With the recent news that the Tomb Raider rights are up for grabs after MGM’s indecision following the addition of Alicia Vikander in 2018, let’s look back at where it all started for a live-action Lara Croft.
Based on the popular Playstation series of the same name (presumably “Lara Croft” in the title to actually distinguish it from the game and identify the star, as opposed to the confusingly titled recent Halloween and scream), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider hit theaters in mid-2001. As a big budget outing from Paramount, based on one of the most well-known gaming IPs out there, the film took itself seriously on paper.
Enabling up-and-coming actress Angelina Jolie as her polygon heroine alongside established actor (and Jolie’s father) Jon Voight, featuring Con Air‘s Simon West directs, Tomb Raider was setting itself up to be more than the flimsy joystick works of previous video game movie adaptations like Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros. that had preceded it.
Lara Croft was the star of Sony
Lara Croft opens into an unknown crypt and hangs upside down from a rope. A relic awaits her on the other side of the room. Immediately, Jolie becomes the character. With close-ups on both her thighs and the double-holstered guns, Jolie is so impossibly beautiful that she embodies the impractically shaped game character she portrays.
Ambushed, a mechanical spider creature heads for her before she can steal the relic for herself. They become entangled and the twin-wielding pistols blared as she blasts the monster to pieces. It feels like a statement from all the filmmakers involved: their Lara Croft is killing this outdated CGI creation with something now flesh and blood and fully realized.
Tomb RaiderThe storyline is as daring as its protagonist, bringing a universe-spanning tale of a preemptive alignment of the planets, and an Illuminati (yes, those guys again) plan to combine two halves of an ancient triangle when the solar eclipse occurs. to gain the power to control time. Honestly, it’s a lot of fun. While the first act is slow, usually with an exposition about the triangle and what the artifacts will do, it’s Tomb Raider‘s own determined grit and great action scenes that keep it so watchable.
Fortunately, this isn’t an origin story either. This script already knows how famous Lara Croft™ is around the world, so it doesn’t have to bore its viewers with the preamble and go straight into her current adventure. The movie is jumping around the world and you want to join Lara. And for good reason: the settings of the film are beautiful and the locations practical, with shooting taking place on sets such as Pinewood in England and on location in Cambodia and Iceland.
The action/adventure hybrid of Tomb Raider
After his main star, Tomb Raider‘s greatest strength is the decision to play straight. This is certainly a fun movie, but the characters don’t rob and wink at the camera. Video games’ inevitable Easter eggs aren’t the most important thing for diehard fans to point out at the cinema, but the film has enough self-awareness to have fun with its collectibles that seem straight out of the games. These characters believe this is life and death, and you agree.
With scenes like the robbery of Lara’s mansion in the middle of the night, stretching from her grand bungee jumping halls to their lab, and the garage scene with several expensive cars, these types of action sequences are second nature to the steady hand of west. Popping with an ecstasy-inspired dance soundtrack from the 90s and scripted by the writers of the great Face/Off, Lara Croft: Tomb RaiderThe softer moments really work with the action too.
A tomb where the statues awaken to defend against their human invaders stands out, even with its own “boss level” in a giant Shiva stone statue that feels at home and closer to the fantasy of the mummy than the knee-jerk, misplaced aliens from Crystal Skull.
Crossovers and real physicality in Tomb Raider
With such comparable global deployments and resource borrowing, it’s super easy to compare Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to every other Marvel outing we’re so used to right now. And frankly, this feels like a blueprint for what Marvel Studios has become so complacent with.
Looking back and seeing Jolie physically move in her incredible scenarios and interact with her world is so refreshing for a viewer watching 20 years later. In the final segment of the film, Lara jumps from planet to planet around a giant planetarium as dudes fall and get crushed under her, and the practicality of the set actually being there makes it all the more tense about the CGI magic show of the film. contemporary green screen.
Daniel Craig and other great British actors alongside Lara Croft
Elsewhere, the dialogue lingers in the 1990s. The comradely chat between the protagonist and her supporting cast feels forced and reminiscent of the bantery dialogue that Marvel movies have become infamous for. With some dialogue from a real who’s-who of British actors, including Chris Barrie (Rimmer from red dwarf) and Noah Taylor (Hitler in Preacher), it’s surprising how spurious the Englishness of the characters comes out here, with just one too many on the nose “Buggers!” and “Bloody Hells!” deflating scenes of otherwise wonderful action.
As an aside, it’s interesting to see a pre-007 Daniel Craig here as Lara’s competition. It’s cool to see Craig so brave and his body so sinewy before piling up for Bond. Maybe with this Tomb Raider and Cake with layers three years later, Barbara Broccoli and MGM would have seen both sides of the actor’s abilities (all the jumps and kicks in a popcorn movie, then key dialogue scenes in the low-budget English sector) as an audition tape for his first outing as Bond in Casino royale in 2006.
Robbing the cash register
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider did well at the box office in 2001, bringing in more than $274 million on the back of a $115 million budget and cementing Jolie as a star around the world. Lara returned for a sequel, Tomb Raider: The cradle of life, which was an unfortunately bland variation on a theme, this time unfocused in its jetsetting locations, a movie that waits for the last few scenes to get weird. With even worse critical response and pretty weak ticket revenue ($160 million on a nearly $100 million budget), Jolie said she was done playing the character.
In 2004 (one year later) Tomb Raider‘s sequel was released), Esquire would call her The Sexiest Woman Alive, something she might not have qualified for if she hadn’t seen her own action movie series with a kick-ass quasi-feminist angle. These two films would pit his heroine against all-male expectations, presenting her as the toughest and smartest character in the room (like Craig, future protagonist Gerard Butler in the sequel as the love interest), and it’s bizarre that they forget as such. In what is a lifetime for cinema, the series would reboot 14 years later in 2018 with a rock solid outing starring Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft.
The Last Boss of Tomb Raider
looking back at Tomb Raider now is akin to peeking through a magnifying glass at a very specific moment in time. Angelina Jolie was not a Hollywood A-lister at the time. After a string of critically rich returns in Gia and Girl, interrupted (where she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress), Jolie quickly emerged as an artistic and critical darling, and a video game movie could have been career suicide.
Instead, it gave her a chance to kick out the bad male crooks and be the only woman on screen and in every scene. Tomb RaiderLove it or not, catapulted her to mainstream status that she probably hasn’t achieved since. Like a relic in the sand crying out to be rediscovered, you can’t help but look back on her time as Lara and ask if the movie itself is really good, or if we were watching a stratospheric rise from one of Hollywood’s most revered stars that bring along an otherwise strong enough but unobtrusive action/adventure.
For now it’s Game Over for Lara Croft, but the rights will be picked up by someone soon enough. And with video game movies more popular than ever, and watching Tom Cruise return to previously dead franchises in Top Gun: Maverickwe’d be very interested in a legacy sequel if Jolie ever returned to the role…
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