The Legend of Tarzan, the latest big-screen version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' vine-swinging he-man, is a sincere and well-intentioned attempt to wrestle with the legacy of European colonialism in Africa. It is also a movie in which a man punches a gorilla. You could say it's at war with itself, but it's a war involving soldiers who are never quite sure who they're fighting, and who are as likely to slip in the mud and break their own necks as they are to get off a clean shot.
Movies need drama. This is a fact. No matter what the genre, if we’re always sure of the outcome, nothing matters. In The Legend of Tarzan, there’s not a moment where anything is in doubt. No one is superior to Tarzan. He’s the unstoppable, unbeatable Terminator of the jungle. He’s always going to win, the bad guys are always going to lose, and the audience is never going to care.
Directed by David Yates, The Legend of Tarzan has some solid ideas at its core. It’s a sequel to most of the Tarzan stories we know and love. So being raised by apes, becoming the king of the jungle, that’s all in the past. Now he’s John Clayton, a respectable Englishman who is lured back to his home in the Congo. There he’s forced to fight for the country he loves, which is in danger of becoming enslaved by a tyrannical king.
The irony of that epithet being bestowed by a black Civil War veteran is not lost on The Legend of Tarzan. And indeed, for a time, it seems as if Yates and company have a handle on how to reshape Edgar Rice Burroughs imperialist fantasy for the modern age. The opening sequence, in which a fastidious Belgian commander leads his soldiers through the jungle mists, is full of redolent images: the bodies of dead troops hung on makeshift crosses, their own rifles used as crossbars; an African tribesman starring indomitably into the lens, a colonist's white linen hat perched incongruously atop his head.
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King of nothing
Unfortunately, the imperative to produce a viable box-office entertainment trumps The Legend of Tarzan's noble intentions at every turn. We're cued to hiss at Rom (Christoph Waltz), the Belgian commander, whose first onscreen act is to rip an African flower from its stem, and who, in an especially rococo touch, uses a spider-silk rosary as an offensive weapon. But when tribal soldiers spring from the water beneath his feet, in the variable-speed slow motion that Yates abuses throughout, the effect makes them seem both more and less than human. We meet kinder Africans later, the cheerful villagers who take John in after his battered body is discovered in the jungle. But it's Jane (Margot Robbie), the white daughter of an American missionary, who nurses him back to health, and who later becomes his wife. It's a story inextricably entwined with Europe's relationship to ‘the dark continent’, and yet actual Africans keep getting pushed to the side.
The problem, besides the obvious one of not enjoying a huge chunk of the movie, is the Tarzan stuff you’re looking forward to is very hit or miss. For a few brief moments, we see what you’d assume Yates wanted this film to feel like—Tarzan, shirt off, jumping off cliffs, flying through trees on a vine, fighting an ape. This can be quite beautiful. But for many of those scenes, he’s just fighting people like any normal human. And Samuel L. Jackson’s character, George Washington Williams, is always nearby to ground the movie in reality. That sounds like a good idea in theory, but instead it hampers the film, which should be more fantastic and less down-to-earth.
At times, Yates seems desperate to jazz up the action, shooting one conversation between John and George in a series of whirlpooling shots that add nothing to the scene but a mild feeling of motion sickness. Perhaps it's a way of compensating in advance for the movie's action scenes, a lackluster jumble of weightless CGI and chiseled abs. (Yes, Skarskård's sculpted torso is impressive, but it's an unlikely physique for a man in the 1890s.) Major studio movies increasingly feel like acts of brand maintenance first and stories second, and Legend is the latest link in that worn-out chain.
It's a Tarzan movie because there have always been Tarzan movies, not because there was any compelling reason to add one more to the list. At its core it’s the story of a white European who asserts his dominion, however benevolently, over wild African creatures: like Kipling's The Jungle Book, it can be tinkered with, but its heart doesn't change. Humans need stories, but the stories we need change, and sometimes old ones die out because the needs they addressed or the ideas they encompassed no longer apply. It might be time to let Tarzan vanish back into the jungle.
★★☆☆☆
