I’ve been playing video games for most of my life, and through most of those years I’ve primarily played on Nintendo consoles though I’ll dip into other consoles when the opportunity arises. In the early years this meant getting a Sega Game Gear and getting heavily into the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons and comics. After all, while I could just play the Super Mario games his cartoons were usually at the same time as the Disney Afternoon and my loyalties laid squarely with Scrooge McDuck and Darkwing Duck. In those days, I’d also eagerly page through issues of Nintendo Power and GamePro (and, later, Electronic Gaming Monthly) and try to imagine what the games they were describing might play like. I was young and would rarely get new games, and so whatever those magazines might give me in the way of articles and comics was all I would usually get.
In those magazines, around the same time as the rise of the Nintendo 64 and the fall of Sega, I started noticing a new participant in the console wars called the Sony PlayStation. Eventually, I’d start seeing them in stores and would play their demo discs, but it’d be a long time before I saw one in anyone’s house. And soon after, amidst the mentions of strange new characters like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, there came something altogether strange and new: Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider. Not only was she on this alien PlayStation but the images that’d usually accompany her were far different from those of Mario and Sonic since her developers had used all the polygons available to them to create what would become a cross-media sex symbol. There’d be official renders of Lara in slinky dresses, form-fitting outfits, and even bikinis. It was a lot to take in for a young man, and while I’ve yet to play a single Tomb Raider game for any meaningful length of time, I’ll always remember her rise to stardom.
In case you weren’t around for all that, Lara Croft is a British woman who raids tombs though I wonder if they can actually be called tombs if no one is buried in them. Unless she specifically chooses ruins which are also tombs? Usually, she seems to wear a pair of short shorts and a blue tank top, both fairly tight, but she probably changes outfits sometimes. The way she raids these tombs involves shooting at things and, possibly, using gadgets. That seems like a safe bet. The movie successfully adapts all of these things, which I was expecting since while I’ve never seen it it was cited as one of the more successful and faithful video game adaptions before the current renaissance. I may have never seen it were it not on the same three-pack as Annihilation and Arrival, perhaps because all three feature strong female leads? I fear this will remain a mystery to me.
As for the movie itself, Angelina Jolie portrays the titular Lara Croft and is the only female character of any note in the movie. While there are moments where they play up her sexuality, they aren’t as frequent as one might think but this is likely because it has a PG-13 rating and there’s only so much you can show in such a circumstance. She has to find two triangles to stop the Illuminati from doing something to time, something which is never really made clear but we can assume it’s bad. Two of the movie’s more memorable sequences also seem like they could have been pulled directly from a video game. The first involves Lara and the Illuminati agents (including a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig) fighting a horde of living monkey statues that culminates in a boss fight that requires the use of environmental hazards to overcome. The other has Lara doing a bunch of platforming to reach one of the two triangles. So it all seems accurate enough, and it moves at a fairly brisk pace and is generally entertaining. The question, then: is it a good movie?
No.
It’s not a bad movie, either. Jolie does a serviceable job carrying everything, but the whole experience is is remarkably like playing a video game but skipping past all the cut-scenes and only giving the instruction manual or strategy guide a cursory glance so you have a general idea of who everyone is and why everything is happening but ultimately you’re just watching Angelina Jolie do action movie things until she gets the power to control time which she uses to have a brief chat with her deceased father (whom everyone in the movie seems to know and have messages for Lara from) which results in her deciding that no one should be able to control time and so she just shoots the ultra-power artifact and destroys it with one bullet. There’s even a gratuitous boss fight at the end, all the more extraneous because the man she’s fighting has already been stabbed and there’s no reason for Lara not to just leave him lying there to bleed out and be crushed by the falling debris, because of course the place they’re fighting in is collapsing around them. All of it fails to come together in an organic way and one gets the sense that the movie was crafted with certain scenes in mind with little care given about how to get from one to the other. There are some other side characters (Lara’s butler, her tech guy, the bad guy’s assistant, various minions) and they’re all harmless enough.
I wouldn’t be against watching this movie again someday, and perhaps if I do I’ll decide to play the first few games to see how things match up with the movie and see if anything is the same beyond the protagonist and her profession. I’m willing to bet that there’s not, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong. Or maybe I should just try to see the sequel, if I ever see that in the Walmart cheap bin, which might be a better movie. Unfortunately, since this is the second movie I’ve reviewed, it is also the worst movie I’ve reviewed thus far. Our next review will finish off the weird three-pack with 2016’s Arrival.
QUICK BITS
MOVIE: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Cultural osmosis
OBTAINED: Walmart cheap bin
WATCHED BEFORE: Nope
WATCHED WITH: My girlfriend Jess
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Meh
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