'Space Chimps' on a Wild Ride Through Outer Space

Space Chimps

The New York Sun, July 18, 2008

When Alan Shepard returned safely to Earth late in the Gagarin spring of 1961, a relieved, ecstatic nation treated him to ticker tape, meet-the-president, and, subsequently, a trip to the moon. The previous astronaut sent by NASA into space hadn't fared quite so well. Emerging snarling and indignant from an edge-of-disaster suborbital shambles that was a comedy of human error and simian savoir faire, Ham had to make do with an apple, a pat on the head, and a speedy return to the desert laboratory that had, with the help of occasional electric shocks and (one hopes) more frequent banana pellets, trained him so effectively. Ham, I should say, was a chimpanzee, one of only two to escape the surly bonds of Earth — at least until Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes."

Ham never returned to space. He was held for years in Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo before being allowed to enjoy a glorious polygamous twilight in North Carolina, a twilight that, if "Space Chimps," the latest CGI saga from Vanguard Animation ("Valiant," "Happily N'Ever After") is to be believed, left him with just one grandson, the ne'er-do-well Ham III. Voiced by "Saturday Night Live"'s Andy Samberg, he's a slacker circus chimp, clad in sub-Knievel kitsch and periodically shot from a cannon in a tawdry parody of his famous forebear's legendary feat.

Everything changes when Ham is conscripted by a flailing space agency to be the p.r. face of a mission to retrieve a probe lost on a planet at the wrong end of a wormhole. Shot into space with the "Star-Trek"-citing straight arrow Commander Titan (a Pan troglodytes Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played Puddy on "Seinfeld") and the coyly fetching Lieutenant Luna (Cheryl Hines), a chimpanzee hottie with more than a passing resemblance to the Zira who fell so hard for Charlton Heston's bright-eyed Taylor, Ham is forced to decide what he's going to make of himself.

In a movie not notable for its originality, it's no surprise that, in the didactic, rapscallion-with-a-heart-of-gold tradition of children's fiction, Ham ultimately discovers his better self. He helps his friends. He rescues the oppressed. He acknowledges his wise old mentor. By the end of the film, the tousled scapegrace has proved himself a worthy heir to his heroic grandfather, "a chimp," Titan says in one of the better of the entertainingly awful ape-themed puns scattered throughout this movie, "off the old block." And, yes, he ends up with considerably more than an apple.

With its chase scenes, laughable, not-too-scary villain, affable apes, lovable aliens, mild subversion of the adult world, hokey sentimentality, endemic cuteness, cheesy sound track, goofily lame jokes, gentle potty humor, and Crayola-colored extraterrestrial settings, there's probably enough in this movie to make it a good dumping ground for the kids on a rainy summer afternoon. The younger ones, at least, should have a reasonably fun time, particularly if stoned on Twizzlers and Coke. This, after all, is the demographic that enriched the Wiggles — sophistication is not the name of their game.

Despite a few, very few, amusing moments clearly designed to appeal to an older audience (on the whole I'd have preferred a few banana pellets), adults are likely to regard sitting through Ham's space odyssey as something of an ordeal. The film lacks the wit, inventiveness, and charm that made "Toy Story," say, or "Shrek" such strong intergenerational hits. That's not to deny that "Space Chimps" is, technically speaking, an accomplished achievement, certainly to anyone, such as me, brought up in the "Top Cat" era, and, I suspect, even for some of those whose early years were more Pixar than Hanna-Barbera.

But technological savvy isn't enough. This is a film that just lacks the spark necessary to keep it from what seems bound to be a lonely afterlife in the dustier corners of Blockbuster's children's section. For a film about outer space, the screenplay is miserably earthbound. Worse still, the talented cast (which also includes Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth, and Stanley Tucci) is rarely given an opportunity to do much more than simply recite lines that needed a lot more help than that.

Meanwhile, despite occasional moments of hallucinatory splendor, the almost immeasurably remote planet Malgor is routinely depicted as little more than a Pufnstuf New Mexico. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, by-the-numbers oddball creatures, with the possible exception of the creepily sweet Kilowatt (Ms. Chenoweth), a megalocephalic dollhouse Tinker Bell with, perhaps, a touch of the Murakami studio about her.

