Project X (1987)

One day my mother came home with a film she showed her kids in school that day. I was either 4 or 5 years old. The film was "Project X", a heart warming, no so far fetched idea, melodrama starring Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt not to mention the extremely cute and hairy chimps.

The film is about an air force pilot who is transfred to an "Experimental Pilot Preformance Project" conducted by a strict doctor. From there he meets Virgil, an extremely smart and loving chimp who ended up there by mistake. He falls for the chimp like anyone else would and tries to save him with the help of the researcher who taught and cared for Virgil in the begining.

I found this film by mistake and quickly bought it. It's only special feature is the theatrical trailer and TV Spots but the film itself is well worth the ten bucks. The film has some very emotional scenes and some harrowing. Some of the scenes were honestly hard to watch. Being an animal lover one can only imagine how bad these kinds of experiments got. However, like all family films, this one has a great and happy ending.

This is simply a great movie that kids will love as well as adults. I'm 21 and I just love it!

I saw this movie when it first came out and have always wanted it. I could not believe I found it here at Amazon at such a great low price. This movie is so funny and yet so sad. It is the best movie I have ever seen. You have to see it. It is so sad to know that this kind of testing was actually performed on chimps by the US Airforce. This movie really makes you think. It gives you a sense of respect and love for these animals. (I was rooting for the chimps all the way.)

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PROJECT X is really a movie fairy tale for adults. It is billed as a comedy, and there are truly some humorous moments, but the basic thrust of the film is to transport the audience to a world of a deep and dark forest populated and run by evil witches and warlocks. The dark forest is a United States Air Force research test center and the resident warlock is a heartless and slimy researcher whose only stated purpose is to expose chimpanzees to lethal doses of radiation. Enter Matthew Broderick as a young and innocent air force recruit whose job is to bond with these chimps and basically and unwittingly get them ready for their lethal exposures. Broderick is young and boyishly goodlooking, but he is not the star. The one who steals more than a few scenes is Virgil the chimp. Virgil learns to trust Broderick, who in turn learns that the horrors of the dark forest are masked by the antiseptic environment that kills chimps in the name of science.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly tries hard to infuse PROJECT X with more than just the comic interaction between a chimp that is as at least as bright as his handler. Kaplan sets up the relation between Broderick and Virgil as a dramatic focus that zeros in on the rationale that the air force doctor slimily insists is the case: namely that if and when American pilots are exposed to killing radiation during a bombing run--perhaps to Russia--then how well will they be able to continue their mission? To Kaplan's credit, he has Broderick point out that unlike their simian counterparts in a flight simulator, a human pilot will certainly know if he has been exposed, and it is this knowledge that renders the entire PROJECT X experiment rationale as unneeded at best and evil at worst. Broderick is forced to juggle duty versus conscience, never an easy task at any time. By the film's midpoint Helen Hunt enters as a simian sign language teacher who, years earlier, had taught Virgil to communicate in contextually meaningful ways, thus intensifying Broderick's dilemma about the potential destruction of a sentient being that is not only cute but smart. It is this smartness that director Kaplan uses to ease the film into the slapstick world of farce. Not only is Virgil bright enough to help Broderick defuse a melt down in a lab experiment gone haywire, but he is also savvy enough to take an airplane up and pilot it in an escape.

PROJECT X is that odd but pleasant comedy/fantasy that brings the audience into the dark world of science to force the hero and the audience to wonder where duty ends and conscience begins. PROJECT X implies that a useful starting point is to define just what it means to be human--or in Virgil's case--near human.

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I am giving the movie 4 stars because It is one of the movies I remember from my childhood that really left an impact on my views about animals and humanity. As a child, soaking in every little bit of this movie really made me feel a lot more attached to animals and more intuitive to the fact that every creature on this earth has feelings and emotions, regardless of if they can't express them like humans do.

Project X is one of the few movies that I also can't get myself to watch again to this day. It always makes me cry. I just get so overwhelmed with emotions over the chimps and the testing. It's all so sad.

James Horner is my musical epitome of a soundtrack God! I will admit though that you can identify his scores immediately because they are all very similar, but they ALWAYS evoke such strong, powerfully moving feelings during the films and it really works here with Project X.

This is a movie that has a nice, happy ending..but there is sadness to get to it, and it makes me all mushy and emotional just thinking of it!

Just had to put some thoughts about this movie up out of boredom!

Great childhood memories film. Reminds me of being a kid in the 80's.

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This movie is a poignant reminder to me of how cruel and how kind the human race can be to other animals. I know it is mostly a fictional story, but I still root for the escape of the chimps, even for grumpy Goliath. Jimmy was being manipulated, same as the subjects of the "experiment" and he comes to realize he has to stand up for himself. He won't just be the wise-cracking card player anymore.

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