The Legend of Tarzan

Someone might enjoy all the pulp as a guilty pleasure, but I found The Legend of Tarzan more and more annoying with every passing minute, despite its very promising start. Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book is the clear winner here. (07/03/2016)

The beating heart, wide open eyes, and dancing soul of a former ten-year-old geek who has read everything that could be found about the ubiquitous man from the apes family. You don't forget your childhood loves even two decades later, and David Yates knows how to tell stories about heroes, villains, love, and friendship in such a fresh yet old-fashioned way that I have no defense. Alexander Skarsgård was born for the role of John Clayton, and when Margot Robbie for the first time in her career isn't annoying me, I am most excited after some slight hesitation. The power of the story and its message outweigh any quiet objections about minor physical flaws. I would take a sequel immediately, and even though the creators surprisingly quickly exhausted one storyline (Opar), I have dozens of directions in my head to explore. (07/09/2016)

Animals versus colonialism or the Swedish model makes Africa great again. When the creators are already pushing so hard on the racial and colonial aspect, the character of the scattered and theatrically very faint Aryan is very interesting, by which I do not want to suggest that anything from The Legend of Tarzan deserves to be taken seriously. Attempts at moralizing are as rigid as trying to tell two stories at once (both the "origin" and the new storyline drag on). Christopher Waltz could send his less talented double to the set to play the villainous roles, and David Yates confirms that he is a boring director, especially when the screenwriters don't give him brisk dialogues. Plus, it sometimes looks like some of the shots disappeared, so Samuel L. Jackson fires like a rich Texan. I can also forget that the film opens a meaningless amount of storylines and tells them very roughly, and sometimes not at all. Favreau didn't try a tenth of the "serious overlaps" in The Jungle Book, yet his film looks ten times more mature than this CGI nonsense. One then notices with fascination all the bullshit, such as the fact that a man living his whole life among gorillas is shaved like a real Dandy. Well, the nobleman's son won’t be denied. (01/21/2017)

Despite the fact that some of the motifs are probably taken from various sequels to the original book, the plot of the film seems desperately pulled out of someone’s ass and the film looks as if none of the creators knew what they were doing. It is as if the film was gradually shot by three directors with different visions, or as if director David Yates wanted to shoot it in three different ways at once. The resulting mishmash is a combination of Tarzan, a romantically veiled red library in the style of Out of Africa and an adventure reminiscent of Indiana Jones. At the same time, the film lacks tension, well-filmed action, humor and fun. On the other hand, there is no lack of bad editing and the digital tricks have a fluctuating quality. The actors are either poorly cast, play below their abilities, or both. The last rescue of the creators would be for them to argue that they tried to reproduce the naive trashy atmosphere of the adventure novels of the 1920s and 1930s, which would explain a lot. But even so, that would amount to a rather weak apology. (07/19/2016)

Right at the beginning, it would be good to compare this film with The Jungle Book, which also arrived in cinemas this year and I have to agree with most of the users, because I also liked the story of Mowgli and his animal friends more than The Legend of Tarzan. David Yates' film isn't downright bad, but I was probably expecting a slightly better built story and more use of the characters, especially Christoph Waltz, whose villains are top notch. Alexander Skarsgård was more suited to his role in True Blood, Margot Robbie was kind bland, and Samuel L. Jackson's involvement was obviously meant to cater for some of the humour (which, thankfully, it did). It wasn't a bad film from a technical standpoint, but compared to The Jungle Book it's more of a poorer sibling. In short, a film that while offering beautiful scenery of African nature, its stumbling block is its weaker story and especially its untapped potential. (07/16/2016)