Two films about chimps are released in the UK this week: Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim

Directed by Man on Wire's James Marsh, it reconstructs the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee taken from his mother when he was two weeks old and sent to live with a series of well-meaning volunteers and a scientist who subjected him to a catalogue of misguided and methodologically flawed experiments in the early 1970s.

It's a film that carefully shows how naivety and hubris resulted in Nim's life going from bad to worse to horrific to bizarre, as he inadvertently became a prisoner, part of a media circus (at one point he even had his own publicity-seeking lawyer), and a specimen for medical testing. Indeed, so jaw-droppingly unbelievable are the events that unfold that if this wasn't a true story, you'd swear it was the plot of a Planet of the Apes movie, serving up a kind of Charlton Heston, Goddamn-you-all-to-hell warning about our relentless arrogance.

Actually, it is. Well, sort of. In a not-entirely coincidental quirk of distribution fate, Project Nim arrives in UK cinemas this week, just as franchise reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes its British debut.

Set in the present day, Rise of the Planet of the Apes – as its title suggests – is an origins story that explains how apes will begin to supplant humans in the future. Departing from the classic time travel paradox presented by the original series of films, this time the apes evolve as a consequence of a medical experiment designed to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

It's the kind of classic Frankenstein conceit in which scientific folly results in us becoming the architects of our own destruction. Yet the story beats aren't too far from the realities of Project Nim, which is hardly surprising since the Apes films have always had plenty of real world resonances.

"I think they've always held up a mirror to who we are," says Rupert Wyatt, Rise of the Planet of the Apes' British director. "I think if you look at the early films they became increasingly satirical, but were also fundamentally commentaries about what was happening at the time and where we were. One of the things we wanted to do in the shape of a big Hollywood summer entertainment blockbuster was to at least ask certain questions about where we are in the world."

Given it is a big Hollywood movie, the moral, ethical and thematic issues it raises are remarkably in synch with Project Nim, not least because Rise… places our sympathies firmly with its chimp protagonist. This is Caesar, a super-smart ape raised in a human environment. Played by King Kong star Andy Serkis, using the same motion capture technology that Peter Jackson used to bring the actor's performance of the giant gorilla to life, it's hard not to feel for Caesar in the way Marsh makes us feel for Nim.

"Andy and I looked at a lot of real-life stories about chimps being domesticated and the repercussions of that," says Wyatt, who has yet to see the film of Project Nim but was certainly aware of the study's existence.

As it turns out, their main research touchstone was actually Oliver the "humanzee", a chimp who was thought to be the missing link. Serkis says: "He was subjected to a lots of scientific experiments on his DNA and became a weird media freak. And then, when all was said and done, and it was proven that he wasn't a hybrid, he was thrown in a cage and left for 30 years and was psychologically destroyed by that."

In Rise… this manifests itself when Caesar is placed in a primate sanctuary that is constructed like a prison. Though heightened for dramatic effect, there's an interesting parallel in Project Nim, which presents in similar borstal-like fashion the Oklahoma University Institute of Primate Studies from where Nim was originally taken and to where he was subsequently returned when injuries and flawed research brought the project to a premature end.

There is, however, one crucial difference: Nim's return to Oklahoma brought him into contact with Bob Ingersoll, an undergraduate student, who was to prove instrumental not only in helping Nim reintegrate with chimps, but who also tirelessly fought to rescue Nim and his fellow chimps when funding cuts later resulted in them being sold to a lab for medical research. He's the only genuine hero in Nim's life.

Ingersoll, a long-haired, endearingly idealistic primate expert who today runs Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary in Oklahoma, remains unhappy about the prison-like nature of the university's facilities when he worked there with Nim. But as he says: "That was the infrastructure; the reality was: those chimps had each other. They were together in what was considered a family group. One or two chimps alone is really bad for them, no matter what the conditions."

When Nim arrived, Ingersoll knew it would be difficult for him, having never been around chimps. "I knew what was about to happen, so I just wanted to do the best I could to help him interface with the other chimps. Because of the personality Nim had, he was able to deal with it. If he hadn't, it would have been bad for him."

Ingersoll effectively became best buddies with Nim, but he never made the mistake of treating Nim as human, and Nim didn't mistake him for a chimp. "We found a sort of common ground," Ingersoll says. "The best thing that could have happened to him was coming back to us and learning to be a chimp again. It gave him meaning and purpose. A chimp's got to know where he stands in the group."

Interestingly, Rise of the Planet of the Apes reaches a similar conclusion. "The underlying thing that this film is about is empathy," reckons Serkis. "The strange lesson that Will (James Franco's scientist character] learns is that he becomes more humanised by an ape. And Caesar has to reach a point of connecting with his own kind to find a way of communicating with them. It's a complicated emotional journey."

Taking the character on this journey was, of course, one of the main reasons why Wyatt chose to utilise digital tools to create the ape characters entirely from motion-captured performances. But there was a big ethical reason too – "It would be wrong to tell a story about the exploited and the oppressed and use performing apes to do that," says Wyatt. It's a stance that has earned the film plaudits from animal rights organisations including PETA, and also from Ingersoll, who in the past helped the chimps used in the 1987 Matthew Broderick movie Project X (which, ironically, he believes was loosely based on his efforts to save Nim) get to a sanctuary after they were abused in the entertainment industry. "I just love that CGI stuff. There shouldn't be chimps in any commercials on television or in any entertainment situation in the movies."

Rise of the Planet of the Apes' use of technology also provides its own little commentary on the animal testing issues that the film raises. "This isn't an anti-science movie in anyway," says Serkis (who, for the record, has always been against vivisection). "It's not saying humans shouldn't try to find cures to diseases such as Alzheimer's.

"But one of the great ironies is that we have used technology to eliminate the need to use live chimps in this movie, so the scientific reach in that respect chimes with the underlying themes of the film and that's quite gratifying." Perhaps humankind is not damned to hell after all.

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim are out now.