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Tomb Raider 2018 reboots the movie franchise with Ex Machina‘s Alicia Vikander (above) as Lara Croft, and while the first trailer quickly tangled you up in a tomb called the The Mother of Death, a sea known as The Devil Sea, I begin to quickly get the idea of how plot-by-numbers it feels.
A second trailer has now been released today, but while it shows a lot more derring-do, as AV swings about like Lara, going from one stunt to the next, I hope it holds up as a movie experience, but based on what I’ve seen – and especially comparing them to Angelina Jolie’s movies, this new film looks quite mediocre and nothing we’ve not seen before.
Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) is an eccentric adventurer who vanished when she was scarcely a teen. For Lara, now a young woman of 21 without any real focus or purpose, she navigates the chaotic streets of trendy East London as a bike courier, barely making the rent, and takes college courses, rarely making it to class.
Determined to forge her own path, she refuses to take the reins of her father’s global empire just as staunchly as she rejects the idea that he’s truly gone. Advised to face the facts and move forward after seven years without him, even Lara can’t understand what drives her to finally solve the puzzle of his mysterious death. Going explicitly against his final wishes, she leaves everything she knows behind in search of her dad’s last-known destination: a fabled tomb on a mythical island that might be somewhere off the coast of Japan. But her mission will not be an easy one; just reaching the island will be extremely treacherous.
What gives it a chance, here, is that it’s based on the 2013 rebooted version of the game, when Lara was younger and had smaller breasts, so it’s more in tune with ‘da yoof’ and the game they’re used to. The original films, with Angelina Jolie, weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible, either. Certainly not a patch on the early games, even if the blocky graphics meant that Angelina was more well-rounded.
I can’t say Tomb Raider 2018 will be the best film of this year, but for my money when it comes to female action leads, it’s got to be better than 2017’s Wonder Woman.
Director: Roar Uthaug
Screenplay: Geneva Robertson-Dworet (based on the character created by Toby Gard)
Also stars: Walton Goggins, Hannah John-Kamen, Daniel Wu, Alexandre Willaume
Check out the new trailer below:
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.