Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A shipping disaster in the 19th Century has stranded a man and woman in the wilds of Africa. The lady is pregnant, and gives birth to a son in their tree house. Soon after, a family of apes stumble across the house and in the ensuing panic, both parents are killed. A female ape takes the tiny boy as a replacement for her own dead infant, and raises him as her son. Twenty years later, Captain Phillippe D'Arnot discovers the man who thinks he is an ape. Evidence in the tree house leads him to believe that he is the direct descendant of the Earl of Greystoke, and thus takes it upon himself to return the man to civilization.
Greystoke is a notably serious, literary adaptation of the Tarzan myth, distinguished by Hugh Hudson's restrained direction and John Alcott's lush cinematography capturing both African jungle and Scottish manor with equal grandeur. Christopher Lambert delivers a remarkably physical and emotionally raw performance, and Ralph Richardson's Earl of Greystoke provides one of cinema's most touching portrayals of an aging aristocrat. The film earns genuine praise for treating the source material with unusual dramatic weight rather than pulp adventure. However, the plot loses momentum significantly in its second half once Tarzan reaches England, becoming episodic and emotionally diffuse. The ending, following Ralph Richardson's death, feels abrupt and unsatisfying — Tarzan's return to Africa lacks proper dramatic payoff and reads as a tonal mismatch with the film's measured buildup. Novelty is moderate: while the serious approach to Tarzan was fresher in 1984, it still follows the familiar origin arc without truly reinventing it.