The script is also littered with a slew of corny one-liners, although a few of them are actually kind of good.
Sure, we see them in London living in the lap of luxury, but neither Tarzan/John Clayton nor Jane seem truly happy in London. We also never really get a clear picture as to why Tarzan and Jane left their modest African home, which Jane seems to resent somewhat. The story's pacing is fairly slow, and even though it was just 109 minutes, it felt like it could have been tightened up in a few places. Her father is sent to the Congo to teach English to the villagers, where Jane meets, falls in love with and eventually marries the jungle man.Įven though the weaving of an iconic fictional character into a historical story line is sufficiently impressive, the script by Adam Cozad ( Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer ( Hustle & Flow) is spotty, at best. In this story, Jane first encounters Tarzan when she is a young woman. This backstory is tightly woven into the fabric of The Legend of Tarzan, with Tarzan ( Alexnder Skarsgard) being lured back to his homeland of the Congo, where he was raised by the jungle animals from infancy after the death of his parents.
Jackson's character George Washington Williams was a real-life person, I didn't realize that Christoph Waltz's Leon Rom was an actual person, who had committed horrific atrocities in the Congo Free State throughout the 1880s and 1890s, before George Washington Williams exposed his work for Belgium's King Leopold II. What I didn't fully realize until after the screening, was that this movie also puts the iconic Tarzan ( Alexander Skarsgard) and Jane ( Margot Robbie) into an actual historical setting, with a few characters based on actual people. The Legend of Tarzan does take a few steps in different directions with this character, cobbling together bits and pieces from Edgar Rice Burroughs' later books, slightly altering Tarzan and Jane's back story. I remember watching the 1984 film Greystoke when I was a wee lad in the 1980s, but the character itself was never one I was thoroughly obsessed with. I don't consider myself a Tarzan aficionado or scholar whatsoever. And yet, even with all of this lore and history, the powers that be still feel another Tarzan reboot is needed with this weekend's The Legend of Tarzan. Still, that number is particularly staggering, considering that the character himself is just over 100 years old, with Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous creation first appearing in a magazine back in 1912. This search seemingly includes a number of obscure projects that have nothing to do with the King of the Jungle, such as Barzan and an Indian film dubbed Taarzan: The Wonder Car, which seems like a Knight Rider rip-off. If you do a search for Tarzan on IMDB, you'll find exactly 200 titles.