Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes

5/4/2015

John, John, John of the jungle. Upon release mixed notices greeted this attempt to get to the crux of Edgar Rice Burroughs' jungle man creation, The Lord of the Apes, Tarzan. It's a bold movie in many ways, one of those occasions when a fondly thought of character from days of yore is given the serious make - over treatment. Which as film history tells us is often very tricky. Plot trajectory has a lost child of the British aristocracy reared by apes in the African jungle after his parents were shipwrecked there. Feral but wonderfully skilled with it, the child becomes a feral man of some substance, but when he is discovered by explorers he is taken to Britain and his ancestral home. Lord Greystoke becomes his title, but his loyalties, confusion and emotions continue to pull him in t