Your techniques should've been used sparingly to show the true nature of, well, nature. There didn't seem to be any method behind the madness. The extreme close-ups were interspersed between panning shots, action sequences, and flashbacks without any outward reasoning. Your up close and personal approach took its biggest hit during the editing process. He was a highly mismatched beauty to your beastly filming concept.īut we can’t blame Skarsgård for everything. He was less man raised by apes and more Abercrombie model with mud smeared on his face.īut he looks good without a shirt on, which is probably the only reason he got the job in the first place. It seems he was more concerned with flexing his abs than he was with being Tarzan. Given that he was cast to literally play the King of the Apes, it's a shame that Skarsgård couldn't emote any sort of fervour other than tight-lipped smouldering. Unfortunately, Alexander Skarsgård’s monotonous energy drained any level of excitement from the experience, even when he was parading as some strange jungle Batman, attacking people from the shadows and fighting off hordes of colonial military men in close quarters. Your too-close-for-comfort cinematography was meant to capture his feral nature clawing to get out. After spending so many years being civilized, Tarzan struggles to go back to the man he once was. It makes total sense why you chose to favour the extreme close-up. In order to get her back, he must ditch his pressed pantaloons and become, once again, the King of the Apes. Once he arrives at the Congo, Tarzan is ambushed by Rom and forced to watch his wife, Jane, be taken captive. He believes he is there to act as an ambassador for Britain when he is actually walking into a trap set by the villainous Leon Rom, who wants to establish slavery in order to mine precious diamonds. It follows Tarzan – now known as John Clayton or Lord Greystoke – as he hesitantly agrees to head back to the jungles of the Congo after years of living in London as a civilized gentleman.
The _Legend of Tarzan is actually an original story of sorts, grabbing inspiration from the ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The concept invited intimacy and could have been really impactful if used sparingly, instead it only highlighted The Legend of Tarzan’s shoddy editing and its humdrum lead, Alexander Skarsgård.Ĭontrary to what many attendees of Legend of Tarzan believed (judging by the amount of kids in the audience), the movie is not a sequel to the 1999 Disney animated classic. I see what you were going for here a high volume of tightly framed shots to urge the audience to tap into our dormant, primal selves, employing a womb-like closeness, hoping to showcase the animalistic savagery that hides deep inside all humans.