If you enjoy documentaries about apes/monkeys, this is a must watch, if you are not to squeemish that is. After watching this, I had to go trough many documentaries about the life of apes/monkeys, and I found none that comes even close to the impression this documentary made. It is truly inspiring to watch a project that has taken decades to finish, to see how the humans slowly are allowed to become a part of, or at least become a observer of the group of chimpanzee. It is a powerful, heartwarming, and at times really hard to watch documentary, that gives us a glimpse of how some animals, in the right conditions, can show eerily human-like tendencies.

"Rise of the Warrior Apes" has some nice photography and great 'ape personality' 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. It's sort of like 'Cops' for apes ("bad boys bad boys") 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 don'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 'documentary'. The 'anthropologists' 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. I think this deserves to be ranked more as ape violence porn framed as a pseudo documentary. Unfortunately 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).