Jungle movies are as much about westerners throwing off the trappings of their civilisation as putting them on to others. Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan and His Mate (1934). As a result of such casting limitations, Tarzan was transformed from the cultivated leader of Burroughs’s writings to a Neanderthal hunk, unburdened by reams of dialogue, challenging facial expressions or cumbersome garments. Acting skills are a bonus for the role a great physique is non-negotiable. When pondering Tarzan’s enduring screen popularity, the potential for depicting male beefcake cannot be discounted. They’ve always been more interested in getting bums on seats – and on screens, if possible. Jungle films have never really toed the ideological line of these colonial creation myths, however. Despite being digital, Tarzan’s simian buddies still manage to look like people in gorilla suits. No real animals seem to have been harmed – or even consulted – during the making of this movie. This rewriting of history takes some swallowing and the special effects don’t help. Never mind that Britain’s own white-supremacist hero Cecil Rhodes was slicing off a huge flank of Africa for the empire around this time, or that the groundwork for the real-life Belgian Congo was laid by our very own Henry Morton Stanley.
#Tv tropes the darkness ii free
Luckily, our decent, gentrified Lord Greystoke (played by Alexander Skarsgård) returns to free the enslaved nation from those nasty Belgians, aided by his tribal African buddies (who look up to him as their leader, of course) and a menagerie of CGI gorillas, lions, wildebeest and crocodiles.ĭjimon Hounsou as Chief Mbonga in The Legend of Tarzan. It is set in 1880s Congo, under the exploitative regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II. To its credit, The Legend of Tarzan confronts its colonial legacy head-on. It’s a narrative that plays out again and again in “white man in the jungle” stories, from Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Sam Worthington in Avatar.
The implicit message is: “Put a white man in the jungle and he will rise to the top.” In Edgar Rice Burroughs’s racist-stereotype-filled fiction, Tarzan is not just king of the beasts, his superior Anglo-Saxon genes make him smarter, stronger and nobler than any native African he encounters. He’s essentially a white-supremacist superhero. Especially Tarzan – the creakiest old colonial myth of all. That’s not the ideal message for a modern global blockbuster so, along with the special effects, these stories have needed updating.
Before that, we’ve got a Tom Hiddleston-led Kong: Skull Island, which promises to take us deep into the giant ape’s “treacherous, primordial” domain. Those fraught, dangerous location shoots with hours of laborious animal-wrangling are no longer necessary – you can do it all on a computer! And there’s more to come: Andy Serkis is developing his own “darker” motion-capture version of The Jungle Book. One suspects this has less to do with a newfound interest in the tropics and everything to do with the awesome possibilities of special effects. The Legend of Tarzan is the second time in a matter of months that Hollywood has taken us back to the jungle, after Disney’s reworking of The Jungle Book. It preys on the weak – but never the strong.” And now, thanks to modern film-making technology, you can consume the jungle back, without having to get your hands dirty, or bitten off. “It preys on the old, the sick, the wounded. “T he jungle consumes everything,” says a character in The Legend of Tarzan.
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