Videogame Cinema: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

When I was growing up, Tomb Raider was one of the biggest names in gaming. It was one of the first blockbuster gaming series I remember seeing. I was only four years old when the first Tomb Raider came out, so I was way too young to be playing them. Yet I still remember seeing it everywhere back in the day. Even in advertisements.

I remember seeing that on TV for the first time and thinking, “wait, games can advertise stuff now?!” It blew my mind because I had never seen anything like it. It was the first time I felt like videogames were mainstream. In fact, Tomb Raider is one of the few videogame series that’s recognisable to people outside of gaming. It was that ubiquitous back then that even older people I knew who never picked up a controller knew what it was.

And it owes a large part of that success to its protagonist, Lara Croft. Lara is one of the most recognisable gaming icons of all time. Not that long ago the BAFTA’s held a poll for best gaming character, and Lara Croft took home the gold. She beat frigging Super Mario as best gaming icon. That is insane to me.

Granted that could be because it was a UK based poll and Lara was created by British company Core Design, but it can’t just be jingoism that gave her the win. Lara Croft is beloved worldwide and a lot of it is that she was one of the first major female leads in gaming. Not THE first mind you, but she was one of the first to be upfront with her gender.

Unlike Samus whose identity was hidden under power armour, Lara was upfront with who she was. Tomb Raider was one of the first gaming series to outwardly market itself as having a female lead. It didn’t try to hide it or sell itself as an action-adventure title that just so happened had a female lead, no it told you from the cover that it had a woman, she was a badass, and damn it you will love her.

Now, part of that was sex appeal. I mean that much was obvious. Lara Croft’s chest in the old games may give the Pyramids of Giza a run for their money in angularity, but it doesn’t change the fact that she was hot, and a lot of teenagers owned PlayStations so… you do the math.

But she was more than a pretty face. She was a complete badass who lived for the thrill of adventure. She was intelligent, tough, athletic, and had a dry wit about her. In short, she was cool as hell.

Combine that with solid gameplay that took advantage of the new 3D technology that was all the rage, and Tomb Raider in the 90’s was a huge hit. It shot both the studio and the main character into superstardom. Which did unfortunately lead to the downfall of the series, but that’s a story for another day.

Point is, Tomb Raider in the 90’s was bigger than Jesus. Which meant the vultures of Hollywood would inevitably come swooping down to pick on what they could. Thus, we got the 2001 filmic adaptation, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. You got to love how they put the character first in the title. They knew where all the money was coming from.

But since the lead was the big draw, who would play her. While there were several actresses lined up including Jennifer Love Hewit, Catherine Zeta Jones, Sandra Bullock and Elizabeth Hurley, the person that would bring Lara to life on film would be Angelina Jolie.

This was a controversial decision for a lot of fans. For one, she was American and Lara was British. Not sure why that was a big deal since actors pretend to be different nationalities all the time but whatever. But the second was that Jolie herself was a bit of a wild child. She was getting into all kinds of controversies back then. She wore a vial of Billy Bob Thorntons blood who she was also in a relationship with despite him being married, she was doing drugs and filming her drug deals, she was into sexual knife play? I have no clue what that is, and I really do not want to.

Point is, she was a bad girl and that didn’t sit right with people. However, that made her the perfect fit for the role. I mean Lara Croft was a thrill seeker. She did all the tomb raiding and action girl shit because it was fun. Add on to the fact that Jolie already fit the look, and it was perfect casting.

As far as the other crew, the writers were John Zinman and Patrick Masset. Both of which are predominately TV writers. Mainly writing a lot of drama stuff, not much in the way of action. Although they weren’t the only writers attached to this. Early drafts of the movie were done by Stephen De Souza who worked on Street Fighter, and Brent V. Friedman who co-wrote Mortal Kombat Annihilation. Jesus, there are protagonists of John Woo movies who didn’t dodge as many bullets as this.

