Review of Tomb Raider (2018) by Nikolayg — 18 Mar 2018

It's impressive how well the original Tomb Raider movies, and this reboot, were cast. Angelina Jolie was spot on as the original Lara Croft with her swagger and larger than life charisma. Alicia Vikander is just as perfect a fit for the new 2013 rebooted Lara Croft. As in the rebooted game series, she's younger, less self assured, more human in scale, and ripped like no woman I've ever seen outside of a professional MMA fighting arena. Smartly the game reproduces some of the 2013 game set pieces. I've always thought it strange how movies based on games will just ignore many things that made the games popular. Tomb Raider doesn't make this mistake ... well ... it could have used more characters on Lara's side. In the game the boat was full of people who later ended up on the island with Lara. In the movie, the boat only has one other person, the captain.

So we get great visuals, good pacing, and a star who is as intense as Daniel Craig in Casino Royale and whose skin is always glinting with sweat and rippling with muscles like an atlas of human anatomy.

The downside to the movie is that the story is fairly standard and Lara doesn't have many friends to interact with. She basically has one sailor and later another character, and that's it. I said above it was smart for the movie to reproduce some of the games best set pieces. Well, the game put more people on Lara's side in the movie, and I wish the movie had followed suit. Also, if we are going to have a more realistic human scale Lara, we need a more realistic nuanced story.