Verdict:
To begin with, the CGI is a flow of vomit. When the movie started, it opened with a gorgeous African view and I thought to myself, “Well, even if it is not going to be good, it will at least be pretty”. Movies set in Africa automatically get free points just for being set in a country that is naturally beautiful and atmospheric. However, as the movie continued, almost everything except the actors was visibly computer-generated, including things that did not need to be computer-generated, like trees, or a train. There is a scene where a man is walking his pet crocodile. They do not show the man’s face, so it would have been easy to hire an animal trainer with a real crocodile but even this croc was fake.
CGI is always going to be an issue when you chose to make a film with animals as characters, but another film from around this time, The Jungle Book, at least made sure that everything looked as impeccable as the current level of technology allows. The same cannot be said for Tarzan, with its blurry steam train looking like it came out of an Xbox game. So much bad CGI pulls you right out of the movie.
Now moving onto the script, because the poor CGI does not break this movie, the terrible script does. The problems can be roughly divided in 3 parts: the slow first half, the poor exposition, and the poor dialogue.
The first half of this film has a pacing problem, as it takes its sweet time with setting up the return of Tarzan to the jungle, suffering under the weight of needing to connect the current events to the original story of Tarzan through countless flashbacks, which brings us to the exposition. There is so much of it, and it is so blunt. Every character’s motivation is spelled out, and everything that is not talked about, gets shown in flashbacks. Characters keep talking of action instead of taking it. On top of that, there is a scene towards the end in which a character does something that makes no sense within the scope of this story, which was a final nail in the coffin for this movie.
And none of the dialogue is particularly good, nor does it fit well with the action, so all that talking really doesn’t do the movie any favours. It’s like the director pulled these actors from their coffee break and just let them talk like they are in a random action movie set in modern times.
Perhaps, this film could have been saved with good acting. Honestly, I only watched this movie because the trailer promised Christoph Waltz, and his performance is fine, but there is a scene in which a Belgian officer played by Simon Russell Beale talks to the character of Christoph Waltz, and the performance given by Beale is considerably more captivating than that of Waltz. Christoph Waltz is supposed to be our main villain! Instead, he looked a bit bored with the whole ordeal. Alexander Skarsgård is fairly flat as the protagonist and I forgot that Margot Robbie was even in this movie.
While this movie is not a complete wreck, it is so painfully average, and in a world with so much other entertainment available, “average” might as well mean “pointless”. I am already forgetting it. Don’t waste your time.