The director was Simon West. A director that predominately works on action movies, with some of his other works being Con-Air, The Expendables 2 and The Mechanic. So at least he has credentials working on action movies. Although he also worked on music videos, including this.

I shit you not folks, the guy that directed the Tomb Raider movie directed the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. It has nothing to do with anything else in this review, but I couldn’t leave that out. It’s too funny not to bring up.

As far as behind the scenes stuff, there isn’t much. It looks like the production went smoothly compared to most videogame adaptations. Until you get to the editing phase. The original directors cut of the film was 130 minutes, but Paramount cut that down to 94 minutes. Meaning nearly 40 minutes of the movie was cut for the finished theatrical released.

I know this is common in Hollywood productions. Most studios want films at 90 minutes to get more screenings in theatres, but when you cut over half an hour out, that’s usually a bad sign. Also, they cut out an Angelina Jolie nude scene to get a PG-13 rating. Make of that what you will.

One of the weirdest aspects of this was that the film went through three different scores during postproduction. The original score was composed by Greg Hale Jones and Peter Afterman, with the main theme being done by Danny Elfman. However, during postproduction Simon West was taking off the movie, and the studio decided to replace that score with a new one by Michael Kamen. Only for that score to be rejected, forcing new composer Graeme Revell to compose 60 minutes’ worth of music in just ten days.

I have seen some weird production stories for this segment, but this is the first time I’ve seen the music being affected. I don’t even know why they did this. they already had a score ready to go, why waste money replacing it only to replace the replacement. Executives man, I’ll never understand them, but I will make fun of them maliciously.

The whole post-production ended up taking so long they didn’t even have time to finish it. Several effects wound up unfinished in the final cut. We are so back, it’s not a videogame movie unless something happens behind the scenes is it.

The movie released in 2001 and, surprise, surprise, it did not do well with critics. IGN even gave it a zero out of ten. IGN, the company that gives almost everything a six gave the Tomb Raider movie a flat zero. Yikes that’s harsh. Though they would later say in 2018 that it was one of the better videogame adaptations. Remember folks, you can’t spell ignoramus without IGN.

Although in IGN’s defence, I know, I’m ashamed of myself too, their later observation is the more commonly accepted one. It is seen as one of the better videogames to movie adaptations, though that probably says less about the film’s quality and more on how bad game adaptions are.

After seeing the movie that seems the more likely reason. Lara Croft Tomb Raider is far from the worst videogame movie, but it’s still painfully mediocre and not the film the legendary series deserves.

Then again, I’ve never actually played the games myself. I don’t know how accurate it is to the games in terms of story and tone. I know the movie doesn’t adapt any of the games directly. It’s an original story which is fine. One thing I do know about the games is it’s heavily inspired by pulp adventure series, and like those the games are largely episodic, self-contained adventures.

So, in that regard it is like the game, and it does have some of the elements from the games fans would expect. Raiding ancient tombs, visiting exotic locations, fighting evil clandestine organisations searching for ancient artefacts, Lara dual wielding pistols and being a badass, all that stuff is here. And from what I can gather, Lara Croft is characterised fairly close to how she is in the games. Being an adventurer purely for the thrill of it.

Granted my knowledge of the games is limited, but it doesn’t seem that inaccurate to the games. It’s at least more accurate than things like Street Fighter or the live action Mario movie. It does seem like a decent representation of the Tomb Raider games at the time.

Again though, I’m not familiar with the games. I’m sure there are fans of the game that can better itemise the inaccuracies to the source material. But I don’t need to be familiar with the games to know that this is not a very good movie.

The story has Lara looking for the pieces of an ancient triangle called the Triangle of Light that can apparently control time. But the Illuminati is also after the triangle so they can take over the world. If that sounds hackneyed and/or painfully generic, congratulations you have accurately predicted the experience of viewing this movie.

