--Richard Croft, Tomb Raider
For all of its cliches, at least Tomb Raider is legitimately not a terrible video game movie! Despite being competently made in general (though not always spectacularly realized), it stands in large part thanks to the performance of Alicia Vikander.
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| Photo credit: junaidrao on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND |
Production Values
Alicia Vikander makes for a great Lara Croft--one that is just beginning to become an independent explorer, one that is affected by her first kill, one that learns by necessity. She takes damage over the course of the film, too. This Lara is not an invulnerable video game character transplanted into the movie! Thankfully, Alicia musters enough toughness and emotional sensitivity to allow her to navigate the narrative script in a fitting way. Dominic West (whom I recognized from 300 [1]), who plays Lara's father Richard, is effective in his role, even if his character isn't particularly developed. Likewise, the same is the case with Walton Goggins, who plays the villain Matthias Vogel. He isn't bad as an actor, his character is just simplistic and not fleshed out. At least Lara is developed somewhat.
Tomb Raider's visual effects are fine, just like the general acting. But the film structure is rather cliched, with Lara becoming entangled in a search for a seemingly supernatural power, competing against a ruthless antagonist who wants to find the same force that she is looking for--and, of course, there is a danger-laden final trip to a tomb/artifact that causes one or more deaths. Just so readers know, I have not yet played any of the reboot games that the movie is reportedly based on, so I do not know how its story compares to theirs. Although the story can be fairly cliche in its narrative, being a fairly predictable Uncharted/Indiana Jones tale (with one major difference that I address in the spoiler-filled story section below), the film is still well-executed.
Story
(Spoilers below!!)
Lara Croft, a young woman who refuses to live off of her missing father's large inheritance, receives a Japanese puzzle her father (Richard Croft) intended for her to have, solving it and producing a key, a key that enables her to discover a special room containing her father's work. Despite being the owner of a vast corporate regime, he had tried to thwart a shadow group called Trinity as it attempted to collect supernatural relics. In particular, Richard was fixated on a a reportedly violent, manipulative Japanese sorceress queen named Himiko, brought to an island by her own soldiers to end her tyranny.
After some research, Lara arrives at the island thought to be the burial place of Himiko, but she is quickly captured by a band of murderous Trinity employees who have enslaved stranded fisherman and bought passengers from abductors in order to assemble a workforce. To her surprise, Richard is still alive on the island, but a man named Matthias Vogel claims to have killed him.
The tomb of Himiko is eventually discovered, and Lara enters alongside Richard and Vogel. It turns out that Himiko was not a malicious woman forcefully brought to the island, but someone who voluntarily sacrificed herself to contain a lethal disease she was carrying. Richard is infected, dying in an explosion that Lara escapes. She returns home to sign a document that preserves her ownership of Richard's estate and property--only to realize that one of the Croft family business' subsidiaries is a front for Trinity operations.
Intellectual Content
Leading up the exploration of Himiko's tomb, Richard and Matthias cling to different fallacies, the former holding without confirmation that Himiko was a wielder of supernatural powers, and the latter dismissing the legends of her supernatural abilities as errors. When entering the tomb area, Richard calls a sudden gust of wind an act of her power, while Matthias insists it is just the subterranean atmosphere changing. Once Himiko's sarcophagus is located and its lid removed, her body soon springs to a sitting position. This is quickly realized to be the result of a mechanical process in the sarcophagus. Vindicated in the end, Matthias spoke without knowledge earlier in the film.
Richard assumed that Himiko was a sorceress because the oral and written legends said she was one, and Matthias assumed that there was nothing supernatural about her tomb area before he even saw that the corpse had sprung to a sitting position because of a mechanism below. Both of them, although holding perfectly opposed conclusions about the matter, merely assumed that they were right before having a chance to thoroughly assess the evidence! Himiko wasn't actually a tyrannical sorceress--or even a sorceress at all--but was a selfless woman who isolated herself on the island to quarantine herself and stop a disease she carried from spreading, something that may have killed a great deal of the human race otherwise. So, yes, Matthias was ultimately right, but he had no way of knowing without investigating the tomb and body himself.
If a person wants to be both correct and intentionally correct, they won't make assumptions like Richard or Matthias did. Neither could have proven from logic alone that the area was or was not haunted by the supernatural, so the only legitimate way to find out would be to examine the interior of the tomb itself. As Richard says, all myths have some foundation in reality; the only way for a claim to be totally deviant from reality is if it is not made, since all truth claims at least acknowledge the necessary existence of truth. Still, sometimes that basis in reality is very minimal.
Conclusion
Tomb Raider doesn't bring any groundbreaking new plot devices to the genre epitomized by Indiana Jones, but it does successfully manage to not be total shit, a common label of many movies based on video games (though I thought that the Silent Hill movie was actually rather competent). If you love the Tomb Raider franchise, enjoy the new video games the film is modeled after, or like the explorer genre, then you might appreciate Tomb Raider. But expectations of anything more than a formulaic but well-executed story with some fitting acting will lead to disappointment.
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| Photo credit: junaidrao on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND |
Content:
1. Violence: There are scenes of gunfighting and blows, but the wounds and deaths are not graphic.
2. Profanity: There is occasional use of profanity.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/movie-review-300.html
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