It didn’t take long at all for audiences to get their first gorilla-sized look at the upcoming live-action Tarzan movie. Right off the heels of the first image released today, the first trailer has also dropped just hours later.
Directed by the very talented David Yates, Legend of Tarzan stars Alexander Skarsgård as Tarzan and Margot Robbie as Jane. But from what’s been revealed so far on paper and now in the trailer, the movie looks to be much more than simply “me Tarzan, you Jane”. And that could either be a good thing or bad thing.
Legend of Tarzan takes place 10 years after the titular hero leaves the jungle for civilization, now a well-to-do man of the 19th century and married to Jane. Something goes wrong when he’s called back to the Congo for a supposedly diplomatic mission headed by Captain Leon Rom, played by Christoph Waltz, that turns out to be much more sinister than Tarzan originally thought.
So far so good. Kudos to Warner Bros. for not doing an origin story or a rehashing of the basic premise of Tarzan and Jane (audiences get the gist at this point). The trailer is a bit contradictory, though. We get a glimpse of all those things Warner Bros. supposedly avoided. We see baby Tarzan, wild ape-man Tarzan, and gentrified Tarzan. Whether some of that early Tarzan stuff is actually a portion of the movie or shown via flashbacks, it’s only a trailer so it’s anyone’s guess. Hopefully the writers didn’t try to cover so much of Tarzan’s story that the interesting 10-years-later concept is bottlenecked.
What’s most noticeable though, and what makes this movie look simply bananas, is all the craziness going on in the trailer. There’s an astounding amount of CGI as well. CGI apes, CGI tree-swinging, CGI set pieces, and an enormous CGI animal stampede through a CGI city. We also see African tribal warriors do battle with Western soldiers, massive and crashing set pieces where daring chases and fights ensue, and a dual-pistol wielding Samuel L. Jackson.
There are two vibes given off. The first is that the movie feels a bit like Peter Jackson’s epic King Kong, if Kong and Ann were swapped out for Tarzan and Jane. The second vibe is that this feels a little like the Pan experiment from earlier this year where a new twist was put on an old story. And so much craziness was added that the movie was killed by its own indulgence and excess. Combine those two movies and you get a sweeping CGI-filled epic that’s a bit more ridiculous than ridiculously entertaining. Hopefully Legend of Tarzan is more like the latter when it swings into theaters on July 1, 2016.
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