If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going
I think it’s fair to say video game movies are at a crossroads. Video game films have had a weird, long, unrewarding history despite coming from a medium that’s in its relative infancy. After making a big splash in the ‘90s with the likes of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter the genre was more or less banished to the realm of direct-to-DVD for the majority of the 2000s and even the early 2010s. Basically, we spent the decade in which games became a snowballing phenomenon slogging through flicks like Blood Rayne, DOOM, and Hit Man.
Lately, though, the video game film has come cautiously crawling back to the mainstream blockbuster scene, most pertinently with last years Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed films. Neither of those were a big successes stateside but the ongoing Hollywood scramble for viable IP and the growing global market seems to have translated to renewed interest in this moribund genre, with a new standard bearer emerging for this new age of video games and women-oriented genre flicks- Tomb Raider, now finally coronated with a shiny new trailer for next year’s film.
Cards on the table right at the start: I hate this trailer. I honestly can’t think of the last time a major film release trailer has seemed less appealing, maybe Suicide Squad. In that same spirit of openness, I should also probably say that I don’t really like the radical Lara Croft redesign of the new games that this adaptation seems to be working from.
I’m not going to pretend the original Lara Croft was some titan of feminist character design- she was a sex prop created by accident when the developers blundered into giving her massive breasts. However, I’ve never been really comfortable with the new games going so far in the opposite direction, there’s a real ugly undercurrent of making a woman character completely non-sexual is “fixing her,” like if she were sexual in any way it’d be inherently anti-feminist.
That’s not a huge problem for the film, though it does weigh a little on the new film’s biggest problem, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Let’s start with a plot breakdown- it’s just Arrow but with a woman. Seriously, based on everything in this trailer Tomb Raider is borrowing the same serious of uninspired story beats that have plagued superhero films since Batman Begins.
The absent child returns home to retake their father’s company/legacy and finish the work they started that no doubt killed him as it’s tied to a vague yet menacing cult/group who was also involved in taking over the company. It’s basically the same plot as Batman Begins, Iron Man, Green Hornet, Arrow, and Iron Fist only now there’s a woman in the lead role to spice things up. This whole beat felt tired in 2012 when Arrow did and it’s twice as tired 5 years later.
More than being a stale story, however, it’s kind of a bad fit for a character as mercurial as Lara Croft. Like a lot of older video game protagonists who’ve persisted Lara Croft has always wanted for a definable public identity. She has greater depth if you dig into the games or the comic book tie-ins but as far as who she is to the public at large that starts with guns and grave robbing and ends with sex appeal. Hitching this new Lara Croft’s identity so heavily to the same story as Iron Fist, Green Arrow, and Batman isn’t doing her any favors in terms of a personal identity.
What’s more, it kneecaps the whole feminist ideology behind cutting back on the character’s sex appeal. Instead of Lara as a personality-free sex prop, she’s become a complete disciple to her father, gaining all her skills and motivations from her relationship with a man. At least in the Angelina Jolie movies, Lara had a sense of personal agency in her sexiness, she was hot but also fully aware of the power that afforded her even if that was more due to Jolie’s performance than the writing.
This is part of the larger problem I alluded to earlier and the issue with draining the sex out of the Tomb Raider franchise- I don’t think it has an identity beyond sexy Indiana Jones. I’m honestly not sure what the appeal of this trailer is supposed to be aside from “you liked the video game so watch this,” which seems a shallow approach that confuses things that engaged while playing with things that will engage while watching.
It reminds me most of the trailers for the Amazing Spider-Man films or The Mummy, a cynical hodgepodge of transparent franchising clichés. It feels mechanical and empty in a way that I really don’t like as if it’s going through the motions of an action film without any of the passion or imagination. There’s just nothing about the trailer that suggests a thematic through line to the film or that it was made for reasons beyond needing a new franchise to make money every couple of years.
It also doesn’t help that Alicia Vikander doesn’t look terribly engaging as Lara Croft. Maybe she’s better in more complete scenes but this trailer presents her with a passivity I don’t think benefits the character. This seems at least a bit cribbed from the video game reboot where the focus was on Lara being forced to become The Tomb Raider and kill people to survive horrible violence, only without that last part.
I mean, she starts this film as globetrotting, ass-kicking badass so I don’t think there’s much room for her to grow through the horrible violence of it all. I at least like the cheeky ambition of focusing on Lara jumping around beyond platforms and over traps, that’s a pretty clever “video game as movie” thing, but it’s not like the equally clever first-person sequence of DOOM made it a better film.
All that having been said, I really do hope I’m wrong about Tomb Raider. I’d be a shame if this was just another corporate hack job to a franchise people love as well as a misfire for the shockingly hard to get right video game genre. I like women-driven stories and we need more of them and I think there’s a lot of potential in gaming for great adaptations- it’s just a shame that this one looks so bad at such an early stage.
More than anything else it looks tired and dated before it’s even come out. It’s like the kind of Tomb Raider they’d make in the mid-2000s, part Da Vinci Code and part Bourne Supremacy- a couple of franchises that, based on last year’s revival attempts, nobody wants any more of. Here’s hoping for better but not expecting much.
If you liked this article, please like us on
Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going 
No comments:
Post a Comment