonder in New York. His escape from captivity represents the awesome, uncontrollable power of nature, while his death signifies an uneasy relationship between man and the natural world, which remains resonant to this day.

Singham Again

Director: Rohit Shetty

Stars: Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Ranveer Singh, Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff, Deepika Padukone

Rating: 3/5

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Biometrics: Touch ID, Face ID

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In the box: iPad mini, USB-C cable, 20W USB-C power adapter

Price: From Dh2,099

BANGLADESH SQUAD

Mashrafe Mortaza (captain), Tamim Iqbal, Liton Das, Soumya Sarkar, Mushfiqur Rahim (wicketkeeper), Mahmudullah, Shakib Al Hasan (vice captain), Mohammad Mithun, Sabbir Rahaman, Mosaddek Hossain, Mohammad Saifuddin, Mehidy Hasan Miraz, Rubel Hossain, Mustafizur Rahman, Abu Jayed (Reporting by Rohith Nair in Bengaluru Editing by Amlan Chakraborty)

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BUNDESLIGA FIXTURES

(All games 4-3pm kick UAE time) Bayern Munich v Augsburg, Borussia Dortmund v Bayer Leverkusen, Hoffenheim v Hertha Berlin, Wolfsburg v Mainz , Eintracht Frankfurt v Freiburg, Union Berlin v RB Leipzig, Cologne v Schalke , Werder Bremen v Borussia Monchengladbach, Stuttgart v Arminia Bielefeld

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Tree of Hell

Starring: Raed Zeno, Hadi Awada, Dr Mohammad Abdalla

Director: Raed Zeno

Rating: 4/5

Cricket World Cup League 2

UAE squad

Rahul Chopra (captain), Aayan Afzal Khan, Ali Naseer, Aryansh Sharma, Basil Hameed, Dhruv Parashar, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Farooq, Muhammad Jawadullah, Muhammad Waseem, Omid Rahman, Rahul Bhatia, Tanish Suri, Vishnu Sukumaran, Vriitya Aravind

Fixtures

Friday, November 1 – Oman v UAE
Sunday, November 3 – UAE v Netherlands
Thursday, November 7 – UAE v Oman
Saturday, November 9 – Netherlands v UAE

The specs: Rolls-Royce Cullinan

Price, base: Dh1 million (estimate)

Engine: 6.75-litre twin-turbo V12

Transmission: Eight-speed automatic

Power: 563hp @ 5,000rpm

Torque: 850Nm @ 1,600rpm

Fuel economy, combined: 15L / 100km

2018 ICC World Twenty20 Asian Western Regional Qualifier

The top three teams progress to the Asia Qualifier

Final: UAE beat Qatar by nine wickets

Third-place play-off: Kuwait beat Saudi Arabia by five runs

Table

1 UAE 5 5 0 10

2 Qatar 5 4 1 8

3 Saudi 5 3 2 6

4 Kuwait 5 2 3 4

5 Bahrain 5 1 4 2

6 Maldives 5 0 5 0

Law%2041.9.4%20of%20men%E2%80%99s%20T20I%20playing%20conditions
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MATCH INFO

Manchester United 6 (McTominay 2', 3'; Fernandes 20', 70' pen; Lindelof 37'; James 65')

Leeds United 2 (Cooper 41'; Dallas 73')

Man of the match: Scott McTominay (Manchester United)