Project X is directed by the gifted Jonathan Kaplan, who grittily dramatized true-life stories in Over the Edge and Heart Like a Wheel. Like his previous movies, the new film has raw urgency and basis in fact.
(According to a title preceding the movie, Project X was inspired by actual experiments performed on primates by the Air Force.)
We're introduced to Virgil (played by Willie) when he's a chimplet nursing at his mother's breast in the African jungle. Stun-gunned by a local adventurer, he's sold to an American college, where he becomes the thesis project of a pert anthropologist named Teri (Helen Hunt).
Like Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, Teri teaches Virgil sign language in the early sequences of this movie that argues: Hey, chimps are people, too. Like most kids in school, Virgil would rather play than study, would rather crayon than spell.
Initially it's comic watching Virgil perform these humanoid acts, scampering about the nursery on all fours. Subliminally, Kaplan makes us relate to the spunky chimp as we would to a human child. Seeing Virgil's face brim with tenderness, his lips curling into a toothy smile every time he looks at Teri, we get to feeling kind of parental toward him.
As abruptly as Virgil was sundered from his biological mother, he is separated from Teri. When her grant runs out, scientific slave Virgil is sold to the Air Force, where the creature meets his human counterpart in the form of Jimmy (Matthew Broderick), a good-time airman in the brig for "borrowing" a plane to impress a girl.