The story is wafer thin. It basically just boils down to a big McGuffin hunt which is what a lot of the stories in the games boil down to, but it works in the videogame because the plots in the games are just the excuse to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s simply there to provide context for the gameplay.

Movie’s need to have something else going on. And a big reason is because of Lara Croft herself. Don’t misunderstand me, I like Lara, she’s cool as shit, but there also isn’t all that much to her character. She’s just an adrenaline junkie who raids lost tombs for a laugh. There’s not a lot of substance to her.

None of that is Angelina Jolie’s fault. Honestly, she’s perfect in the role. She understands what the character is all about and does well in the action moments. Even the moments with her dad are alleviated thanks to her performance. Mind you it helps is played by Jon Voight, Jolie’s actual dad, so they have a lot of on-screen chemistry together.

The one downside to Jolie’s performance is her British accent. Sometimes it sounds fine, and other times it sounds faker than Madonna’s face. Still, it’s not the worst accent in the movie. That goes to future Bond actor Daniel Craig who has one of the most embarrassingly bad American accents I’ve ever seen. It’s worse than the accent he had in the Knives Out movies, which I think was intentionally bad as a send up to old detective movies.

I don’t even know why they made the character American to begin with. It’s not like his nationality is that important to the character. Why not just make him English? Or better yet just don’t have him at all because he is one of the most pointless characters I have ever seen.

Daniel Craig’s character, Alex, adds nothing to the movie. He’s supposed to be Lara’s love interest/rival, but their relationship isn’t developed beyond light flirting, and they don’t even end up together at the end. Alex doesn’t do anything. He helps the bad guys, but you could give that role to a random henchman, and it would work the same. The only thing he does add is being killed at the end to force Lara’s hand, but even that could be re-written slightly to not involve him. You could remove Alex entirely and lose nothing of value.

But back to Lara. She just doesn’t have much of a character arc. She begins the movie as an adrenaline junkie and ends as an adrenaline junkie only know she’s open to wearing nice dresses from time to time. I’m not kidding, that’s what her story boils down to.

Ok, that’s not entirely accurate. The main crux of her arc is getting over the death of her father. A fine enough character arc that does tie into the games. The problem is their relationship isn’t developed all that much. It’s just a typically loving father daughter relationship. And because the movie doesn’t dive into Lara’s backstory or motivations much, we don’t get a good idea of how her fathers death affected her.

They do try to add an interesting wrinkle by revealing the dad was a member of the illuminati, but it doesn’t go anywhere. The only thing it really adds is making the main villain more personal since he worked with Lara’s dad and later killed him. Except the last part doesn’t get revealed until the climax and he was already an insufferable prick she hated before so… yeah, it’s a detail that doesn’t add much.

Lara’s entire character arc ends up being a flat nothing burger. The story ends up feeling empty because there’s no emotional core to get invested in. But this is an adventure movie, you don’t always need a strong emotional character arc for those. So long as the adventure is interesting and fun then we should still be golden. I think you know where I’m going with this.

Another major issue with the story is that things just sort of happen in it. You know how in adventure movies the characters usually need to figure out a riddle or puzzle to find out where to go next. Well, this movie doesn’t do that. The characters either already know where to go next or just figure something out within a few seconds.

There’s no intrigue or mystery. Things just happen at the will of the plot. There’s an old lecture from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone about writing a story where they say that a story should flow because of the actions of the characters, and not just be a random series of events.

This movie doesn’t follow that rule. It does feel like a random series of events. Some things flow together logically; like Lara taking an ancient artefact to a friend to examine it because she found it under the stairs. That makes sense, but she only found it because of a weird psychic vision. Which just sort of happens. So even when things do flow naturally it still feels random because they don’t start from a logical beginning.

Then there are the moments that just don’t make a lot of sense. At one point Lara gets an old letter from her dad that contains a poem. The poem leads Lara to a book that contains a secret letter also from her dad that tells her about the history of the triangle.

