Review of Tomb Raider (2018) by K Nife C — 25 Mar 2018

You know what you haven't heard enough about recently? That's right, identity politics, and I'll bet for movies in particular representation has hardly even come up. Well just leave it to me, a white, cis-hetero male to man-splain or, if you will, com-man-plain (?) about our cinematic paradigm and the shift that should be happening but isn't (even though it seems like it is). In the past year or two there have been a spate of films that have broken the mold for representation in Hollywood, and for all the avid audience members that cheer triumphantly at a particular casting decision or character trait, there is a white, cis-hetero man with tears welling up in his eyes for joy at the steady increase of his bank account. Ultimately, it's people like Kevin Feige who are on cloud nine when a movie like Black Panther dominates the box office, and people like Jim Whitaker who taste the pain when a movie like A Wrinkle in Time will most certainly fail.

Admittedly, it is a cynical viewpoint to consider only the financial results of a film and who benefits from it the most. After all, Ryan Coogler will have a massive budget on whatever his next film is if he doesn't get resigned to the Mediocre-Superhero-Cinema-Industrial-Complex. He will probably cast as many people of color as he can fit into the movie because he can and probably should. As proven by the Oscars this year, Hollywood is a diverse, splendorous world where all are freely invited to spend their money. They have always had a one-size fits all attitude about what a film can be about and who it's for. Up until a few years ago, the size that fit all consisted of diverse casting, but not too diverse because they didn't want to alienate the WmiddleHaged,ImiddleTclassE demographic who frequented theaters the most.

See, it's not just finances, it's marketing too. Since we've had a p(l)easant three decades of Reagan America's "War on the Poor", the dwindling middle class and the even more dwindling movie-going public have become the diverse melting-pot of ethnicities, races, genders, and sexual identities that we were told America is supposed to be all about. So it's no wonder that gender and race inclusive casting seems awesome in the cultural vacuum of the few people who actually still want to go to a theater and the film makers who need to make money off of them. However, it reeks of hollow lip service to pretentious assholes like moi. "Think of the children" one may retort, "finally, they have heroes to look up to that look like them." There's the problem: I don't like children - regardless of race, gender, and nationality. There are too many of them, the world owes them nothing, and they are annoying especially in a movie theater and most of the time on film.

This is at the heart of my argument, there's a massive problem with the glorification of nostalgia and childhood. It allows film makers to be even more lazy with themes, dialogue, plot logic, and character development than usual. Nothing more is expected past a certain intellectual threshold, and it is childish in every sense of the word. Wonder Woman is strong and cunning, and that's it. Black Panther is strong and cunning, and that's it. It's not a new thing. There have always been these stoic and simplistic archetypal leads filling an anthropomorphic hole in their respective films, but that was before CG sucked the soul out of everything surrounding the Person with No Name. A constant upping the ante of fantastical environments has led to a clinical and critical shortcoming of major productions. These worlds and characters are transient thrills to fill a progressive atrophy in imagination. They are hot-button trigger words to trick you into aligning with a blank canvas of a character for reasons almost completely external to the films they inhabit as opposed to experiencing a fantastical world through the open eyes of a timeless character. They've overspent their value as pre-nostalgic set-pieces for the sake of a quick buck and at the cost of your attention. It's another superficial "by the numbers" decision to maximize revenue.

It wouldn't be so bad if these characters had some insightful sense of depth. I'm not talking about an elaborate set of titles and fart-box MacGuffin swords they acquired on the magical Neptunian archipelago of Antarctica. I'm talking about real human emotion. I'm talking about strange and terrifying ethical conundrums that changed them as people, deep-seated regrets that haunt them at night, splendorous moments where they felt connected to something beyond love and thought - not fate and destiny and that one guy who died or that one guy who killed everybody that always seem to be the stand-ins for character motivation. Everything is spelled out unambiguously and simplistically because if an audience is left to ruminate about something too long, they will probably get out of their seats and trash the theater in a mass hissy fit like the children they are assumed to be. I feel bad for the races, genders, ethnicities, and orientations being represented in these movies because the audience they are meant to embody are being talked down to and sold short.

Lara Croft, the titular Tomb Raider, is a woman who is overly capable of a decathlon, but most importantly, she is a pre-existing IP that is easily capitalized upon amidst our socio-political disdain for patriarchy despite the fact that every motivation she has is in service to or as a reaction to her daddy (who loves her, as we are reminded through constant flashbacks). The plot is a mixture of the vastly superior Raiders of the Lost Ark and the similarly crappy The Mummy (2017). This pisses me off because Alicia Vikander is a great actress who should be in more movies, but here she is given a boring, sexless, ersatz-empowerment role in a film where her character might as well have been played by a blue chimpanzee, or worse, Tom Cruise. I'm sorry if what I'm about to say will irreparably crush your nine year old daughter's dreams of becoming the President of Earth, but this movie sucks.