The Legend of Tarzan is an original adventure. Tarzan has been reimagined as a late 19th century superhero while keeping Edgar Rice Burroughs’ background material more or less intact. A stone-faced but ripped Alexander Skarsgard plays Tarzan. Jane is feisty, forthright, and definitely not a traditional damsel-in-distress. She certainly complicates matters for Tarzan, but seriously, would you have it any other way?
Samuel L. Jackson plays Tarzan’s sidekick, George Washington Williams, pretty much the way he plays most Samuel L. Jackson characters. I wondered aloud after the movie to my husband about how he hadn’t seemed to have aged that much in the last twenty-some years since his famous role in the classic Pulp Fiction.
After a prologue that explains why the emissaries of the King of Belgium want to catch Tarzan, we are soon transported from Victorian England to the jungles of Africa. With frequent flashbacks of Tarzan’s childhood and his early meetings with Jane, we patch together a familiar story, but soon we are focusing on the evils of the slave trade from the Congo, and how it is that Tarzan is to fix this mess.
And fix it he does, indeed.
As for the cinematography, it’s impossible to tell whether all the vine-swinging is computer-generated imagery or not, but regardless, it is a sight to behold. The animal creature work is also expertly done. The Legend of Tarzan is a lot like The Jungle Book in that respect, although there are no talking or singing bears here.
The musical score was somehow not that compelling, and I do wish that were not the case because I do love to make such associations that transport me in an instant to scenes and stories with the mere sound of even a few opening bars of a tune or song in a movie.
And yet, all in all, a very creative action-adventure-love story, and I give it high marks for great escapist entertainment in the beautiful Congolese Basin of Africa with glimpses of nineteenth century European stiff-upper lipped manners that pass off for civilization.
