Tomb Raider

There is a great moment about halfway through Tomb Raider.  The young heroine Lara Croft (played here wonderfully by Alicia Vikander) finds herself in a life or death situation when a villain jumps her, and is going to lead her to her potential end.  She must fight back, and she does, but she also ends up taking the villain's life.  What's great about this scene is what comes afterward.  We see Lara's horrified reaction to what she has done as she stares at the lifeless body before her.  It is not overplayed.  There is no screaming, and no dramatic music.  We are simply watching the dawn of realization spread over her face over what she has done.

This is fascinating for so many reasons, as it's something we so seldom see in action movies, and especially action movies based on video games, where killing your opponent is usually the key to survival.  Movies seldom slow down long enough to show the hero's reaction to taking another life.  This has special emphasis, as it's the first time Lara has ever killed a person.  Yes, this is somewhat of an origin story for the tomb raiding heroine, who has been one of the biggest stars in the video game world since hitting the scene back on the original Playstation in 1996.  Fans will no doubt remember the two earlier movies from the early 2000s that featured Angelina Jolie in the title role.  Those were relatively harmless and brainless blockbusters that played up the sex angle of Miss Croft, and featured a lot of over the top action.

This new Tomb Raider movie is a much darker and more somber affair.  It's more about survival, and it features Lara in her early 20s.  She's beautiful, but not confident.  She has no idea where she's going in her life, and is not the experienced adventurer that Jolie portrayed in the earlier two movies.  She is haunted by the disappearance and presumed death of her father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), who left her seven years ago for reasons unknown.  But now, Lara has uncovered information on where he might have gone.  In a hidden recording that Richard left behind for his daughter, he tells Lara that he had been leading a double life the whole time.  He was not just the wealthy businessman that Lara grew up knowing.  He also had a passion for uncovering ancient artifacts and uncovering lost civilizations.  His main goal was to uncover information about an ancient Queen of Japan who supposedly possessed supernatural powers that could kill with a single touch.  He thought he had finally discovered the location of the Queen's tomb where she was trapped and buried, and that is where he was headed when he disappeared.

Lara sets off for the island her father headed for so long ago with the aid of a fellow adventurer who has a connection to her father (Daniel Wu).  A massive storm at sea leaves them shipwrecked on the island, where they find an evil organization known as The Trinity is scouring the island for the exact same tomb that her father went missing looking for.  Lara is quickly captured by the group's leader, the charismatic Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), and when she eventually escapes, she must use survival skills for the first time.  This is when we get that great moment where Lara must take a life for the first time, and we see the impact it has on her.  We also see her in pain from her struggles to escape, and her barely clinging to life in one moment.  It made me stop and realize how seldom we get to see that in movies.  With recent films like Wonder Woman or the female soldiers of Wakanda in Black Panther, the heroines are seen as being strong, capable, and almost unbeatable.  Here, Lara is not just strong, but also vulnerable and quite close to breaking down.  Her determination that drives her to live and keep on fighting is not only admirable, but an interesting angle for an action film.

Had the movie continued in this direction, I would have been completely behind it.  Unfortunately, after we get a few moments of this, Tomb Raider all but drops this angle.  It stops developing Lara as a sympathetic character, and instead turns her into one of those heroes who is so skilled with a bow and arrow that she can take on an entire group of thugs armed to the teeth with automatic weapons without breaking a sweat.  She can also solve ancient riddles and traps that have baffled her fellow tomb raiders for centuries in a matter of seconds, just by glancing at the puzzle.  The traps that Lara must survive do seem to be like something out of one of the games (in one memorable sequence, she and some others are trapped in a room where the floor is slowly falling apart, and she has to solve a puzzle surrounding color-based stones to stop it), and given how quickly she solves them, it's like she's using cheat codes or an FAQ.

Here is a movie that simply starts out with a lot of potential, and then sells itself short just when it seems like it's about to go to some interesting places.  The early scenes with Lara uncovering the mystery behind her father's disappearance and her fight for survival led me to think that this would be the first movie based on a video game to get it right, and give us a sympathetic hero who was strong as well as emotionally invested.  But then the movie just kind of seems to lose interest in this idea, and starts to give us nothing but stunts.  And these are impressive stunts, made all the more so by the fact that Alicia Vikander pushed herself to the physical limit and performed them all herself.  Best of all, the movie never sexualizes or minimizes her abilities.  Not only is she impressive in how she bulked up for her role, but she also brings her strong talent to the film's more dramatic moments.

Unfortunately, Tomb Raider suffers from a common problem with video game adaptations, which is trying to squeeze the plot of a game that lasts around 10 hours or so into a two hour film structure.  The plot is a bit too straightforward, and aside from a rather weak twist, there are really no surprises.  It is Vikander who carries the film, and when the movie is allowing her to explore Croft's different sides, the movie works.  It stops working when she straps on her bow and arrow, and just starts using the villains as target practice.  The supporting characters also are not as interesting as they could have been, and seem to be victims of the plot's rushed structure.  We never know much about them, outside of basic motivations.  A good example would be Lara's main friend and sidekick on the adventure, whom we learn is an alcoholic and has a gambling problem, and then nothing else, as he's basically pushed into the background.  He always seems poised to be getting his own subplot at any moment, but the movie keeps on cutting away from him just when it seems like he will take focus for a while.

I have a feeling that fans of the video games will get behind this film, as it does absolutely no disservice to the franchise or its lead heroine.  Speaking as someone with little history of the games, I started out liking it quite a lot, but little by little, the movie lost me.  I was never bored or dismissive of what I was watching, but I could also sense the moment when the movie stopped working for me.  That being said, I would welcome seeing Vikander in the role again, provided the script gives her a full character to play, instead of half of one.

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