Tomb Raider

For the finale of “Video Game Adaptations Month,” I thought that I would review the three “Tomb Raider” movies. I’ve never played any of the games because I knew nothing about them when the movie was released. I just looked at them like decent action flicks that were really enjoyable to watch with Angelina Jolie in the starring role. I guess they casted her because she was the hottest thing at the time, and who can blame them? Let’s get it started with “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” released in 2001.

The movie raises silliness to an art form. Here is a movie so massively silly, yet so great to look at, that only a nitpicker could find mistakes.

Roger Ebert said in his review, “And please don't tell me it makes no sense. The last thing I want to see is a sensible movie about how the Illuminati will reunite the halves of the severed triangle in order to control time in the ruins of the ancient city that once rose in the meteor crater--if, and it's a big "if," the clue of the All-Seeing Eye inside the hidden clock can be used at the moment of planetary alignment that comes every 5,000 years, and if the Tomb Raiders are not destroyed by the many-armed Vishnu figure and the stone monkeys. The logic is exhausting enough even when it doesn't make sense.”

Ebert continued, “This is, at last, a real popcorn movie. I have been hearing for weeks from fans of "The Mummy Returns" and "Pearl Harbor," offended that I did not like those movies--no, not even as "popcorn movies." I responded that "The Mummy" was a good popcorn movie but "The Mummy Returns" was a bad popcorn movie. It is my job to know these things. That "Pearl Harbor" is even discussed in those terms is depressing.”

The story of “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” is here as a support system for four special effects scenes. From the start you can see that the movie is completely advanced. “The Mummy Returns” had no story, and one special effects scene, which was 121 minutes long.

The film starts with Lara Croft doing serious fighting with a deadly robot, which looks like it is paying tribute to the beginning of the Pink Panther movies where Clouseau took on Kato. When everything is done, we find out that she is Lady Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie), daughter of the tomb raider Sir Richard Croft (Jon Voight), whose memorial stone sadly tells everyone, “Lost in the Field, 1985.” Lara Croft lives in a giant country estate with a faithful butler (Chris Barrie) and a private hacker and weapons system designer (Noah Taylor). Detailed research-and-development and manufacturing buildings must be hiding somewhere, but we don’t see them.

Lara Croft is a hot girl with a great set of ears. Ebert said, “She hears a faint ticking under the stairs, demolishes the ancient paneling (with her bare hands, as I recall) and finds an old clock which conceals the All-Seeing Eye.” This is the Key to whatever it is the Illuminati plan to do with the lost city, etc., in their plan to control time, etc. Why they want to do this is never told. A letter from her father is found stuck in the binding of an old edition of William Blake. “I knew you would figure out my clues,” it says. This works out as well, since fate hangs in the balance while she plays his parlor games.

Ebert said, “We now visit "Venice, Italy," where the Illuminati gather, and then there is an expedition to the frozen northern land where the ancient city awaits in a Dead Zone inside the crater created by the meteor that brought the Key to Time here to Earth--I think.” Machines do not work in the Dead Zone, so Lara and the others have to use dogsleds. It is cold on the tundra, and everyone ears fur-lined parkas. Everyone but Lara, whose light gray designer cape flies behind her so that we can like the tight matching sweater she is wearing, which sticks tightly to areas on her body that can be found a foot below and a little to the front of her great ears.

The inside of the city is a massive feat in art direction, set design and special effects. Ebert said, “A giant clockwork model of the universe revolves slowly above a pool of water, and is protected by great stone figures that no doubt have official names, although I think of them as the Crumbly Creatures, because whenever you hit them with anything, they crumble. They're like the desert army in "The Mummy Returns" and the insect alien soldiers in "Starship Troopers"--they look fearsome, but they explode on contact, just like (come to think of it) targets in a video game.”

Angelina Jolie plays a great Lara Croft, however to say she does a good job playing the protagonist of a video game is perhaps not the highest compliment. She looks great, is flexible and athletic, doesn’t overplay, and takes with great seriousness a plot that would have lessened to a weaker woman to laughing. In real life she is a good actress. Lara Croft does not appear as a person with a personality, and the other actors are also nobodies, but the movie smartly confuses us with a plot so thick that we never think about their personalities at all.

Ebert admitted, “Did I enjoy the movie? Yes. Is it up there with the Indiana Jones pictures? No, although its art direction and set design are (especially in the tomb with all the dead roots hanging down like tendrils). Was I filled with suspense? No. Since I had no idea what was going to happen, should happen, shouldn't happen or what it meant if it did happen, I could hardly be expected to care. But did I grin with delight at the absurdity it all? You betcha.”

Not everybody could play Lara Croft. Not everybody would want to, but that’s another issue. Rich, humorless, awesomely capable, uncertain about romance, stacked, she appears in “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” released in 2003, as once again a heroine too busy saving the world to stress herself with tomb raiding. Actually, she isn’t really a raider here. The word suggests criminal activities, when maybe it is only meant to remind us of raiders of lost arks and those things.

