Tarzan: Lord of the Apes Has a New Director!
Stephen Sommers is teaming with Warner Bros. to recreate a big-screen version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Collateral, screenwriter Stu Beattie will write the project with Sommers, according to trades.
Jerry Weintraub (Ocean’s Eleven) is producing through his Jerry Weintraub Prods. The Mummy and GI JOE: Rise of Cobra director will get his shot now that former directoral candidate attached to the project, Guillermo Del Toro, is committed to a four-year stint choreographing dwarves, elves and orcs in New Zealand for MGM-Warner Bros.’ Hobbit film.
The trades also mention that Beattie and Sommers do not plan to work from the original 1914 Burroughs platform or any previous film. An entirely new approach is in the works, though more details beyond that are being kept under wraps. Sommers is known more remaking old Hollywood classics as mentioned he revived the Mummy as well as the old monster movie type adventure film with Van Helsing. This will be his third re-make of an old adventure classic and if anybody can do it it is him as long as he doesn’t cast Brendan Fraser in the loin cloth, we should be OK, I mean do we really want George of the Jungle again? The bigger question here is look at King Kong? did that movie really do that well box-office wise? Is this new generation wanting a new Tarzan film?
What Do YOU think?
Oh lordy lordy lordy… SOMMERS IS MAKING A TARZAN MOVIE? Come on. This is about as a good idea as Sommers directing a GI JOE movie. What? He’s making a GI JOE MOVIE? Really? Well crap.
So we are stuck with this guy making a GI JOE movie and an over the top Tarzan movie. Things just keep getting better and better with this next decade.
Lord Greystroke, Tarzan of the Apes is Edgar Rice Burrough’s golden-boy exemplar of “natural selection” used by the author to model the arrogance and ignorance of 19th Century colonial imperialism. Burroughs, like his contemporary brethren Arthur Conan Doyle, was a staunch Darwinist, promoting the iconoclast of European white male superiority (a white man lording through the jungle) over the “darkies” of primitive Africa with unashamed abandon.
The 21st Century challenges for the Continent are, to say the least, multifaceted and multi-layered, involving both culture and ecology, the horrors of global neglect and apocalyptic famine, incurable diseases and genocidal wars—all this, while being subjected to the kinds of exploitation (blood diamonds, Draconian oil deals, Machiavellian retribution, etc.) that will skewer or sidetrack any conventional re-telling or traditional interpretation of the Tarzan motif as conceived by Burroughs.
Any attempt to produce a “great summer action movie” rated PG-13 will be an anathema in the current zeitgeist and an historical anachronism that by now belong not in the 19th Century—for that matter, not even inside the Matrix of a 1999 Disney cartoon. Except for the ignorant, Tarzan’s time has past.