The Legend of Tarzan is an explicitly anti-imperialist movie. More than a century after the ape-man’s creation, screenwriters Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer and director David Yates (final four Harry Potter movies) have revived one of literature’s archetypal feral children for the 21st century, translating Edgar Rice Burroughs’s immortal character through the lens of more modern concerns around exploitation and injustice.

The $180 million, 109-minute eco-epic opens with a panoramic long shot of Africa. A subtitle delivers the backstory: In the 1880s, the world’s colonial powers are carving up the Congo. His Serene Majesty Léopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the (so-called) Independent or Free State of Congo, is clearly the heavy in the story. John Clayton III (Sweden-born Alexander Skarsgård, who portrayed the vampire Eric Northman in the HBO series True Blood), fifth earl of Greystoke and member of the House of Lords, is enjoying the good life at Britain’s posh Greystoke Manor with his American wife, Jane (Australia-born Margot Robbie, who costarred with Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot). But this is no ordinary aristocrat. Born in Africa, he was raised by apes after his parents died tragically in the forest, a story now commonly known as the legend of Tarzan.

Members of the British elite, including the prime minister (venerable English actor Jim Broadbent), and George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) urge Clayton to return to the Congo, where he hasn’t been for seven years. They suspect that King Léopold is enslaving the indigenous people there, including tribes that befriended Tarzan in his youth. The spunky Jane—daughter of an American teacher who, a flashback reveals later, first encountered Tarzan in the jungle in a classic Hollywood “cute meet”—insists she join her husband on the trip.

Capt. Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz as yet another demented villain with a sly sense of humor like the creepy Nazi in Inglourious Basterds) and the vicious Force Publique mercenaries (in a clear reference to Vietnam, they burn African huts down in order to “save” the village) are lying in wait for Tarzan. They hope his murder will enable the Belgians to mine the diamonds of Opar. (In 1916, Burroughs wrote Tarzan and the Diamonds of Opar. According to Variety, “The historical figure on whom Rom is based was notoriously cruel to African natives—it was he who inspired the character of Col. Kurtz in [Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella] Heart of Darkness.”)

Rom and his soldiers kidnap Jane—a blonde beauty who alternates between being a damsel in distress and a prototype of grrl power—and Clayton reverts to type, swinging on vines through the sylvan glade as he does battle with the imperialists and various CGI wild beasts, including an ape that had raised him. Although Tarzan, née Clayton, doesn’t return to loincloth (except, perhaps, in the end), he doffs his shirt and wears only a pair of calf-high breeches.

The film’s eco-message, although subtle, arrives toward the grand finale. The Force Publique and Belgian troops, at King Léopold’s order, occupy the port city of Boma to enslave the Congolese as diamond miners. Tarzan—who, Dr. Dolittle-like, can talk with the animals—gathers “a few of his friends” for a wildlife charge featuring wildebeests and lions galloping through the European encampment. As Jane says in the movie: “They speak of his power over the animals, because his spirit came from them, he understood them…” (Spoiler alert) Tarzan summons a scrum of crocodiles to finish Rom off. African tribes join with the progressive westerners—the English Tarzan, white American Jane, and black American Williams—to route the Belgian colonialists, where, historically, King Léopold’s minions are believed to have slaughtered millions of Congolese.

Among Congo’s onscreen indigenous leaders is Chief Mbonga (Benin-born actor Djimon Hounsou, costar of Steven Spielberg’s 1997 abolitionist movie Amistad), clad in leopard headgear, with leopard claws covering his fists. At first the vengeful warrior is hell-bent on aiding Rom in killing Tarzan, because the ape-man had, years earlier, slain his son. However, Mbonga turns against the Belgians and joins the anti-colonial revolt after Williams and Tarzan confront him about the realities of slavery—and the genocide of America’s native peoples, which Williams witnessed in the Indian Territory.

Since Elmo Lincoln starred in the 1918 silent movie Tarzan of the Apes, and many other thespians followed—including the Olympic swimmers Buster Crabbe (the future Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers) and, above all, Johnny Weissmuller—Hollywood’s most famous African character has been a white man. But casting Samuel L. Jackson as the historical figure George Washington Williams is an attempt to inflect this pattern. On July 18, 1890, the actual Williams, a free black who was born 1849 in Pennsylvania, wrote “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Léopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo,” an eloquent denunciation of colonial violence with which The Legend of Tarzan closes. Even so, some may feel that the movie’s Africans play second banana to the African American and his Caucasian comrades, Tarzan and Jane. Animal rights activists may also be divided: Although Tarzan loves and freely consorts with jungle creatures, the mixing of war with the wild requires its own critique.  

The Legend of Tarzan opens today.