Actress Margot Robbie praised director David Yates for not shying away from darker themes of colonialism and exploitation in the new film The Legend of Tarzan.

The action-adventure is a reboot of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous tale, in which Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) is called back to the Congo to serve as a trade emissary for the British Parliament after years of living among English aristocracy as Lord Greystoke.

Back in the jungle, he is caught in a deadly plot masterminded by Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz) who is overseeing diamond mining in the area on Belgian King Leopold’s orders.

As she walked the red carpet in London’s Leicester Square for the film’s European premiere, Robbie, who plays Tarzan’s wife Jane, said she hoped audiences would investigate more into the bloody past of King Leopold’s founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State in 1885 after watching it. Djimon Hounsou, who stars as Chief Mbonga in the film, similarly praised Yates’s ability to “diplomatically and subtly address some of those issues of colonialism”.

Furthermore, Yates himself said that he wanted audiences to ask questions about a period of history he said was “washed away”. He said: “I like the contradiction of making a movie that’s out there for a big general audience to watch that also has a Trojan horse in the middle of it, a piece of politics that very few of us really know about.