Tarzan is an
animated re-telling of the Edgar Rice-Burroughs story of a boy raised in the
jungle by apes, his adventures, and his eventual contact with other humans. The
initial trailer aroused a lot of scepticism from myself and others of my age
group, particularly as most of us have grown up with the 1999 Disney animation
of the same name very close to our hearts. This new interpretation of the story
is brought to us by E-One Entertainment and Constantin films, and features up-and-coming
star Kellan Lutz (Legend of Hercules)
as the voice of the eponymous ape-man.
The film begins in space (no, really) as we see a meteorite
crash on earth and wipe out the dinosaurs. Embedded in the rock is a rare
mineral that – much like ‘unobtanium’ in Avatar
– can be used as a power source. A pair of explorers brings their young son
with them as they investigate the meteorite. A helicopter crash leaves the boy
stranded in the forest, and before long he is discovered by a mother gorilla
who – having lost her own child – adopts him as her own and raises him amongst
the other gorillas, much to the disdain of an ‘evil’ silverback who is now the
head of the pack.
Tarzan is a
terrible film. Not funny bad, not even mediocre….just abominable. The one good
thing that can be said in its favour is that amongst the audience I was with,
one young boy whispered to his mother that the animation looked ‘amazing’, so I
can’t deny that the visual element is at least working for the target audience.
As far as everything else goes, it’s a real mess. The entire film is given a
cringe-inducing voice-over that makes the term ‘Captain Obvious’ seem
redundant, spelling out Tarzan’s inner emotions and the complexities of the
story in terms that are offensively simple. Children are not stupid; they do
not need everything that’s going on to be spelled out for them, that’s what the
visuals are there for.
Speaking of which, the gorillas are indistinguishable and
all blend into one endless mass of screaming, photo-realistic black-furred
chaos, the human characters (and I use the word ‘character’ in its loosest
possible sense) all look like cartoons, Professor Porter in particular looking
like a reject from the upcoming Postman
Pat movie. The key to the ’99 film’s success was that every character and
location had their own unique features, but the jungle in this film is a
mangled mess of vines that could all be set in the same square mile for all I
know.
The dialogue is primary school amateur dramatics level, Jane
(the supposed love interest) simply spouting various inflections of ‘Wow’ every
time Tarzan swings into view, the latter forgetting very now and then that
before he was lost in the jungle he could speak perfect English, then suddenly
speaking in full sentences for a bit then lapsing into simple ‘Jane no leave
Tarzan’ mode. To use the phrase ‘cartoon villain’ to describe Clayton would be
an insult to cartoons, his whole aura and motivations stolen – like the
meteorite element – from Avatar.
The plot is all over the place, the gorillas are dropped
twenty minutes in and not seen again until the end, set-pieces from the Disney
film are carelessly thrown around in the hopes of ‘paying homage’ but merely
come off as desperate, and the end battle could give James Cameron even more
reason to sue. The moment at which I abandoned all hope was when they brought
in Coldplay’s ‘Paradise’ to emphasize how beautiful the forest is as Tarzan
shows it to Jane. So that’s a film I love, a film I casually like, and a song I
really like all ruined within about 45 minutes.
There’s a popular mantra among film critics about films that
are over two hours long: ‘Your head goes with it, but your bum gives up’. Ten
minutes into Tarzan, (a 90-minute
film) my bum was screaming at me to leave and my head was about ready to
explode with exasperation, rage, embarrassment, and – above everything else –
depression. Leave this film well alone, and let it die a slow and painful
death.
0.5 Stars