In the first movie, you will remember, she fought the Illuminati in her journey to reunite the halves of a damaged triangle in order to control time. In the sequel, which with becoming humility is 10 letters shorter than “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” she goes up against a deadly race for control of Pandora’s Box, which brought life to earth but was closed before it could also release a plague that would kill us all. Ebert said, “Devout Darwinians will note that if the box was opened to admit life and then immediately closed on death, whoever or whatever came out of it must have evolved with startling speed into a box-closing organism.”

Lara Croft, the daughter of the archeologist Sir Richard Croft (“Lost in the Field, 1985”). Actually, since the title insists it has no comma, if grammar means anything she is Lady Lara Croft Tomb Raider. In the somewhat foggy chronology she describes early in the film, the original box arrived from space and was found by an Egyptian pharaoh in 2300 B.C. “in a place he called the Cradle of Life,” she explains to her colleagues, mentioning Pandora’s Box. “You mean the Greek myth?” she is asked. “That’s the Sunday school version,” she says. Only Lara Croft would go to a Sunday school that teaches Greek myth.

Some two centuries later, the box was found by Alexander the Great, who hid it in a temple, which was buried beneath the sea by an earthquake, its location revealed as the film starts by another earthquake. Lara is involved in a deadly race against Dr. Jonathan Reiss, played by Ciaran Hinds, for obtaining the box. Ebert said, “He wants it in order to wipe out humanity, except for the best and the brightest, of course, after which he will rule, I guess.” Lara chooses as her only friend Terry Sheridan, played by Gerard Butler, and they go on an adventure that will have them dead-sea diving, jumping from the tops of Shanghai skyscrapers, and fighting in Africa.

Ebert said, “I describe these details only because this kind of story amuses me, and always has, ever since those long-ago days when I curled up on the sofa with H. Rider Haggard's She .” Adventures involving the ancient, the occult and the exotic are really superior to those with modern cars and guns and cops. A perfect adventure should have at least one great private library somewhere in it and a butler, also ancient falling temples, things that shine real bright and cool costumes.

As we see, the location of the Cradle of Life is encoded on the outer surfaces of a shining sphere that Lara and Terry find in Alexander’s undersea temple, which mysteriously remains watertight until halfway through their visit, after which it leaks and ruins excellently. To escape back to land, Lara cuts her wrist so the blood will be smelled a shark, hits the shark in the nose to confuse it, and holds onto its fin as it swims for the surface. Now that’s a tomb raider.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown gradually more tedious and boring, “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life” uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of nice adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies. There’s a great use of giant neon signs in Shanghai, an escape by parasails, a secret lab hidden in a retail mall, a pole-vault to a helicopter, and a perfect scene where the villain, chasing of Lara, gets into an elevator and then a little brat gets on and pushes all of the buttons. Ebert admitted, “I've been waiting for years for that to happen.”

Ebert said, “Not everybody, I observed, could play Lara Croft.” Angelina Jolie can, with a straight face, a dry humor, a serious tenacity and a British accent, which adds a type of style to the activity. She’s all class, which is why she has friends everywhere, ready to fly parasails on top of skyscrapers, or allow her to parachute into the Land Rovers as they race across the African savanna. Kosa, played by Djimon Hounsou, is the Masai warrior who’s her sidekick in the African part. Also, Sheridan delivers one of the more sincere romantic lines in recent movies: “You can break my wrist – but I’m still gonna kiss you.” She is not, he will find out, very sentimental.

This is a better movie than the first one, more guaranteed, more entertaining. The director is Jan de Bont, who demands a type of logic from his screenwriters, so that despite the story is completely ridiculous; obviously, it is consistent within its own ways. Ebert said, “I was relieved to discover I am not tired of movies like this after all.” They have to be good, is the fact.

Now the 2018 “Tomb Raider” movie is based on the 2013 video game, with Alicia Vikander as the latest embodiment of a character who’s been around for 22 years, and surprisingly plays like a throwback to the classic late-80s/early 90s era of action filmmaking, represented by films like “Cliffhanger,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” the first couple of Indiana Jones films, and Jackie Chan’s “Armour of God” series. From the animated beginning, where the title character’s archeologist father, Lord Richard Croft, played by Dominic West, tells of an ancient, cursed tomb supposedly having the all-powerful, weaponizable remains of the Japanese shaman queen Himiko, through its nicely shot chases and emotional moments, to its finale scene on an island filled with booby-trapped ruins, “Tomb Raider” is better and more original than anyone could have expected.

Although it borrows from the game (and a little bit, its sequel) for structure and most of its main action scenes, the movie never feels like a pointless companion piece to a work that was created for a different style. Matt Zoller Seitz said in his review, “I've never played the game, but I had a great time watching the movie it inspired, thanks ]to the direction; the stunt choreography, which leans on real performers and props whenever it makes sense to; the emphasis on problem-solving one's way out of tight spots; and most of all, the actors, who flesh out archetypal characters who might have seemed cliched or merely flat on the page, and make them as real as they can, considering what sort of movie they're in.”

