Cinefantastique Online

Over at Examiner.com, Jason Roestel offers up an accurately categorized “Film Tirade,” titled Tarzan and the Isle of FUBAR. The source of Roestel’s justifiable anger is that, after years of hoping that Warner Brothers would craft a big-budget, faithful version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs source material, word is that the film will be directed by Stephen Sommers, the man who turned THE MUMMY into a RAIDERS clone and downgraded the classic Universal monsters to the level of a stupid videogame in VAN HELSING.

Hollywood has been stuck in the 50’s paradigm concerning Tarzan. The “Me Tarzan you Jane” days with the T-boy being a big/dumb gorilla swinging around with the rest of the big/dumb gorillas. Fans of Burroughs work remember that this guy ate his meat bloody and raw. That he was feared by every living thing in the jungle. That he fought in wars. That he was an English Lord and a savage all in the same skin. Tarzan’s mythos, his literary legend, his world, is every bit as big and as daring as Tolkien’s Middle Earth and we always seem to get the same re-heated left-overs from movies our grandparents grew up watching: Olympic swimmers in leopard underwear saving girls from Zulu warriors…. Sommers is just going to repeat all this, but with more doofy-looking CG, more cute quips from his leading man, (please let this film be the ultimate abomination and have Sommers cast Brendan Fraser as Tarzan….) and a plot right out of the Hollywood three-act playbook. It’s going to suck. 

Although I will say that some of the early Tarzan movies stand up well (even if they do not do justice to their source), otherwise it’s hard to find much to disagree with.