Sections of this film are so imaginative, and so lovely, that they deserve our open-heartedness, not our scorn Conceptually, at least, David Yates’ The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård as the fantastically brawny lord of the jungle, just can’t win. It’s adapted from a series of boys’ adventure books written in the early 1900s, when racial and social awareness wasn’t anything close to what it is today, and “colonialism” wasn’t yet a word that was always preceded by “the evils of.” The world is better off, now that we’ve learned—or at least are learning—to think and talk about these things. But what about Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ English and very white lord raised in the African jungle by apes, a man in tune with his body and with nature, but one who must also, eventually, adjust to the mores of civilization? The ape-man has lived for a very long time through Burroughs’ books, and through almost countless movie and TV adaptations, including the Johnny Weissmuller and ...