by Ed Travis
We got so caught up wondering if we could render a live action/CGI Tarzan in the 21st century that we didn’t stop to think if we should.
The Legend Of Tarzan is a studio summer blockbuster arriving with almost zero buzz, and what discussion there has been about it is centered around whether this is a film out of time with very little clear audience demand. Yet with all that said, I remained interested and hopeful. The trailer was compelling, the cast was intriguing, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulpy original stories of Tarzan are breathtaking adventures.
A shame then, that director David Yates follows up his stratospheric Harry Potter success with a film that genuinely suffers from his direction and the overwrought script from Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer. While the globe trotting and time skipping of this tale somewhat reflect the pulp roots of Tarzan, here they create a choppy and disjointed narrative. Spanning from London to the Congo, and through past and present, it’s hard to follow the geography of the action and hard to invest in the narrative which jumps around far too frequently and attempts to mix origin and high concept adventure.
The human elements of the Tarzan story are where the film feels the most alive. Alexander Skarsgard stands out quite nicely as an intriguing leading man. His physicality is impressive, sure, but the rare moments of levity and romance are strong as well. Margot Robbie is admittedly gorgeous enough to have my attention from jump street, but she also offers a little bit of a pulse with her boundless excitement and defiance, even if the character never fully sheds its damsel in distress origins. Faring less well in the cast is… everyone else. Samuel L. Jackson’s comic sidekick is utterly one dimensional and never quite elicits the actual laughs he’s clearly intended to. Christoph Waltz is done even fewer favors by the script, stopping just short of twirling his evil mustache while doing bad things that villains do.
But as mentioned, when the stakes are focused on the humanization of this very fanciful character, the film scores its best moments. There’s a hand motif happening at the beginning of the film, very intentionally establishing the softness of the civilized hands and the toughened, almost misshapen hands of Lord Greystoke. But this motif is largely abandoned. Occasional glimmers of humanity are found in his interactions with his ape family, and in the ways he interacts physically with Robbie’s Jane. Skarsgard adds subtlety to a role prone to broad physicality. Flashes and moments of intimacy and realism, however, can’t overpower the emotionless thud that the rest of the story delivers.
Working against a modern adaptation of Tarzan is the fact that Burroughs’ original stories, while thrilling and masterfully plotted, are rooted in an outdated and de facto racist world view. Tarzan is a high fantasy character that works far better on the page than he does on the screen. And while this iteration goes out of its way to shed much of the overt and casual racist conception of “deepest, darkest Africa” and render a tale of triumph over colonial slavery, there’s no possible way to shed the tiresome “white savior” template this character more or less serves as a mascot for. My curiosity was positively brimming to see if the filmmakers could successfully overcome these issues, but they really didn’t. Far worse than the ever present “white savior” issue is the overall blandness of the endeavor. The muted color palette, the laughless moments of attempted levity, and the failure to render Tarzan’s famed vine swinging in a believable or exciting way all lead to a busy blockbuster which focuses far too much on plotting and not enough on the fascinating elements of a troubled, if somewhat eternal, literary character.
Ultimately the blockbuster moments of The Legend Of Tarzan are the most bland, though they were likely required by Warner Brothers in order to greenlight a big budget reimagining of this story. The vine swinging, the set pieces, the battles… all are rote and range from legitimately bad to just plain boring. Singular moments of combat and small character beats hint at a far more interesting movie that could have been told for far less money, but that would have turned this into a mid-budget film which studios just don’t seem to want to waste their time with anymore. There’s a heart and soul in this film that are drowned out by the banal blockbuster it tries too hard to be. I’d still love to see Burroughs’ problematic creation attempted again on the big screen, perhaps with a spotlight shown on the less palatable elements of the character in today’s world. This film isn’t that.
And I’m Out.