Jungle Cruise takes ample liberties with the legend of Lope de Aguirre in particular, and with Reality as we know it in general (and, I assume, with the attraction on which it is based; how else to explain that a seven-minute ride turns into a two hour-plus movie?).
Aguirre had previously inspired Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Carlos Saura's El Dorado, searching in both for the mythical city from which the latter takes its title. In Jungle Cruise, the 16th century Spanish conquistador (Édgar Ramírez) is in search of the Tears of the Moon, a tree whose petals can cure any disease, heal any wound and lift any curse — including a kind of eternal youth, in light of which director Jaume Collet-Serra and screenwriters Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, and Michael Green should have used Ponce de León instead of Aguirre.
Now, the names Herzog and Saura will surely be foreign to a person who watches Jungle Cruise willingly, in which case this hypothetical viewer will be unaware that in the two films mentioned above, the characters sail real rivers in real jungles and interact with real animals.
In Jungle Cruise, Captain Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) fights a tiger so phony-looking that it could be a cereal mascot (definitely not what William Blake had in mind when he spoke of "fearsome symmetry" in "The Tyger"); this scene is awkwardly choreographed and has a predetermined outcome — not unlike what Johnson used to do in WWE, except that even in the ring he was facing another being of flesh and blood, not a tiger that, like all other animals in this film, belongs to the genus computatrum generatae.
Now, I’m fully aware that Aguirre, The Wrath of God, and El Dorado are dramas, while Jungle Cruise is, at least nominally, a comedy. However, I don't think this exempts it from achieving a modicum of realism; the saying 'it’s funny 'cause it’s true' is not a cliché for nothing.
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