Tarzan (2013)

Reinhard Klooss has taken Edgar Rice Burroughs' durable colonial fantasy and outfitted it with a villain who runs an energy conglomerate. William Clayton, chief executive of Greystoke Energies, sends a private army to seize a meteor because the meteor is worth money. The film does not complicate this arrangement. He is greedy, the jungle is good, and the collision between the two supplies the entire moral architecture. There is a conservation group, a closing vow to protect the forest, and a hero who screams at his animal friends to come and fight. The environmental sentiment is genuine enough, carried by action set pieces and a narrator who explains everything twice, but it never hardens into a sermon. The audience is trusted to notice that the corporation is bad.

Jane Porter has been granted slightly more than the role traditionally allows. She rescues a straying safari client from a cassowary, she draws a paycheck from a conservation outfit, she recoils visibly from Clayton's avarice. Then the plot remembers itself, and she is bound and left on a meteor, awaiting rescue. The agency is a garnish, not a meal.

Elsewhere the film is content to be a 2013 computer-animated adventure with motion capture, a 20 percent approval rating, and a narration track that will not stop. The African setting is populated by apes, a glowing rock, and white explorers. Nobody involved appears to have considered that a story set in Uganda might include Ugandans. The voice cast is uniformly pale. There are no queer characters, no body diversity, no neurodivergent figures, no reckoning with the racial history that clings to this particular property like humidity. That leaves a serviceable lesson about corporate greed, wrapped in a jungle drained of everything else it once held.