If there is one time when this movie manages to rise above itself, it's when the chimps' spacecraft first leaves Earth behind it. In a short, magical, beguiling sequence, the filmmakers manage to convey a sense of beauty, immensity, and wonder. It's a glimpse of the movie that might have been, and a hint, frustrating in its brevity, of the original Ham's strange, wild ride.

Star Monkey

National Review Online, September 3, 2001

Ham's Grave, Aug 2001  © Andrew Stuttaford

The astronaut's grave is plain, a metal plaque on a slab of concrete on the grounds of the Museum of Space History just outside Alamogordo, N.M. There is no statue, no elaborate monument, just the silence of a desert hillside. Wreaths do not flourish in the dryness of the American Southwest, but some kindly individual has left a pancake-shaped cactus in memory of the dead flier. A face has been cut into the plant, two eyes and a jagged smile. The carving was, doubtless, well meant, a tribute, perhaps, to a simple, friendly, soul, but the impression it leaves is faintly grotesque, more Jack O'Lantern than Smiley. That is not inappropriate, because to modern sensibilities there is something disturbing about the story of the deceased, a small dark space pioneer by the name of Ham, America's first Astrochimp. Yes that's right. Ham was a chimpanzee, a space-suited representative of the species known technically, and somewhat insultingly, as Pan Troglodytes. It is largely forgotten now (although not in the Comoro Islands, a fine nation that, a few years ago, issued a stamp in Ham's honor), but the early days of America's attempt to storm the heavens were marked by the space-bound trajectories of a number of luckless mammals.

Various rhesus monkeys, all called Albert, were shot off into the sky from captured German V2 rockets. As the space program progressed to homegrown technology, other tiny simians, Able, Baker, Sam, Miss Sam, and Gordo all followed in the Alberts's exhaust trails, as did a squadron of mice, but this was not enough for NASA. Before Homo sapiens could be risked, the space agency moved up the evolutionary scale, turning to man's closest relative, known then, as now, to be the chimpanzee, but quite how closely related, well, in those days, nobody could be sure.

Times have changed. DNA testing has now made it possible to argue that the traditional division between humanity and the four species of Great Ape (Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Gorilla, and Orangutan) owes more to vanity than biology. According to this view, we are simply the fifth, and most sophisticated, variant. Within this new, and alarmingly expanded, family, our nearest relations, the chimps, turn out to be closer to us than they are, for example, to the gorillas. What is more, over the last 30 years, detailed observation of chimpanzees in their native setting has established that they have at least the rudiments of a culture, one that includes the use of tools, barter and primitive medical techniques. As noble savages, however, the often unruly and violent chimps fail to make the grade. The mark of Cain turns out, depressingly, to be a sign of a good brain.

Quite how good is far from clear. Measuring animal intelligence is difficult, and prone to anthromophic exaggeration, but it does seem that a chimp possesses the intellectual ability of a two- to three-year-old. That may be no revelation to a parent of toddlers, but it is a fact worth remembering when considering what happened to Ham in the years that followed his abduction from his African birthplace. The derivation of his name, "Holloman Aerospace Medical," gives the critical, ominous clue.

The museum in Alamogordo takes up the narrative, although, sadly, the simian spaceman does not make it to the museum's pantheon, a plaque-bedecked Valhalla known as the International Space Hall of Fame. No, Ham's story is confined to the building's lesser regions, more specifically, a corridor decorated with a series of educational posters, the first of which provides a good prologue. It features a glorious color image of a rocket at launch and the headline, "Before there was John Glenn or Neil Armstrong there was…," and there right in the corner is a little circular cut-out of Ham's head, a Caliban satellite for the giant, gleaming Saturn 5, an enigmatic, humbling reminder of where we all come from.

Other posters show some of the chimponaut training process. We see three chimps being taught to become accustomed to sitting in one place for up to 24 hours. It is a scene out of daycare hell. One ape sits, impassive, a cross-legged lama, the second slumps, pensive with a hint of Rodin, while the third wriggles like the bored two year old he so clearly resembles. Another shot shows the three chimpanzees reclining side by side, each in an open container. Two are holding hands. Reassurance? Other grimmer tests ("windblast", "acceleration/deceleration") are, tactfully, not shown and nor is the darker side of the "mild" electric shock/banana pellet routine used to train Ham to pull the right levers when he was in his capsule.

