Tomb Raider: A Lackluster Adaptation
A somewhat loose adaptation of the Tomb Raider video game, where Lara Croft makes her debut as an adventurer.
Several years have passed since British aristocrat and businessman Richard Croft (Dominic West) disappeared near Japan. The police have long ceased searching for him, and everyone considers Croft dead, but his daughter Lara (Alicia Vikander) refuses to accept this. Therefore, she does not accept a huge inheritance and lives on her own, earning a living as a bicycle courier. When the girl finally decides to sign the documents, she receives a puzzle from her father’s lawyer, inside which she discovers a key to a secret room in the Croft estate. There, Lara learns that her father was obsessed with legends about the first empress of Japan, who was supposedly a powerful shaman and mistress of life and death. According to ancient chronicles, the ruler was overthrown and buried alive on the uninhabited island of Yamatai off the coast of Japan. Croft Sr. disappeared when he found information about the empress’s tomb and went to look for it. After studying her father’s diaries, Lara uses her last money to go to Hong Kong to hire a ship and repeat Richard’s route. She dreams of finding her father alive or dead.
“The book was better!” is a common refrain among viewers discussing film adaptations of bestsellers. Conversely, video game adaptations are rarely judged this way, as they usually differ radically from the source material and do not allow for direct comparisons. However, the new video game blockbuster “Tomb Raider: Lara Croft” is created as a loose adaptation of the 2013 Tomb Raider game, which rethought and “rebooted” the epic known since 1996 and gave the world a long series of games and two films with Angelina Jolie. And since the Tomb Raider game is very cinematic, a comparison is possible in this case. And we can say with full confidence: “The game was better!” Much better. Even if you forget about the exciting gameplay and evaluate Tomb Raider only as a narrative.
The 2013 game offered gamers a rich, dynamic, and intriguing narrative about the formation of archaeologist Lara Croft as an action heroine and seeker of adventures and mystical artifacts. There were many surprises and plot twists in Lara’s story, the main one being that the novice researcher had to act as a “prince” and save her best friend from a sinister cult and ancient evil. This was a non-standard and very appropriate script decision, and it should have been preserved in the film adaptation at any cost. After all, this move appealed to both feminists and their ideological opponents (“Two beauties on the screen are better than one!”).
The teenage Lara was played by Emily Carey, a young British actress who previously portrayed the teenage Diana in Wonder Woman.
However, the creators of “Lara Croft” reasoned differently. They crossed Samantha out of the narrative, along with all the other minor characters in the game, and replaced the non-standard plot with a hackneyed cloning of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (understandably, with a father and daughter instead of a father and son). Why “hackneyed”? Because the sluggish duo of West and Vikander is two orders of magnitude weaker than the sparkling duo of Ford and Connery. At the same time, the imitation is quite obvious, up to almost exact copying of some phrases. The fiasco of the screenwriters and, to a much lesser extent, the actors, is all the more obvious. It’s hard to shine when there’s nothing to play.
True, there is still brilliance in the film. But not where you would like to see it. The most striking thing for Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, who made his Hollywood debut, was the opening London scenes, in which the reckless Lara rides a bicycle and competes with friends. When the film ends, you catch yourself thinking that it would be great to see a whole picture about Lara the courier, her friends, her rivals, and their way of life. Because such a movie would be more entertaining than what “Lara Croft” turns into when the title character, after a short stop in Hong Kong and a short voyage, ends up on Yamatai.
Don’t get me wrong - “Lara Croft” has shootouts and fights with the villains occupying the island, as well as the tomb raiding that Tomb Raider is most famous for. The authors of the film are well acquainted with the Lara Croft cycle, and they shot a number of spectacular scenes in the style of the 2013 game. But all this exudes not new energy, but a secondary attitude to previous similar films and a lack of lightness and inspiration.
Even the main villain of the film exudes not rabid malice, but the fatigue of a person who has been sitting on the island for a very long time and who only wants to find the tomb, transfer its contents to his bosses, and return home to his family. Such a character does not add drive to the picture, but does not evoke sympathy, since we are faced with a ruthless killer who cannot be sympathized with. So all attempts to give the villain a “psychological dimension” turn out to be meaningless. In the end, this is an ordinary movie villain without unusual talents, sophisticated plans, and impressive charisma, whom the heroes must defeat. That’s all.
At the same time, humor and vivacity leave the film along with the views of London, the puzzles inside the tomb turn out to be simple and few, the scope of the production is quite modest, there are no interesting fights, and the landscapes of Yamatai (in fact, South Africa) are no better than the landscapes of Crimea, which our directors have been constantly treating us to lately. The unraveling of the mystery of Empress Himiko is most disappointing, but this is already spoiler territory.
Daisy Ridley auditioned for the role of Lara Croft, but was unable to play it due to her busy schedule filming Star Wars.
Final Thoughts
What about Alicia Vikander as the “human” and emotionally developing Lara, as opposed to the static superheroic Croft played by Angelina Jolie? The Swedish star looks decent, but, frankly, she is not entirely convincing. Unlike Jolie, who did not give a single reason to doubt that Lara Croft was on the screen. Still, Vikander is too soft for an image that, even at the beginning of her adventures, should have been tougher.
Finally, we note that Daniel Wu played a Chinese sailor in the film, who appears as a dubious drunk in Hong Kong, and turns out to be a heroic Rambo on the island. The contrast is so striking that it seems as if at some point the script was read by a Chinese censor who said: “Our man must be ого-го, not a rag!” Or maybe Hollywood immediately adapts to Chinese tastes…
In general, we cannot call the picture a “complete failure”, since it more or less meets the basic requirements of the genre and offers some entertainment. But Uthaug’s film does not deserve a rating higher than “three”. And the problem here is not that the film is based on a video game, but that its creators simply lacked talent.