If the story had directly lifted the flashback approach the games took, it would have been a lot easier to get invested in Lara.
It’s obvious they were trying to make Lara a more relatable character for a mass audience but I’m not sure anyone who came to see a high stakes action movie where planes hang off the edge of waterfalls, want to see the hero deliver takeaways. We see so much of Lara’s mundane life that it’s hard to get invested in the film early on, and it’s not until much later that we start to see her do more interesting activities. The film, however, decides to take around 30 minutes of its run time and dedicate it to Lara before she even discovers the fact she wants to be a tomb raider.
This is why, in the games, her origin story is left mostly to flashback cutscenes, which in themselves are sparse enough to never ruin the flow of the action. The rebooted games are fully aware that Lara’s time before she was a tomb raider is the least interesting part of her story. This is where we stumble across the first of many problems: the film’s structure. Both of the games it’s based on had great stories, but for some reason, despite being based on the same story, it doesn’t play out anywhere near as well as the games. The game takes most of its story from the 2013 reboot while sprinkling in snippets from the 2016 Rise of the Tomb Raider. From there, she sets out to continue his last bit of research and discover where her father disappeared to. But it’s not until she discovers her father’s underground lair that she realizes her true potential as a tomb raider.
We join Lara before she sets out to become the hero we know and love, at the start of the film she’s an amateur boxer and delivery driver who has a taste for the extreme. But it only took me a whole three minutes to realize that I was in for just another awful video game movie adaption. That meant that the writers had plenty of interesting new material to work with and the potential for this to be the first truly great video game movie was plausible. Both Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider were exceptional action-adventure games with fun stories that kept me captivated throughout. Since the 2013 reboot of the games, I fell in love with Lara’s new outings. So, going into Tomb Raider I was understandably skeptical about what we were going to get. Dwayne Johnson’s Doom is a lifeless slog that just relies on action clichés, Mark Wahlberg’s Max Payne, which was so poorly acted it was nominated for a Razzie, and the less said about the Resident Evil films the better. That’s understandable though, all you have to do is take a look back at other video game movies and you’ll see the problems. If someone hears that their favorite franchise is getting its moment on the big screen, it usually comes with a heavy dose of skepticism. Video game movies consistently get a bad reputation. This post was originally written by Dawson Roberts.