‘Legend Of Tarzan’ footage reaction; What we learned

Legend Of Tarzan footage reaction: David Yates brings footage of his big summer event movie to a special preview in London.

This morning, The Hollywood News and a number of other outlets, attended a special preview screening of some footage from the big Warner Bros. summer release, Legend Of Tarzan. Also in attendance were the film’s stars The Legend Of Tarzan footage was actually very, very good, and the WB may have a considerable hit on their hands. Here are some of our initial thoughts.

David Yates, Margot Robbie, Alexander Skarsgård and David Barron at a screening of The Legend Of Tarzan footage preview in London.

Warner Brothers brought director David Yates, stars Alexander Skarsgård and Margot Robbie, along with producer David Barron to The Legend Of Tarzan footage preview on Tuesday morning. That list of talent should tell you a lot about the kind of quality we’re looking at here. Yates directed the last four Harry Potter movies, and will take us back to the universe later this year with Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. Barron teamed with Yates on the Potter movies, and unites with him on this summer tent pole. Skarsgård plays the title character, a very lean version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legendary character, while Robbie plays the role of Jane Porter.

We were treated to six or seven key scenes from the film; around twenty minutes of footage in all. The fully edited scenes, complete with full score and CGI where relevant, were a mixture of action and character-driven scenes, a stand-out featuring Robbie’s Jane and a villanous Christoph Waltz is his typical menacing guise. Here’s what we learned from the footage, but be warned, there may be minor spoilers ahead.

David Yates and Margot Robbie at a screening of The Legend Of Tarzan footage preview in London.

• The effects are excellent. It was a very brave thing for Warner Brothers to show us footage of gorillas in their natural habitat, along with wild buffalos, lions and much more so close to the outstanding stuff seen in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, which was release just last week. David Yates revealed that everything in his ‘Tarzan’ world was shot on sound stages at Warner Bros’ facility just outside of Watford in north London. While the animals in the film are not motion captured, but animated, they are all very realistic and at least on a par with the stuff we saw in Disney’s Jungle Book.

• Skarsgård is built. The True Blood alumni looks every part the Tarzan that we’d expect, though is much leaner and indeed taller than previous incarnates. His Tarzan/ John doesn’t have a grunting, limited English-speaking Neanderthal (thankfully), but an eloquently spoken, mostly fully clothed version (in the footage that we saw anyway). Fear not though, as that shirt doesn’t stay on for long, and for what we expect to be the last reel, he’s mostly topless. Here’s what the actor had to say about playing the role, and how he personally discovered the character. “My Dad was, and is a massive Tarzan fan. When he was a kid back in Sweden in the 50s and 60s he would, every Saturday, go to the matinée and watch Johnny Weiss Miller on the big screen. Growing up, he would have these VHS cassettes that we would watch, so that was my introduction to the character, and how I fell in love with Tarzan and that world. It wasn’t that daunting [stepping into the role]. Tonally, it’s so different. It didn’t feel like I was taking over from someone who did this two years ago. So much time has passed, and I will never compete with Johnny Weiss Miller. I just wanted to just impress my father.”

More on our Legend Of Tarzan footage reaction below.

• Samuel L. Jackson is hilarious. This is another really strong performance from Jackson. His character George Washington Williams provided most of the comedic beats in the footage that we saw, and seems to have a very bromantic relationship with Tarzan. In one scene, Jackson’s character has to straddle Tarzan in order for them both to swing onto a steam train travelling at 40 miles per hour.

• Robbie’s Jane is unlike any other incarnation. Margot Robbie revealed that out of all of the characters that she’s played, this one is the one most like her. Jane seems to be a very strong female character; one that is largely away from her other half for the duration of the movie. The actress revealed to the journalists why she chose to play the character in the movie, one that has been played many times before, and whether she was worried about stepping into the iconic shoes of Jane. “The material, in the wrong hands, could have turned out cheesy. I wasn’t really worried about all of the previous performances, I was just worried that we’d make the film with the correct tone. I was like, ‘if they’re going to do it (Yates and producer Barron)’, I’m completely confident.“

Margot Robbie, Alexander Skarsgård and David Barron at a screening of The Legend Of Tarzan footage preview in London.

• This film is unlike any other version. David Yates described how the project came his way and how he felt when he read the script for the first time. “It made me smile. It had such a lot of lovely things going on; lots of different colours. All the scripts that I was being sent at that time just seemed to be one colour. This felt different and I just couldn’t resist it really. I was surprised by it.” Margot Robbie also shared her first thoughts. “It’s just epic, and in the middle of it there’s this romance. Everything about it was just rich and… big.” In the scenes that we saw, there are huge action sequences, perfectly teamed with smaller character driven ones, and the one that stands out is that aforementioned dinner scene between Robbie and Waltz. “I was with Christoph for most of the filming. He was so fantastic to work against because he never plays things the way you’d expect him to, and he’s very unpredictable.”

• Christoph Waltz appears to have landed another superb performance. One thing’s for sure, Christoph Waltz can play a bad guy really quite well, and following last year’s Spectre, and villanous roles in the likes of Inglourious Basterds, for which he won his first Oscar, Waltz seems to be on top form again here. We saw him in three of four different scenes, and he grabbed our attention in all of them.

• The film may be told in flashback – The first clip that were shown showed Tarzan as a baby, and then led on to where his father is killed in the jungle before the young child is taken by a pack of gorillas. However, as Skarsgård said during the talk, it’s not the first scene in the movie. “I opened the first page of the script and the first scene is of Tarzan, not as Tarzan but as John Clayton Greystoke drinking tea with the Prime Minister in a three-piece suit. He’s like the perfect Victorian gentleman. So we open the movie not in the jungle but with John and Jane in London. In a way his journey is almost the opposite of the origin story or most of the old movies where it’s about taming the beast. This is the man who’s already perfected that. He’s civilised himself and accumulated to life in Victorian London. He feels a responsibility to take over the Greystoke manor and be there with his lovely wife that he’s obviously very much in love with, but it’s not his home.” Interesting.Other bytes from the session suggest that it may not be told in non-linear form. It seems we see Tarzan and Jane as teenagers, roles that the two leads played, and then de-aged in post-production by effects house Lola. “There are flashback sequences in the movie with us as teenagers that we actually shot ourselves. It was quite interesting how [the filmmakers ] did it. We had two teenagers shoot the scenes and we would come in and do the same thing.”

• There may be more movies to come. We posted news about a potential Legend Of Tarzan sequel earlier on, but we’ll mention it here two. Right at the end of our talk, David Yates commented that there may be an idea for a sequel already, and so long as the audience connects with the film, a sequel, and more Tarzan movies could happen. “It’s a highly entertaining, and very moving two hours in the cinema which will take us to a place that you haven’t been to in a while, and one which we’d like to take you to again. If you come and watch it.” That comment stirred immediate interest in the audience. So, is a Legend Of Tarzan sequel already planned? “We have an outline, which we’re really excited about,” Yates said to the screening room, full of journalists from across Europe.

We hope you got something from our Legend Of Tarzan footage reaction.

The Legend Of Tarzan is released in the U.K. on 8th July, 2016, and the U.S. on July 1st, 2016. Watch the thrilling trailer here.