First among equals is Alicia Vikander. With her weakly royal behavior, she’s correctly cast as a woman, who’s literally to-the-manor-born, but the humility and sense of fair play she displays makes you like rather than resent that character. More importantly, she’s an action hero par excellence. Apparently bereft of body fat, Vikander throws herself into action. Seitz said, “She makes you feel the physicality of this intensely visceral performance, letting out a high-pitched grunt of rage or pain when Lara crashes into a wall or gets slammed on the ground by a brawny foe, and letting sparks of fury flash in her eyes as Lara delivers a coup-de-grace.”

The movie has given a lot of thought to the question of how a small woman could successfully fight enemies who are a lot bigger and stronger. The answers are persistent speed, the strategic use of full body weight, and dirty fighting. This is not to say that “Tomb Raider” is “realistic” in any sense, because no video game movie is – at one point, Lara pulls through after a pierce injury that would put a 250-pount Green Beret into a coma – but that the filmmakers and Vikander are doing everything they can to sell the physical and emotional reality of a moment.

As written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, there’s a strong element of domestic melodrama at the heart of the story: Lara’s father went missing and is said to be dead. The movie gradually tells the details of their relationship, balancing Lara’s admiration, even worship, of her father against the pain made by his frequent absences and final disappearance. This is the story of a daughter learning from, exceeding, and ending up forgiving her dad – an adventure that hits higher beats than you see in genre films starring male heroes whose fathers died, disappeared, or disappointed them (although the third Indiana Jones movie deals in these themes, as well).

Abandonment by the father and its aftermath are at the heart of every character’s story here. Lu Ren, played by Daniel Wu, the alcoholic sea captain who sails Lara to the island that contains Himiko’s tomb, is dealing with his own father problems: his same-named father once ran the boat, and ended up disappearing, too, which might explain why their relationship feels more sibling than romantic (they obviously respect each other, but there’s no love chemistry because the movie isn’t interested in finding any). The bad guy, archaeologist turned corporate mercenary Mathias Vogel, played by Walton Goggins, is himself an absentee husband and father. He’s spent seven years trying to locate Himiko’s tomb at the request of the mysterious Trinity organization, and resents the unseen master who’s keeping him on the island until he finishes the job.

Lara has empathy for others, and feels things deeply. Seitz said, “I liked how you could hear the catch in her voice or see tears almost well up in her eyes as she deals with moments that cause her distress.” These details confirm that “Tomb Raider” isn’t going to attach standard-issue, strong-silent tough guy clichés on a female lead and that will be the end. Seitz said, “There's more sensitivity and intelligence on display here than there needed to be, and while "Tomb Raider" doesn't go as far in this direction as I would've liked, the unmistakable effort means a lot.” Mainly hitting is the moment after Lara kills someone for the first time: she sits next to the corpse, looking psychically disturbed along with physically exhausted. The act of killing is shown in such a casual manner in so many action and adventure films that it’s shocking to see it treated as if it means something.

However, in the end, this is a movie about a woman running, running, running, running, then pausing just long enough to kill a man with a bow and arrow, defeat him in hand-to-hand combat, or solve a tumbler-styled puzzle that will open the stone door of a temple containing ancient treasures. “Tomb Raider” treats Vikander as a movie piece of sculpture, admiring her not in an objectifying way women have been treated, but as you might an athlete. Director Roar Uthaug often adopts the perspective of an especially kinetic videogame, filming Vikander from a low angle as she races toward the camera or from a high perspective looking at the back of her head and her shoulders, the better to appreciate Lara as she cuts a path through her world.

Seitz admitted, “There are at least five action sequences in this movie that rank with the best I've seen recently.” The first is a “fox hunt” on bicycles through the streets of London where Lara, who works as a messenger before accepting her destiny, leading a gang of her colleagues on a chase through winding streets filled with cars and trucks. Another is where Lara dives off a cliff into a raging river. She catches herself before going over a waterfall by hanging to a rusted-out, World War II-era bomber that’s shaking on its edge, and then slowly moves over and through the husk of the plane, trying to get to the riverbank before the whole thing crumbles. (A great Indiana Jones-style moment: as she hears the clasping groan and sees the plane falling to pieces, she mutters, “Really?”)

There are frustrations here and there, mainly having to do with the planning and some of the supporting characters, who are lively and memorable but often lack one or two scenes that would’ve made them seem as mythically bright as the material demands. (Seitz said, “Vogel's misery is fascinating at first, but ultimately becomes tedious, and I didn't like the way the film sidelined Ren during the final act.”) Still, this is a beautifully made and modest piece of action cinema, with a number of scenes that are as beautiful as they are exciting, and a female hero who’s as elegant as she is deadly: an action-packed Audrey Hepburn.

Hope everyone was able to sit through this long review, but like I said, I judged these as movies and not video game adaptations because I have no knowledge of the video games these movies are based on. If you don’t like them because they didn’t do the video games justice, I completely understand, but as simple action movies, I think they are fine, enjoyable flicks. The latest one is probably the best. Check them out and see for yourself.

Thank you for joining in on “Video Game Adaptation Month.” I know I reviewed a lot of stinkers, but now everyone knows about why I have mentioned a few times that video game adaptations seem to spell disaster almost all the time. Stay tuned next month to see what I will have in store for everyone.