My Thoughts on Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider as a long lasting game, and film franchise, tells the tale of Lara Croft, a near indestructible and surrealistic female heroine that jumps incredibly far, scales enormous heights and is also deadly smart. While based on the 2013 game itself, it delivers in aesthetically pleasing shots and many throwbacks to the game itself with similar scenes and somewhat familiar characters.
Enter Tomb Raider 2018, unlike its predecessor films shows Lara is a more vulnerable light that we've never seen her in before. Though with much ground to work with considering a whole other game to consult, it comes off lacking as a simple adventure-esque film with nothing more behind it.
Spoilers ahead!
We are introduced to Lara Croft being beaten up in a boxing club and then "kicked out" for not being able to pay the membership with her only income is by delivering food on her bike. She soon gets in trouble with the law after bumping into a police car in a bike race which she had both bet and participated in. She is soon bailed out by Ana, her father's assistant of Croft, who tells her that her inheritance of her father's fortune will be disposed if she continued refusing to claim it since her father's disappearance. Guilt-ridden by the fact that she would lose the Croft Mansion which her father deeply cherished, she signs the paper and is given a Japanese puzzle which was in her father's will. She solves the puzzle which is a clue from her father which leads her to the tomb of Sir Richard Croft.
Inside the tomb is an office, she finds that her father had been secretly researching on a mythical being named Himiko, the queen of Yamatai who left a trail of death everywhere she went and was banished in a tomb on an island in the Devil's Sea. She also finds a pre-recorded tape of her father telling her that Trinity, an organisation who's sole aim is finding a way to dominate the world through supernatural weapons, is tracking him and that she must burn all of her research. Lara, however, decides not to but instead, pursue and discover what happened to her father after his disappearance. She pawns a gift that her father gave her when she was young and proceeds to Hong Kong to track down the captain who had sailed her father to said island but after encountering and retrieving back her stolen bag from bandits in an epic chase scene, finds the captain's son, Lu Ren, instead who Lara bribes to take her to the island.
The ship finds itself in a vicious storm and forced to abandon, Lara and Lu Ren escape to the lifeboat but Lara ends up falling into the sea and somehow makes it to the shore. She is then knocked unconscious and wakes up in a tent, being introduced to Mathias who is working for Trinity and used Richard's research which Lara had brought along, while she was unconscious. She is also told by Mathias that he had the pleasure to killing her father. She is then forced to to hard labor to uncover Himiko's Tomb along with numerous shipwrecked fishermen but meets up with Lu Ren who was subjected to the same fate. With the help of Lu Ren, Lara manages to escape to the forest and ends up jumping in the river leading to a waterfall, leaving Lu Ren behind. Lara grabs onto a wrecked aircraft and is forced to parachute down and she is stomach punctured by a large splinter. She collapses due to her injury and is awoken several hours later when being discovered by a guard whom she kills by drowning in the shallow mud.
She then follows a figure to shore who runs away by climbing a rope to a cave. Lara manages to climb the rock wall with her sheer force of will and finally meets the figure who turns out to be Richard Croft. Old and tattered, Richard convinces himself that Lara is just one of his numerous hallucinations that he has gotten used to but is still finally persuaded by a gesture Lara makes to him that he did years ago. Richard attends to Lara's wound and when being told by Lara that she failed to burn his research appeared deeply disappointed in her, while she protests that she loved him more than the world. Lara is unconvinced of Richard's theory that Himiko is a paranormal entity that dictates his life on the island and pursues Mathias. She meets up with Lu Ren and the rest of the fishermen agree to helping Lara obtain her father's research.
Richard then makes his way to the tomb only to be threatened to open it by Mathias his guards. He refuses and claims that he will never speak and Lara is left with a choice to sacrifice his father or to open the tomb of Himiko. Lara chooses the latter and the group proceed into the tomb, through the numerous booby traps and puzzles, they discover the coffin of Himiko and discover that Himiko's power was only being immune to a infectious virus that is transmitted via touch that disfigures a person rather morbidly and is turned basically into a zombie. Mathias extracts a finger from Himiko and escapes the tomb while Lara is left to pursue him with Richard who was infected stays. Richard sacrifices himself by blowing up the tomb and himself knowing that it was the end of the line for him and Lara overpowers Mathias, forcing him to eat the extracted finger and escapes narrowly while the tomb is collapsing. She is rescued by Lu Ren and the fishermen and they proceed to taker over a Trinity helicopter and finally return to mainland.
Lara returns back to London and official signs the papers to inherit her father's wealth and allows Ana to take the charge of her father for the company. She returns back to her father's office and discovers that Trinity had been hiding inside her father's company all along under a different name and that she had unknowingly gave Ana, who is suspected of working for Trinity, her father's position which had been her plan all along. Motivated by this, Lara then prepares to fight Trinity and buys a pair of Heckler & Koch USP Match.
As a comparison from game to film, the action scenes were magnificently played out and were practically a carbon-copy from the game. Which seeing on the big screen is definitely a plus. From the wrecked plane, crossing a tree bridge, parachuting down an island and even being perforated in the gut, those were fantastic callbacks to the game and I am all down for those. However I was quite saddened that they had twisted the story quite a bit. Himiko in the games was a power-hungry empress who had shamanistic control over the elements and survived through ritualistic sacrifices where the her soul was transferred into a body of another, acting as a vessel which she lived by. In the film however, she is turned into a host of a disease that sure would've caused an epidemic that would've wiped out the world but it basically just reduced her into a martyr to save the world which is basically a zombie origin story that never happened. Himiko was a goddamn sorcerer who commanded and army of legions of her dead and was a terrifying ordeal for game Lara to stop. The aftermath of this change led Mathias to feel like just a pawn for Trinity instead of a man who was devoted to the cause of bringing Himiko back.
If you are looking for action in this film, it definitely delivers, almost every scene delivers in the aspect of either storytelling, breathtaking scenery or hardcore fights. It's really satisfying to see the fight scenes play out and the definitely captured our "invincible" Lara as we know from the games in those scenes. It's very nostalgic to see how accurate Lara was portrayed as even her first kill was an emotional wreck for her as it was in the game.
Another thing I'd like to mention was that Richard was absent in the game, Roth, a mentor of Lara and close friend of Richard had raised Lara and the connection between them was the purest of forms that I could hold close to heart which made it heart-wrenching to watch Roth sacrifice himself. Instead we have bumbling old Richard who yeah did save her daughter but I didn't feel like I cared much for him as much as I did for Roth. Lara did have other people along with her but I'll digress from that. A fair argument I'd like to point out is that the game does have a longer playtime than the film's screen time but I doubt that the portrayal of Richard was good enough to be justified.
My opinions may be biased as I expected more of the film because of prior knowledge of the game itself but I can't help myself but be bothered by it. At one point in the film, when Mathias explicitly said that he had killed Lara's father and when Richard was still alive, I was convinced at that point that Richard was being used by Himiko as a vessel. When I think about it, he could've been referring to Lu Ren's father but I couldn't help but squeal at that point and sigh again about half an hour later. Ana was also a disappointment though she didn't appear in the actual game but came out in the future games.
I did like Alicia Vikander as Lara and my Hong Kong pride couldn't help but show when seeing Daniel Wu, it's just that I have too many problems with my expectations of the film itself due to it's notation that it was based on the game.
Overall I think it's still worth watching but if you do know the story behind Lara Croft, then maybe just expect a little less from the story and just simply enjoy the astounding scenes and shots of the movie and it's heartfelt acknowledgement to prior fans.