Ngogo – Königreich der Affen (2017)

Ngogo – Königreich der Affen: Directed by James Reed. With David Watts, John Mitani, Kevin Langergraber, Kevin Potts. For more than 20 years anthropologists have been researching the social behavior of a chimpanzee clan in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. They gained new insights about the violence, brutal power struggles, rivalry, enmity, friendship and diplomacy within the large, strictly hierarchical primate group. The males set the tone. The intelligent individuals have the ability to network and forge alliances. War against external conspecifics and brutal hunting of other monkey species is not uncommon. The conclusion is that animals are by no means better than humans.

“u0026quot;Rise of the Warrior Apesu0026quot; has some nice photography and great u0026#39;ape personalityu0026#39; stories, but it suffers greatly by lack of balance and hard information. All it wants to do is concentrate on male ape relations highlighting on violence, emphasized by overdramatic music. Itu0026#39;s sort of like u0026#39;Copsu0026#39; for apes (u0026quot;bad boys bad boysu0026quot;) It lacks depth and background which would enlighten the viewers as to the overall situation of chimpanzees in this area, and how human expansion in the overall area (Uganda) might be driving the development of what is (apparently) a supergroup of apes. We learn nothing about the relationship of the males to females or young. We donu0026#39;t even know, when they fight, HOW they fight or if they use tools in fighting. This is a remarkably uninformative video document after all is said and done in an hour and a half u0026#39;documentaryu0026#39;. The u0026#39;anthropologistsu0026#39; who are interviewed provide a lot of general talk and supposedly have spent many years in the field, but they do not sound like they really KNOW anything much about the species. It boils down to lots of fights, some only surmised by the disappearances of some of the male apes. So in the end most of the photography boils down to lots of head shots of apes. Many of them not really identified.nI think this deserves to be ranked more as ape violence porn framed as a pseudo documentary.nUnfortunately this is closer to Tiger King than to the great research done by real animal behaviorists such as Goodall and Fossey (yes, Fossey did gorillas, not chimps. Point is she communicated a hell of a lot better than the people in this festival of chimp tantrums).”