Moviepilot: “Legend of Tarzan has a fantastic cast, but can it live up to its name?”
At MoviePilot, Katie Granger takes a very nice and thorough look at Legend of Tarzan and gives the kind of reaction that I think is going on in the minds of a lot of people out there in the world of “lets thin about upcoming movies”. She writes:
Odds are when you first heard that Village Roadshow were planning on rebooting a live action version of Tarzan you may have been a little apprehensive about the idea. . . After all, live action / CGI reboots of these types of franchises – never mind the prospect of yet another origin story for the archetypal character – is enough to make anyone worried, given some that have come before. . . .But the trailer for the upcoming The Legend of Tarzan dropped at the end of last year with our first look at the David Yates directed action adventure, and it actually looks not half bad; especially because it draws heavily from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels rather than other adaptations. . . . And rather than rehashing the origins again it’s going to move forward through the life of Tarzan and Jane, which is a good way to take the franchise at the current time.
Read the full article at MoviePilot.
5 comments
Makes a lot of sense Michael. I hadn’t thought about it from a purely pragmatic angle. Thanks
I tend the think the reasoning was more practical. The only people who are aware of the Mangani/Bolgani distinctions are hard core ERBophiles and exerting effort to make the Mangani not be a gorilla would please that very small constituency but possibly confuse the more general (and target) moviegoing audience. The idea of an undiscovered great ape made a lot of sense in 1912 (indeed DuChaillu had identified an ape called “koolo-kamba” that was was larger than a chimp and smaller than a gorilla and ERB had that book on his shelf) . . . . but here we are in 2016 and there are chimps and there are gorillas and they’re rare enough — there are no undiscovered creatures of that ilk in Africa. So I could see it just being a decision in which they would see little value in going out on a shaky limb that might send them crashing to the ground, all to satisfy us few (when considered in the context of the very large global audience the movie needs to find) diehard Burroughs fans who would notice or care.
I think they can but doing so would be very expensive and Yates may have wanted to do so originally but WB refused to green light his original presentation until the budget was brought down. Which Yates dideventually did but it took a year. Maybe one of the things he had to sacrifice was the creation of the Magani.
It still bothers me that the current trend, started by Disney in their animated movies, I think, is to depict Tarzan’s adoptive jungle family as gorillas, when, as any reader of the books know, is absolutely not the case. I will never understand why the same people who sneer ar the concept of Barsoom as a living, inhabited, planet instead of the dry crusted ball of sterile dirt that it is, will accept blindly that gorillas would ver act the way that Tarzan’s great apes do. We all know that Burroughs’ great apes don’t really exist, but we also know that, if they did, they would look more manlike than any gorilla. Hollywood could come up with all those fantastic beasts in the Harry Potter movies, they could populate Avatar with strange animals and people, so why can’t they come up with a manlike anthropoid creature to be Kerchak’s tribe?
That was a very thoughtful article, which I very much appreciate.