Lord Greystroke, Tarzan of the Apes is Edgar Rice Burrough's golden-boy exemplar of "natural selection" used by the author to model the arrogance and ignorance of 19th Century colonial imperialism. Burroughs, like his contemporary brethren Arthur Conan Doyle, was a staunch Darwinist, promoting the iconoclast of European white male superiority (a white man lording through the jungle) over the “darkies” of primitive Africa with unashamed abandon.
The 21st Century challenges for the Continent are, to say the least, multifaceted and multi-layered, involving both culture and ecology, the horrors of global neglect and apocalyptic famine, incurable diseases and genocidal wars—all this, while being subjected to the kinds of exploitation (blood diamonds, Draconian oil deals, Machiavellian retribution, etc.) that will skewer or sidetrack any conventional re-telling or traditional interpretation of the Tarzan motif as conceived by Burroughs.
Any attempt to produce a "great summer action movie" rated PG-13 will be an anathema in the current zeitgeist and an historical anachronism that by now belong not in the 19th Century—for that matter, not even inside the Matrix of a 1999 Disney cartoon. Except for the ignorant, Tarzan’s time has past.