The Legend Of Tarzan is a weird film. It's absolutely dreadful, for a start, but its so weird. Not unlike I imagine will be a lot of people, my only previous exposure to Tarzan outside of a vague awareness that it was based on super old books, is the Disney film, which is a really good movie. This on the other hand is so far removed from that, and what made that film work, its a little bizarre. Not that it should copy the disney film I mean, or that they couldn't try a different interpretation of the character/story, just that it fails so badly, the comparison is inevitable.
When I saw on the internet a few days before I saw the film a comparison of it to Batman v Superman, I assumed that was a mildly humorous joke, but its surprisingly apt. A lot of what went wrong in BvS is also seen in Tarzan, its way too grim, way too dark, takes itself way too seriously, lacks almost any form of levity or lightness to offset the darkness and grimness, takes things that should be beautiful or awe inspiring and makes them ugly with an awful washed out colour palette, yuck.
The story assumes a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the viewer of the Tarzan story, which is fine, and involves Tarzan already living in England as a super rich lord having left the jungle and married Jane and is lured back to the congo by Samuel Jackson as an American trying to expose King Leopold's exploitation of the native people as slavery, and by a plot by the king's representative played by Christoph Waltz who needs to capture Tarzan for another tribe who hate Tarzan for some reason. It takes about 8 minutes of them being back in Africa before everything goes to shit, Jane gets abducted, and Tarzan has to rescue her.
Well, where to start. For one, what a weird film to try and be political, right? Are modern audiences supposed to be outraged at European colonisation of Africa? What message are they even trying to send, that colonialism was bad? Cos I mean, we all get that, and but I don't know if they expect people to care or what. The story is both boring, confusing, and yet lean. Giant obvious metaphors are rampant, Waltz uses rosary beads as a lethal weapon (hmm) before animals and natives rise up against the inhumane colonial Belgians, led by Tarzan and Jackson, respectively an incredibly white British person and an American.
The characters are bad. Alexander Skarsgård looks very physically imposing, granted, but he's a charisma vacuum of the highest order, and he hardly has any presence on the screen. Margo Robbie is an actress I really like and has charisma , but she gets shockingly little to do as Jane, and her and Tarzan have hardly any screen time together. The film tries to make a big deal out of her not just being a damsel in distress, but... she really is. Jackson and Waltz try their best, but Waltz is constrained by his role and the script, and never really gets to shine, which is strange considering how much success he's had playing utter bastards in films before. Jackson fares a little better as the comic relief sidekick with an ex military background, but again, his place in the story constrains him.
It all looks bad, specially after the jungle book, the looks of the animals was just bleh. The action is boring, and there's really not much of it, and hardly any of it looks good at all, calling back to aforementioned washed out palette WB seems to be so fond of. The pacing is bloody awful, which goes with how bad/infrequent the action is most of the time, stuff that I think is supposed to be impressive comes off as lame and limp.
So, The Legend Of Tarzan is awful, but its fascinatingly awful. Don't go see it though.