There are, of course, pictures of the great day, January 31, 1961. Ham is in his spacesuit, an eerie mix of the futuristic and the primitive, looking like a suspicious old man as he stands with his trainer, showing few signs of the "friskiness" that had earlier earned him his ticket to the infinite (and with that ticket came a name; previously he had been known as "61"). Later, we see him lying in his "couch", NASA's Ikea-style description of his capsule-within-a-capsule. During the flight our chimpanzee Columbus is photographed staring out of his little window, face impassive, eyes as black as the space through which he was flying. Finally, after his safe return, Ham is portrayed reaching for his reward, an apple (John Glenn, it has been pointed out, got a Senate seat for pretty much the same achievement). He looks, to humans at least, to be grinning, but if it really was a grin, it must have been one of relief.

For the flight would have been a juddering, jerking nightmare for anyone, let alone for a passenger unable to understand what was going on, but bright enough to suspect that it was nothing good. To make it worse, almost everything that could go wrong, did. The exhibit skirts the issue, but, to put it bluntly, Ham was nearly toast. Right at the start, his rocket started sucking in fuel too fast. As a result, the angle of the craft's climb was too steep and too high, subjecting poor Ham to g-forces far fiercer than ever expected, a process repeated on re-entry sixteen minutes later, when the retrorockets cut off too soon, sending our once-frisky Icarus plunging down to earth at nearly 6,000 mph, 1,400 mph faster than planned. These were not the only difficulties. Quite early in the flight, cabin pressure collapsed, a development that would have been fatal for an astronaut, but not, fortunately, for an astrochimp safe in his self-contained couch. On the other hand, no one ever subjected Neil Armstrong to "mild" electric shocks every time he pulled the wrong lever, which was the threat that continued to hang over Ham even as his capsule careened through space.

In fact the redoubtable chimponaut, hardened by the rigors of his bleak training regime, performed very well, going about his preordained tasks (Watch for the white light, pull the left lever! Watch for the blue light, pull the right lever!) with surprisingly few outward signs of stress, despite the massive g-forces and the weightlessness. One final insult remained, however. On splashdown, the capsule promptly sprung a leak. By the time rescuers arrived on the scene (late, of course: they had expected Ham to land somewhere else), our hero was in severe danger of drowning. Once recovered, he appeared distinctly unimpressed by this shambles of a trip. Ham may have taken NASA's apple, but for a few hours the biting, irritable chimp displayed every symptom of the syndrome we now call air rage, something probably made worse by the gesticulating, shouting, flashbulb-popping Cape Canaveral press corps that surrounded him on his arrival back on dry land.

NASA did not seem to mind. The agency had what it wanted — good publicity (Ham made the cover of Life!) and good science. To quote from his tombstone, Ham "had proved that mankind could live and work in space." All was now set for Alan Shepard's historic flight. Unfortunately, America's Soviet rivals were even quicker to get the message. The next primate to leave the Earth, less than three months later, was Yuri Gagarin. As for the astrochimp, it was back to the barracks for him for a while, but a rival, Enos, got the first orbital mission, leaving the discarded Ham to be retired to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There, at least, there were no levers, no shocks, no crazed wild rides, but it was, apparently, a somewhat isolated existence, a miserable fate for such a gregarious animal. After 17 years this Chimp of Monte Cristo was moved to a more congenial zoo in North Carolina and, finally, the company of his own kind. He met Mrs. Ham; in fact, some say that he met two Mrs. Hams, but these better times were not to last. Within two years Ham had died of, poetically, an enlarged heart.

To judge Ham's treatment by current standards would be posturing of a type that is, these days, regrettably familiar. We are often too quick to apply contemporary criteria in measuring the supposed failings of the past. Nevertheless, from what we know now it is clear that humanity does need to take another look at its handling of the Great Apes. And if Ham's strange, sad odyssey can remind us of that, he will have helped out yet another species.

His own.