So, Lara’s dad wrote a letter as a clue to lead her to another letter to tell her about the triangle. Why not just write it down in the first letter? What was the point of all that?! Maybe the idea was to cover his tracks because the Illuminati could have followed his communications, but if that’s the case then why bother with the letter at all.

I appreciate the movie trying to add a puzzle element to the proceedings, but the puzzles in adventure movies have to actually make some sense and have a reason to exist within the context of the world the movie creates. This one doesn’t. it’s one of those weird movie moments that makes less sense the more you try to figure it out.

I think you get the idea. The story is bad. Not completely awful or unsalvageable, but it’s thinner than an anorexic super model. Pointless distinction I know but still. There just isn’t much to the narrative to keep your interest for very long.

But I don’t think the movie was that focused on telling a compelling moving story. I think it just wanted to be an over-the-top action movie, and it is in the action where things do pick up. The action in this movie is a lot of fun. It’s ridiculous, it opens with Lara fighting a robot as a training exercise for God’s sake, but it is entertaining.

The action sequence in the mansion is the best part of the movie because it somehow incorporates bungie cords and motorcycles into it. Is it stupid? Oh, most definitely, but it’s the best kind of stupid. And let’s be honest the games are known for their ridiculous moments. The first game had a boss fight against a T-Rex for no reason, and that’s one of the tamer moments of the game.

The movie is at it’s best when it’s gloriously stupid. It has moments where things don’t make any sense, but they’re just so cool you don’t give a shit. Sadly, while the action sequences are fun there’s not that many of them. There’s only four in the entire movie, and two of them are front loaded in the first twenty minutes. It makes the entire middle part of the movie a bore because nothing really happens in it.

In other adventure movies like the Indiana Jones films, the original trilogy specifically, there’s also some lulls in the action, but they make up for that with a good mystery and puzzle solving aspects. Which this movie, as we went over, is lacking in.

For one the McGuffin is uninteresting. Its powers aren’t that defined, and they explain what it is too early so there isn’t much of a mystery surrounding it. That’s on top of it being a made-up load of bullshit.

One of the reasons the artefacts in the Indiana Jones movies were so interesting was they were based on real world objects. The Ark of the Covenant was something that could have existed at one point in history, the Shankara Stones are based on real life stones in Hinduism, and while the Holy Grail is largely fictional, it’s still based on a mythology that a lot of people know about.

But the artefact in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is just completely made up. There’s no real-world intrigue so it’s hard to get excited about it. Combine that with its powers being very vague in what exactly they do, and it makes the main crux of the movie boring. How do you make a time travelling triangle boring?

That’s the movie really. When it’s not being over the top stupid, it’s just dull. I already said the emotional core doesn’t work, but there’s also no tension in the movie either. The whole McGuffin hunt is timed around a celestial alignment of the planets. The only way to get the triangle pieces is by using a special key in certain temples when the planets are aligned just right.

This creates a time limit that should add tension to the movie, and it does, but only for the villains. Lara’s goal in the first half of the movie is just to get the triangle so the Illuminati can’t get it. She does eventually decide to use the triangle to save her father, but that’s after the halfway point and after she teams up with the main illuminati guy. Before then she’s very much against them.

And the funny thing is, if Lara hadn’t gone to the first temple after the bad guys, they never would have gotten the first triangle piece. It’s only her intervention that allows them to access it. if she had stayed at home and done nothing, they wouldn’t have found it, run out of time and then the movie would be over.

You know the dumb criticism that Indiana Jones’ presence in Raiders of the Lost Ark was meaningless since the Nazi’s would have died anyway, well Lara Croft Tomb Raider has the exact same problem. Except unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark where the criticism is complete nonsense and only exists because a bunch of snarky assholes don’t understand the movie, in Tomb Raider it’s one hundred and fifty percent accurate.

