A simple glance at the promotional images of the respective films of Angelina Jolie (‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life’) and Alice Vikander (‘Tomb Raider’) playing Lara Croft, makes the differences between the two ways of approaching the same character very clear, and not only because 15 years have passed between one and the other. It just so happens that, in a sense, Vikander and Jolie are playing different lengths.
Lara Croft was born in 1996 from ‘Tomb Raider’, a video game developed by Core Design that became a success due to its intelligent and then very original combination of elements. Exploration of wild environments, hellish puzzles, jumping sections, platforming, balancing and skill, and finally some action. Lara Croft dazzled the players and became a completely transmedia pop icon required by U2 to appear at their concerts and to be on the cover of fashion magazines.
The game’s publisher began to publish sequels to the game at full speed, reaching a dozen in just over a decade, which began to suffer from their quality from the third installment. The franchise got back into shape when Crystal Dynamics took the reins from the 2006 installment, ‘Tomb Raider: Legend’, getting to take care of two more deliveries. In all cases, we are talking about the same Lara Croft, built from the original incarnation.
A Lara that, since her second installment she had seen how her curves were pronounced to cartoonish extremes and how it was adopting sex-symbol ways, certainly inconsistent in a survival adventure game. The two Angelina Jolie films, where the heroine shoots and rides a motorcycle, but also poses like a pin-up, changes outfits and is very conscious of her physical attractiveness, are inspired by this first Lara Croft.
In 2013 Crystal Dynamics brought about a total turnaround in the franchise, one that nevertheless allowed the saga to remain true to its roots. Lara Croft would lose her status as femme fatale of archeology and would become a very young explorer, brave and capable, but fragile like any human in hostile environments. The result was a (another) bombshell, which lost the stratospheric difficulty of the first games, narrated her first adventures and made Lara a completely accessible character.
Alicia Vikander’s adaptation drinks more from this new Lara (which saw its first sequel arrive in 2015) than from the classic. Very young, full of resources, but undoubtedly closer than Angelina Jolie’s Lara. We have reviewed the first two installments of the franchise and we have taken good note of what was wrong with them. These are the details that Hollywood needs to attend to if it wants the next ‘Tomb Raider’ to be more memorable than the previous ones now that the sequel to the Vikander reboot has been cancelled.
Beware of passing fads
We give Lara credit for being one of the first two-handed shooting heroines, inheriting all the flair from Chow Yun-fat in John Woo’s Hong Kong movies. But when those modes were translated into US cinema, becoming mainstream basically through ‘The Matrix’, imitations like the first Lara Croft movie (which Of course, he appears at one point in a full-length trench coat), successful in their day, have aged fatally.
The new ‘Tomb Raider’ should be attentive to the latest trends in action movies… not to imitate them. The aesthetic and theme of Lara Croft, archaeologist and classic adventurer, is quite timelessand nothing would do more damage to the survival of the franchise than fast-expiring aesthetic nods to ‘Fast & Furious’ or ‘The Hunger Games’.
Be careful not to abuse the special effects
Without a doubt the worst (by far) of the first two installments of ‘Tomb Raider’ are the digital special effects in those days when we simply were not ready for digital special effects. And while there are some very neat stone apes in the first installment (more consistent than most of the second installment’s effects), these Guardians of the Shadow from Angelina Jolie’s second film cry out to heaven.
‘Tomb Raider’, we never tire of repeating it, it must be dirty, it must be stuck to the rocks and sandstones to give that real feeling of exploration that the games transmitted so well, and that they have so successfully renewed the series in the last two installments. For this reason, the digital effects (and incidentally, the corkopán sets, like all the horrible caves in the climax of ‘The Cradle of Life’) must be reduced to a minimum. No matter how consistent they seem to us now.
Travel the world… but avoid the cities
In classic adventure movies we want to see trips through exotic places. From the days of James Bond and his successors in ‘Mission: Impossible’, we have become accustomed to the fact that in each epic there is exoticism, plane planes at dawn and a label of a country which you have never heard of. And here we are talking about archaeology: we want Asia, Africa, deep America, unexplored Europe…
The first movie of ‘Tomb Raider’ made the mistake of not starting to travel until well after half of the movie (and the first half hour is at Lara Croft’s house…she looks like a hermit!). The second correctly corrects this issue by sending Lara to several continents -sometimes somewhat arbitrarily, it is true-, but in the cities half the time is spent in buildings, caves… and night alleys that sing to the set. Let’s get some fresh air, Lara!
