Chimp Empire

This documentary is in four parts, and it follows this huge group of apes who number about 120 individuals. The main story is the story of Jackson, who is the alpha of one of these groups. It tells the story of a bunch of wars that occur, or maybe it's just one long war that happens between the central group of chimpanzees and the Western group of chimpanzees. Like a lot of wars, there's actually personal relations involved.  Jackson started in the Western Group, and they broke off to form their own thing, and Jackson kind of betrayed them.  That's kind of a spoiler for this nature documentary, but it does have a plot and that's what a didn't like about, was the attempt to force a plot on this group of highly intelligent creatures. There has been a lot of debate over my lifetime whether you can treat animals in a human way and ascribe human motivations to them. I think with chimpanzees it's pretty clear that chimpanzees are remarkably human and in fact some biologists would argue that we are just another kind of chimpanzee, so you can ascribe human motivations to them, but this show really stretches that out. I think it's hard to it's hard to describe the motivations of people who can talk and communicate their motivations, and it's even harder to describe the motivations of a chimpanzee who you are studying in the wild, and you're filming in the wild. Chimpanzees are cursed with the inability to speak. I would say it looks amazing, but it's a little bit disappointing and even maybe a troubling the way that it was made .