I see Hollywood is gearing up to make
another Tarzan movie. They
are on a Burroughs kick lately, aren't they? Since they've already got John Carter of Mars in the works. (Taylor Kitsch, guys? Really? Really? Look, I like the actor and all -- Riggins! Also Gambit, but I haven't seen Wolverine yet -- but that is
not John Carter of Mars.
Willem Dafoe, however, I can totally see as Tars Tarkas. They managed to get one of the few guys in Hollywood who can actually pass a green six-armed Martian warrior!)
Hollywood has been making Tarzan movies for almost eighty years now and they'e never quite nailed it. I don't think they've ever actually come all that close. (And you know what's funny about SciFiWire's remark about John Clayton speaking English with a French accent? It's canon. I think in the later books he probably spoke perfect English, but in
Tarzan of the Apes he learns French, then English (oh, d'Arnot!), and in fact remarks, "You will pardon me if I do not speak to you in English. I am just learning it, and while I understand it fairly well I speak it very poorly," and is in fact described as an "immaculate Frenchman.") I would not put a lot of money on the Hollywood producers trying to make the Tarzan books into movies actually having
read a lot of Tarzan or Burrroughs.
"It's mainly new stuff, because it's the kind of stuff that Edgar Rice Burroughs, I don't think, could have possibly imagined," Beattie said. "There's certainly nothing like it in the books, so I guess I can't really speak to what he was thinking when he wrote them, but it certainly raises it all up a notch to be like a big, fun summer movie."
Dude, have you read the books? Really? Really?
Stop adding new stuff. Take Tarzan back to its core, damn it; you don't have to add a whole bunch of flashy special effects, just get to the core of the fucking story. The young Lord Greystoke in the jungle! The fight with the gorilla! The fight with Kerchak! The arrival of Jane Porter, Professor Porter (both of whom are
American, I may add, whatever Disney tried to tell you), and William Clayton, Tarzan's cousin, the one who unknowingly usurped Tarzan's inheritance as Lord Greystoke! Hell, they could ignore the more outre parts of the series (La of Opar, Pal-ul-Don, the ant-men, the lost knights, and so on and so forth) and they could
probably even ignore some of the parts of the series that aren't as PC today as they were when the books are written, like the Waziri. (But oh, it would be cool to have Jad-bal-ja!) But dear God, don't add new stuff. You don't
have to add new stuff. I would
kill for them to make a trilogy of the first three books, because that would actually work out quite nicely; they only start getting
really weird after
The Son of Tarzan. (I actually like Korak/Jack Clayton more than I do Tarzan, but that's just me.)
At least it looks like they hired someone who can actually write; Stuart Beattie did
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and
Australia. That's something,. Granted, he looks completely misguided about how to approach Tarzan, but so was everyone else that's made Tarzan movies over the past eighty years. (Including, if I remember correctly, the guys in
Tarzan and the Lion Man, where there's a film crew wandering around in the jungles trying to make a Tarzan movie while the real Tarzan is trying to go about his business.)
I have pretty much given up hope on Hollywood ever producing a good Burroughs movie. (Although I would love to see them make a crack at Pellucidar. That was my favorite Burroughs series, then Tarzan, then Venus and Caspak. I think I might have read nearly everything Burroughs ever wrote before I was ten. I know. It explains a lot.)
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