If Lara Croft hadn’t gotten involved in the plot, nothing would have happened. The villains would have failed, and the world would have kept spinning. Yes, Lara is a thrill seeker and her going after it makes sense for her character, but it doesn’t change the fact that the entire threat of the movie would have been undone simply by the hero doing absolutely nothing.

Look, most stories only happen because the characters get involved in the proceedings. The heroes journey only starts when the hero decides to go on a journey, but in most of those stories the hero being there helped. They were the only ones that could have done what needed to be done and so their presence was helpful in the grand scheme of things.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is the opposite. The writers have written a movie where the heroes’ presence is detrimental to the actual events of the movie. How, fucking how do you do that? How do you take a character as cool as Lara Croft and make her pointless to the story? I don’t know, but by God they found a way.

But to give the film some leeway, it’s obvious the editing did a lot of damage to the movie. Now I don’t know how much of what they cut would have helped the story. For all we know it could have just been some extra action scenes, but there are clearly plot points that are left unresolved by the end. Alex and Lara’s relationship never gets a conclusion, and there’s this weird ghost girl that follows Lara in two scenes that never gets explained.

There are also some very abrupt cuts in the movie especially near the end that indicates to a lot of behind-the-scenes bullshittery with the editing. There’s one cut near the very end that is so abrupt that it gave me whiplash. It’s very haphazard and proves to me that there were some vital scenes that ended up being cut all to get that 90-minute run time.

That’s on top of the editing itself being the most early 2000’s thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why but the early 2000’s was obsessed with obnoxious editing techniques. Slow Mo, strobe effects, fade in flashbacks, quick cuts, shaky cam, ok that last one is more a camera technique, but the principle is the same.

That kind of shit was all over movies back then, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider has all of it. It uses every weird editing technique in the book. It’s almost impressive how many cliché techniques from the time it uses. It makes the movie feel like a time capsule of the period. Even the music is a perfect embodiment of the early 2000’s. It’s not good, it’s very stock sounding, but I did get a nostalgic kick from it just for how 2001 it sounded. Plus, the composer only had ten days to make it. I can’t be too harsh on it.

I think it’s obvious that I didn’t like this movie, but I didn’t hate it. Truth be told it is one of the more enjoyable videogame movies I’ve seen. The action is few and far between, but when it does happen it is a lot of fun. There are some cool set pieces and while the CG isn’t great, they are at least creative with it. It’s shot well and there’s still cool moments and one liners outside of the action, it just doesn’t happen that often.

Also, the acting is surprisingly pretty good. Angelina Jolie is great as Lara Croft as I mentioned before, but the supporting actors do a great job too. Iain Glenn plays the main villain and while the character isn’t the most interesting, he delivers his lines with such smooth coolness that it does make him fun to watch. Jon Voight is great, but it’s Jon Voight so what did you expect, and Chris Barrie is always entertaining to watch.

Daniel Craig is the only performance that doesn’t work, and even that’s down to the accent. The actual performance is a lot more energetic and involved than I’m used to with him. If he scrapped the accent, he’d honestly be fine. So, while the script gives them very little to work with, at least the actors do a good job with what they have.

And I have to admit it is fun to watch as a product of the early 2000’s. It’s such a time capsule of that period that it makes for an interesting case study of what movies were like back then. In all the fun ways, and all the bad.

So, is it a good movie? No, but it’s not irredeemably awful either. There are things in it worth watching, but I can’t say it works as a whole. It just has too many things holding it back. If you’re a fan of the games then it might be worth checking out, especially since it seems very accurate to what the games were like back then. Otherwise, you can skip it.

Despite not doing well critically, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider did well at the box office. It even managed to spawn a sequel, and it would later see a reboot based on the most recent games as well as a Netflix anime. All of which got middling to negative reviews.

Suffice to say there’s a lot more Tomb Raider to go through on this segment, but I think I’ll save those for another day. There’s a lot more early videogame movies to get through. In fact, next time why don’t we go back a bit and talk about one of the earliest videogame movies ever made.