A few days ago the trailer for Warner Bros.’ new film, The Legend of Tarzan, dropped. As the original tale of Tarzan was written by none other than Edgar Rice Burroughs, it seemed oddly fitting that I should share it with you guys, considering I reviewed another of his more popular books last night.
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Geekritique
There is a secret to making Tarzan and it isn’t making him PC or updated or any of that codswallop.
Tarzan was comicbook BEFORE there were comicbooks. His jungle days are his origin story like Superman rocketing from Krypton or the Batman crime alley shooting.
Move past that and Tarzan is your basic superhumanly strong, almost more like Wolverine type smart predator, dignified and civilised in some ways but always longing to cast off such superficialities.
He is Conan combined with Batman to demean him by using lesser exemplars in comparison.
Tarzan visited the hollow world within the Earth, fought Mayans, relict populations of everything from biblical bad guys to medieval knights to ape-men and generally had a whale of a time.
Almost always modern producers turn the Tarzan story into this po-faced pseudo-historical garbage and that is the worst possile approach.
In Tarzan stories literally anything could happen, and did. It has far more in common with the first 75 issues of Fantastic Four in terms of content and style.
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I want to read some of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan.
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It’s strange stuff. Some of it is of its time, but then you get the most beautiful passages decrying the destruction of nature and the loss of the wild – very much like Robert E. Howard’s “barbarism is the natural state of mankind” stuff.
But it has to be read as pulp / comicbook- almost all the more recent attempts to “do” it have turned it into pseudo-historical pablum and that is, frankly, nuts.
Like trying to reconcile what we (think we) “know” about “real” Mars with Barsoom.
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I see Alexander Skarsgård -> I need to watch this in the movie theatre *nods*.
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Haha! He makes a good Tarzan!
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Definitely! :3
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At least this time they seem to be doing a better job at keeping it like the books… I hate how they’ve tried to in other movies make it seem like he never left the jungle and never became civilized… he was Lord Greystoke, an extremely wealthy man… how do they screw that up? But I just keeping hoping… it can’t be worst than the John Carter fiasco… serioulsy, did they even read the book? so sad…
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I haven’t seen the film yet – John Carter that is.
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Well they took things from the books like the characters and the fact that it was on Mars and then completely screwed over everything else… Like how honorable John Carter is… I mean do you remember his friend at the beginning of the book that he fought together in the war with? Oh they made him his enemy… and then they had him perfectly willing to leave Dejah Thoris to her fate with no intention of saving her… they seriously turned him into an a-hole that I wanted to punch in the face… which is sad because the graphics and all were pretty awesome… plus they totally screwed up for if they were ever planning on doing the Gods of Mars… so angry!
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Oh wow, that’s pretty messed up ahaha. I will probably skip the film in that case.
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I haven’t decided if I want to see this movie or not. The casting intrigues me, particularly Alexander Skarsgård, but I’m afraid that it’s going to be more the Disney Tarzan than the Burroughs Tarzan.
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Oh yeah, I have a hard time believing they’ll stick too closely to the book.
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