Starring: Kellan Lutz, Spencer Locke, Trevor St. John
In the heart of the African jungle, John Greystoke (Mark Decklin) makes a discovery of a strange asteroid. Upon extracting a fragment from it, elemental forces cause the death of him and his wife (Jaime Ray Newman). Their son, J.J (Craig Garner, Lutz) is raised amongst the apes and adopts the name, Tarzan. Years later, Jane Porter (Locke) discovers Tarzan and the two work together to stop a greedy CEO (St, John) from finding the asteroid and destroying the habitat.
Tarzan is no stranger to the big screen. Going all the way back to the older films and serials, the most famous starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller as the loinclothed one, all the way up to the animated take on Tarzan in 1999. This time, German studio Constantin Film bring a 3D computer animated version of the story and update it with a science-fiction storyline thrown in for good measure. Oh, how they should never have bothered.
There's no great mystery or intellectual reason why Tarzan doesn't work. The problems are pretty blatant. First and foremost for a computer animated film, it is simply ugly. The characters' movements are stiff and awkward, their eyes often seem glassy and lacking any kind of emotion and the production values seem more in line with cut scenes from an old video game than a major movie studio production and the 3D is almost entirely without pointe except for the end of the film.
The writing is similarly poor. The dialogue is bland and on occasion delivered in a strange stilted fashion, and the narration (on top of being almost completely uneccesary at times) is far too abstract for a movie of this kind, giving off a strange dissonance. As for the plot, a modernisation of Tarzan could've been interesting, even if the jungle environment is more or less devoid of giving any historial context. Here, the Tarzan story compares clumsily with plot elements from Avatar (2009) and, in a strange move, Superman Returns (2006).
In short, Tarzan is probably not going to be very popular with audiences. A film that fails not only on an aesthetic level, but pretty much every other level as well. Hopefully someday, the film makers will prosper into something better, but this is sorely troubled and the effort put into promoting it is a complete mystery to me.
Tarzan gets a wide release in the UK on the 2nd of May. There is currently no release date for the US.
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