The Legend of Tarzan (2016)
Directed by David Yates
Tarzan, having acclimated to life in London, is called back to his former home in the jungle to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.
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19 films that influenced The Legend of Tarzan
What critics say influenced The Legend of Tarzan
“The Jungle Book” delivered CG environments that melded seamlessly with their human hero, and animated animals that looked so photo-real you could practically reach out and stroke their fur.
In flashbacks throughout the film, you do see the legend according to Burroughs — of the white orphan baby raised by an ape mother in the African jungle where his buddies, just as in Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” are wild animals from whom he learns to swing ape-like from tree to tree via those ever present vines.
Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book had no real tigers or snakes either, but the animals in that one talked and occasionally sang.
The Legend of Tarzan is a lot like The Jungle Book in that respect, although in this movie no talking bears start singing.
If you enjoyed the new version of "The Jungle Book" then you should enjoy "The Legend of Tarzan."
With its ultra-serious reboot structure screams Batman Begins and its CGI jungle environments trying (and failing) to match the likes of The Jungle Book, what The Legend of Tarzan really needed was a dose of fun personality ala Pirates of the Caribbean to add some energy to its doldrums.
And there is much singing and celebration in a manner not unlike that scene in “Hatari!” where they make Elsa Martinelli the elephant queen or whatever she was.
From the silent features of the 1910s and 1920s through the kinda terrible Johnny Weissmuller B-movies of the 1930s and 1940s through the horrific “Tarzan the Ape Man” with Miles O’Keeffe and Bo Derek in 1981 through the ambitious and competent “Greystoke” in 1984 through Disney’s animated “Tarzan” in 1999 (not to mention all the stage plays and TV shows and radio serials), we’ve had tons of Tarzan adaptations — but not a single legitimately great movie.
Like James Bond, Tarzan on screen has never gone away, but unlike the dapper double-oh agent, his movie appearances rarely generate much notice — one would have to go back to the final year of the last century to find a Tarzan flick that more than 12 people saw (that would be Disney's 1999 animated take).
The last live-action Tarzan movie was released in 1998 (Disney produced an animated one the following year), and like a lot of his contemporaries – the Lone Ranger, Green Hornet and Burroughs’ John Carter among them – Tarzan’s name doesn’t conjure up a certain kind of classical pulp adventure but rather a hazy memory of something your grandparents once watched in black and white.
(I’m ignoring the 1998 “Tarzan and the Lost City” because nobody even saw it, let alone talked about it.)
Although there have been more than 70 feature films based on the character of Tarzan, the son of a British lord who was raised by apes in the jungles of Africa, the last one of any significance was Disney’s 1999 animated version (and, just prior to that, 1998’s embarrassing Tarzan and the Lost City starring Casper Van Dien).
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His Girl Friday, made in 1940, has a scene where a room full of newspapermen (and Rosalind Russell) talk about a little African-American boy born in the back of a truck.
In my youth, I used to mainline Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels as if I were Al Pacino snorting up all that cocaine in Scarface.
The most financially successful modern take on the tale remains Disney's animated 1999 Tarzan, the most serious has been Hugh Hudson's stately Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes in 1984, and the most ridiculous was unquestionably John Derek's 1981 Tarzan, the Ape Man, in which the director was far more interested in photographing his wife, Bo, in multiple stages of undress than in training his lenses on the title character.
My habit extended to the filmic versions, including all 12 Johnny Weissmuller yarns, most of the Gordon Scotts and Lex Barkers, the TV series starring Ron Ely, and 1984's intelligent and handsomely mounted Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
??? Directed by "Harry Potter" veteran David Yates and scripted by Adam Cozad and Memphis' Craig Brewer, the first major live-action Tarzan movie in three decades rehabs the problematic and elides the indefensible aspects of Edgar Rice Burroughs' story about a white baby raised by apes who proves to be the natural lord of both jungle animals and black-skinned Africans; at the same time, the film embraces the seductive "noble savage" fantasy of a new century-old Western pop myth that -- as with "Frankenstein," "Moby Dick" and "King Kong" -- offers endless, thorny avenues for sexual, racial, political and historical analysis.
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While the film is credited to the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inspirations for its narrative are firmly the modern high concept movie, the types of origin stories that Christopher Nolan popularised with Batman Begins.
With its ultra-serious reboot structure screams Batman Begins and its CGI jungle environments trying (and failing) to match the likes of The Jungle Book, what The Legend of Tarzan really needed was a dose of fun personality ala Pirates of the Caribbean to add some energy to its doldrums.
I am amused that somebody took the “ Blazing Saddles ” joke about stampeding cattle through the Vatican as a sort of inspiration for a climactic set piece, but I also have to admit the conceit works.