Project Nim

Year: 2011

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Marsh

Review

one of the better films of the year. it’s about a science experiment wherein they sought to see how much a chimpanzee could adapt to humans and learn language. the chimp was named nim chimpsky (after noam chomsky the linguist who said that humans are the only species that could form sentences and use proper grammar). long story short, it turns out he was mostly right, but this experiment was carried out by one of the dumbest and least ethical scientists i hope we’ve had here in the last 40 years. he slept with his students and practiced poor science to boot. one of his ex-students took care of the chimp for the first few months and she was a total 70s hippie who let nim do whatever he wanted. the film shows more about human nature than it does about chimps. it’s an aggravating film to watch because of the idiocy of some of the people involved and their expectations of a wild animal and its ability to fit into our world. morons.

Watched in theater