Review of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) by Filipeneto — 15 Sep 2021

I'm not a fan of Tarzan, but I think there was a lack of a good movie to bring the character back to cinema after many years of absence. This absence ended, fortunately, with the appearance of this new film, which brings us the usual story, told in a new and different way. For me personally, it worked quite well, especially considering the lack of logic and verisimilitude underlying the story of a man abandoned in the African jungle and raised by gorillas as if he were one of them.

In this film, Tarzan long ago left the African forests to take his place as Lord Greystoke. He is an aristocrat, he is perfectly used to the life of English society, and he married Jane. However, the British government asks him to return to Africa to look into what is happening in the Belgian Congo, where everyone suspects that slave labor is being used. He acquiesces to the request, but he doesn't know that it's everything the Belgians wanted, and that there's a trap waiting for him.

One of the things I liked most about this film was seeing the same story told from another perspective: Tarzan is now an English nobleman who, deep down, doesn't want to go back to the jungle and lives badly with the celebrity that his origins bring him. I also enjoyed seeing the story placed in a precise historical context: the African partition between the European empires and the Belgian colonization of Congo, which brings very bad memories, for the brutality of the colonial regime imposed there by Leopold II, monarch who, virtually, treated the Congo as his own. The film is good, it was very well done and David Yates showed, once again, talent and determination, but he made a gross mistake in allowing so many sub-plots lost in the middle of the main story without this being fully justified.

The film has a vast and luxurious cast, where we will find several illustrious names that have already proven themselves in cinema. This is the case of Alexander Skarsgaard, who was a good option to give life to Tarzan. He has charisma, he is elegant, and he adapted very well to the character and what he had to do. Christoph Waltz also looks flawless in the role of the villain, a cold, hard man who looks to no means to his ends. The actor has already shown, in previous works, that he is particularly good at villains of this style (I remember his work in “Inglorious Bastards”, in a very similar character). Far less positive, Samuel L. Jackson's appearance sounds bad, as the actor is given a character who didn't have to appear there, and who seems to have been invented just to secure the actor a spot on the end credits. And I'd rather not to mention the bad choice for his character's name, which almost made me laugh out loud! Margot Robbie didn't strike me as suitable either, as she never behaves or acts like an aristocratic Victorian wife. She looks like what she is: a 21st century actress dressed in Victorian clothes. It would have been wiser for the production to choose another actress.

Technically, the film has a very good cinematography, where color and light were very well-used. Alas, the overwhelming majority of the film relies on massive doses of high-quality, but still fake, CGI. The animals in CGI didn't seem realistic to me either, although that's a minor problem. It's a film of almost three hours in length, but I confess that I didn't have any major problems with it, despite sometimes observing, in the final third of the film, a more rushed and confusing editing work than would be acceptable. The sets and costumes, loaded with evocative notes of the time the film is set, worked very well and were one of the most absorbing facets here. The soundtrack works well, but it didn't stick in my ear, and I don't even consider it particularly striking.