Tomb Raider (2018)

April 7, 2018 4:44 PM

Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she finds herself on the island where her father disappeared.
posted by tobascodagama (3 comments total)

I saw this a few weeks ago so its not totally fresh in my mind. I found it pretty disappointing. The dialogue was pretty woeful. I didn't feel any of the relationships in the film were convincing and there was a lack of attention to detail throughout. Action scenes were underwhelming. It seemed like a waste of a lot of acting talent. Vikander is generally good but was weak here and it would be easy to make a case that she was miscast. Goggins was given so little to work with I don't know why they bothered. Its the first film for 3 of the 4 writers and God knows how they got picked up for this. It doesn't bode well for Captain Marvel, which has the same team.

There were a number of points that annoyed me at the time but the one that sticks with me is that they left Hong Kong for Japan and somehow managed to be heading straight for the setting sun on a wide open ocean.

When they machinegunned the escaping prisoners at the end I do hope they didn't get whoever was running the laundry because he had done some fantastic work keeping outfits clean and in good repair.
posted by biffa at 10:51 AM on April 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Personally, I expected to hate this, but I didn't. The action was sufficiently satisfying, and I thought most of the performances were pretty good. Vikander was maybe wasted on such slim material, but she sold me on the movie's version of the character pretty well regardless.

Having Lara's dad actually pop up on the fucking island very nearly killed the whole movie, though, especially that shoehorned-in thing where he decided to angst out for about five minutes of screen time because his daughter wanted to find some closure about her missing dad instead of burning all of his shit because of some cockamamie conspiracy theory involving supernatural artifacts.

I agree with a lot of the reviews I've read from gaming-adjacent sites, though: the game's narrative was already cinematic as fuck, and nearly all of the departures from it made the movie worse than it could have been. Like, who gets that plot synopsis and then thinks to themselves, "You know what this needs? The shitty dad subplot from the Angelina Jolie movie." I did kind of like Lu Ren, though, despite the fact that I would have preferred Jonah.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:25 AM on April 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

This was about as good as I expected, which was "meh". The Templar/illuminati crap made me groan out loud. It's so played out now. Was excited to see Walter Goggins, but his talents were wasted. The Himiko myth was fairly interesting, but never got to see a scene of her in action (like in Wonder Woman). I also feel they spent too much time in London. Tomb raid right away, goddamnit.
posted by Brocktoon at 1:12 PM on November 29, 2018