"He's Tarzan. You're Jane..." says Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained, Inglorious Bastards). That is Waltz's character- the Belgian captain Leon Rom. We can see from the trailer for The Legend of Tarzan who the "bad guy" of the movie will most likely be. This is what is known about The Legend of Tarzan from its trailer and its release date.
This Tarzan movie differs from other Tarzan movies in the past. It's not really a remake, but more of a sequel. The focus is not on the early life of Tarzan and his jungle days, though we do get flashbacks, of course. Instead, the movie is set ten years after he has left his King of the Jungle days, and he gets convinced to return to the Congo as an emissary of Parliament.
Tarzan is played by the swoon-worthy Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, The East). According to USA Today, the 6'4" actor went through four months of rigorous training to get into the shape that is Tarzan- getting up at 4:30 a.m., and Skarsgård added that,"I basically didn't see my family or my friends." He was chosen by the director of the film, David Yates (director of the last four Harry Potter movies) because of his distinct grace and physicality, and that, despite being born in Sweden and having a career in America, "he has this wonderful quality of not quite belonging to one or the other."
Skarsgård said of the film,"It's almost the opposite of the classic tale, where it's about taming the beast. This is about a man who's holding back, and slowly as you peel off the layers, he reverts back to a more animalistic state and lets that side of his personality out."
The Legend of Tarzan will be based on a historical event according to Yates. Belgium's King Leopold II, took the Congo as his own colony in the 1880s. He then created a mass genocide, killing millions.
Tarzan's wife, Jane (Margot Robbie), is not the demure damsel in distress that one may expect her to be from past portrayals (or maybe from the teaser trailer). Yates says,"[Jane is] in no way a passive partner to Tarzan. She's a really strong, assertive, beautifully knowledgeable, very sexy, modern woman who cans more than look after herself. In a way, it's a story of two human beings and how they save each other."
Stuart Craig, who worked with Yates in the Harry Potter movies, worked on the design of the Legend of Tarzan sets. He recreated jungle scenes of Africa from two hangars at an old English airplane factory. They became soundstages full of real trees, vegetation, running water and mountains. True elements photographed in Gabon were added with green screen and CGI to bring the audience back to Tarzan's former jungle home.
Also part of the cast, we will see Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator) as Chief Mbonga and Samuel L. Jackson who portrays the real-life person George Washington Williams. The Legend of Tarzan will be swinging to theaters July 1st 2016.