Moderation with mysticism
In all Lara Croft movies there have to be very slight supernatural elements, it goes with the nature of the game from the moment that ‘Tomb Raider’ is a exploit of Indiana Jones, and that touch is cultivated pulp of temples and ancient civilizations, with knowledge (and monsters) lost in the abyss of time.
Finding the right touch of fantastic and the inevitable mysticism that comes with it is a tricky balance: Angelina Jolie’s installments didn’t go particularly leaden, but grated on the final climaxes of both, without a doubt the worst of the two films.
No one says making Indiana Jones is an easy task: its balance between a very classic adventure and a philosophy of the fantastic very mainstream cinema of the eighties is unique. If Lara Croft wants to become, now, what she has always wanted to be since the nineties, she will have to find a way to combine adventure in exotic mudflats and jungles with a certain mystical / oriental touch so typical of the games in the series – including the last ones.
Dr. Jones is your patron
What was said: it is convenient not to lose sight of the referents, no matter how unattainable they may seem to us. The right balance between the epic and the ridiculous, the parodic and the reminiscence of the classics is what created the myth of Indiana Jones, and although ‘Tomb Raider’ may not see it as a total model, it is undeniable that Indiana changed the way to see adventure movies. A meticulous study of his successes, to start from them, would have come in handy for the Vikander version… since Jolie’s was following very different (and inferior) paths.
Big bug, walk or not walk
A T-Rex is the first thing Lara Croft encounters at the start of her first game.…and it still remains one of the franchise’s most memorable moments. Since then, the adventurer’s encounter with ridiculously huge bugs has been a constant in video games, including the latest, apparently more realistic ones. It also occurs in both Angelina Jolie movies, first with stone monkeys and second with ghostly shadows.
Alicia Vikander’s adaptation had before it an undoubted dilemma. A terrible bicharraco can force the spectator to a very big suspension of credulity, but it is still a hallmark of the franchise. From here we pray that in the next reboot a small godzillite appears at least… or it won’t be a complete Tomb Raider.
Warning: it’s a video game
Right now we are not going to get into the scrubbing of telling what makes a video game adaptation good, but As can be seen in the trailer for the latest version, Vikander’s Lara has taken good note of her references. Possible problem? These things are much more fun to do (or play) than to watch.
Without seeing the movie we could already bet that Vikander would give a few platform jumps, just as Jolie gave them in her two installments -sometimes in a slightly forced way, as in the climax of the first film-. They even managed to introduce plans of first person shootingso that the viewer could see himself “controlling” Lara Croft!
But there is another aspect of video games that is more complex to translate into non-interactive action. Video games are movement, dynamism. They tell things (the good ones) not with words or with texts on the screen, but based on action and interactivity. This is done very well by classic martial arts cinema, for example, but… can we trust that the next Lara Croft will unfold in such a subtle and complex narrative form?
Remember which was the best of the two Angelina Jolie
The answer is ‘The cradle of life’, less shy and nothing pending to please strict fans of video games, and therefore, more crazy and insane. It has severe deficiencies, it is a stiff film, at times arbitrary and its characters sway (some are as unnecessary as that of Gerard Butler) from one scenario to another without much sense. But he does possess a rather welcome sense of occasional wonder.
The reason is that Jan de Bont (‘Speed’, ‘Twister’) has a bit more verve and personality than simon west (as much as we love ‘Con Air’), and above all, much less shame. Those martial arts choreographies, those crazy things from ‘The Cradle of Life’ would have been inconceivable in the much more serious and stony first part.
Conclusion: you have to let the person in charge of directing Lara’s adventures inject his personality into the film. From this point of view, everything indicated that Roar Uthaug, director of the wonderful ‘The Wave’ (and more recently ‘Trol’), had everything to win, being without a doubt the director with the most marked personality of the three; however, he did not take advantage of this advantage.
We will have to wait for a fourth installment, or second reboot, that if you know where to look, has a lot to offer to the viewer eager for adventure. Hollywood, take note.
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