The supporting cast functions as a Greek chorus of industry archetypes. The director is an enthusiastic sadist with pockets full of past glories; the makeup artist is a philosopher who recites aphorisms about camouflage; the studio exec is a blandly bullish force whose decisions land like small earthquakes. They are caricatures but also symptoms. The screenplay lets them speak in shorthand so the camera can eavesdrop on quieter betrayals — a flinch when a joke lands too hard, a makeup artist’s lingering look at a bruise they cannot legally inquire about.
Formally, the movie plays games. It indulges in period pastiche — foggy film-stock, rudimentary optical effects — and then abruptly ruptures that nostalgia with jarring modernism: jump cuts that expose blank film leader, anachronistic pop songs bleeding under montage, and abrupt fourth-wall addresses that turn the actors into commentators. These techniques complicate the viewer’s complicity: are we laughing with them, at them, or because we are invited to look?
Where Tarzan X could have simply been a ragged satire, its ambition grows via tonal dissonance. Comic set pieces — flubbed lines, a slapstick chase of a trailing cable — bleed into moments of unnerving intimacy. A late-night scene finds the two leads sharing a cigarette beneath a humming light, trading stories about the roles they were born into. Instead of the expected eroticized tension, the scene is almost pastoral: confessions about fathers who preferred silence, a shared nostalgia for the smell of dry leaves. It’s here that the movie’s undercurrent surfaces: this is a film about performance as a trap and about tenderness as an act of rebellion.