VGFlicks: Tomb Raider (2018) (Part 2)

Resuming where we left off in Part 1…

Reunions

Is there a doctor on the island? ...Well, there's a few, but
none of the kind she needs right now.

Even with her minor skills in MMA fighting, she's fighting a
trained soldier. Of course she'll have a rough time.

Let’s catch up quick: Lara is trapped on the Island of Yamatai, the bad guys have her dad’s research, she barely survived her escape, and now she’s lost in the woods. Oh, and did I mention she’s got a metal spike in her abdomen? Yeah. She’s had better days. Not knowing better, she pulls out the spike. That night, she’s attacked by the man sent by Mathias Vogel to capture her. As the film stresses out, this Lara Croft isn’t the badass we know from the games; or at least, she’s on her way there, but is still lacking in experience. So when she's attacked, at first her modest MMA skills aren’t enough. She barely survives by drowning the guy in a puddle. The encounter leaves her traumatized that she had to kill to survive… she’ll get over that soon enough.

Father and daughter, reunited. Hey, at least she
was right, he's not dead.

Running from the body, she sees someone else climbing up a rocky front. She gives chase and meets… her dad, who’s still alive. This is another departure from the source material; Richard Croft has been killed by Trinity before the events of the first game in the Tomb Raider reboot series. Not exactly a happy reunion, though; before she proves she IS there, he thinks she’s an illusion. Yeah, seven years of loneliness will do that to ya. They don’t really get to rejoice much, considering the situation. At least he patches up her wounds. He doesn’t stay happy long, though, once he learns that she found him thanks to his research, which is now in Vogel’s hands. While playing dead, Richard had been misleading the expedition so that it would never find the place – but now they will, and if they find Himiko’s tomb, they’ll harness her “powers” and weaponize them against the world (and they’ve found it, though its entrance is locked by an intricate puzzle). There’s a reason his recording had asked her to burn all his goddamn research.

Bow, arrow and effect of surprise versus machine gun and
distraction. Bow and arrow might win.

Richard has given up trying to escape, and this news only sinks his morale lower; Lara, meanwhile, still has some fighting spirit, so she steals her father’s bow and arrow. Those archery classes from when she was a teen will finally pay off! She runs back to camp and sneaks her way around, first trying to steal back the journal in hopes that Vogel can’t decipher the riddle of the tomb’s entrance, which fails. Plan B: She kills the guard watching over the slaves and gives them the guy’s machine gun so they can fight their oppressors. Oh, and Lu Ren is still alive, albeit with a bullet wound.

Emotional manipulation and threats! Always works.

In the ensuing shootout, the slaves kill many of the mercenaries but also suffer a few casualties. The battle halts when Lara sees her father approaching the tomb’s entrance. Vogel shows up, and when Richard refuses to help with opening the door, he’s almost shot, though Lara prevents that with her bow. When Vogel threatens Richard, Lara can’t bring herself to shoot her arrow and risk her father getting killed. Instead, she gives in and solves the puzzle of the door.

Raiding the tomb

Heh… this story was lacking any tomb-raiding so far, wasn’t it?

Dunno what's more dangerous: The tomb, or the armed
mercenaries following them in.

Not like they have any other choice, the Crofts have to help Vogel and a group of his armed men through the tomb. A lot of the following scenes show them walking down towards Himiko’s coffin, triggering traps and solving puzzles along the way. Every scene calls back to the Death Queen’s legend, like a “chasm of souls” they must cross using a long ladder or a trick room with a mechanism of falling floor tiles that they must stop by using the correct colored stones in a keyhole. All the hints to solving the puzzles are in the legend.

Falling floor and color statues.
Sounds about right for a video game throwback.

On the one hand, this is where we get the scenes we came for. On the other, this film’s various inspirations, Indiana Jones at the head, are really difficult to ignore. Several critics already pointed out the similarities between the traps in Himiko’s tomb and the trials faced by Indy in The Last Crusade, on top of the whole “finding the father they thought was dead” storyline. I’m a big proponent of judging films for their own merits, so although “too similar to Indiana Jones” is a valid critique to have, I’ll mention it but not stick to it. From my understanding, the trials of Himiko’s tomb were invented for the film and not part of the game. Some supporting characters join in and are necessary in the quest and help, whereas Lara faces these tombs alone when used by a player with a controller. It’s the difficulty of adaptation; changes have to be made, but how many?

If youre gonna raid tombs, expect mummified corpses.
Comes with the territory.

Within a pagoda deep inside the tomb, the expedition finds Himiko’s sarcophagus. Inside, they find a body that rots from the inside out once exposed. While the men prepare to carry the entire corpse away, Lara looks at the pictures on the walls around the resting place and notices something odd. They show that Himiko was a beloved ruler, not the monster of the legend. She figures out the truth: Himiko was the carrier of a deadly contagious disease she was herself immune to. She actually sacrificed herself, put into a tomb hidden so as to be impossible to find, so that the disease may never spread.

This is in complete contrast with the game, where Himiko was indeed a supernatural being. She could control the weather, hence the unending storm around the island; did have a “touch of death”, a superpower rather than a disease; oh, and she’s an actual antagonist who survives across millennia by taking over the bodies of others. I appreciate that the film took a different approach; and to bring back the Indiana Jones comparison, having a cause that isn’t supernatural is a decent departure from classics of the genre. That said…

Time to play: Magic or mundane?

Out of the way ebola, there's a new disease out there
and it's even worse than you!

One man from the expedition touches the corpse and the blood in his hand, then forearm, goes necrotic. Really fast, to the point it starts rotting mere seconds later. “Touch of death”? Sure is. Back to what I was saying about there being no supernatural… well, I’m not so sure. No disease spreads that quickly, especially not from physical contact; even the worst diseases that spread through contact take 12 hours before they start showing signs. Ingestion would be quicker, sure, but still not that fast. What’s more, the diseases and viruses that were discovered in corpses this old were degraded to the point of being ineffective. Realistically, the corpse should be harmless. But the facts that the disease is still active, and spreads that fast, means that there may be, in fact, something supernatural at play here.

Zombies? Aw, Hell no! We're sick of those! Besides, after
we've had The Last of Us and its Infected, no other
zombie story has measured up!

I like that it’s kept ambiguous whether it’s supernatural, and there's an argument to be made either way. My argument for “it’s supernatural”: When the illness reaches the brain, it rots it as well, and the diseased, just before and also shortly after death, will go insane and attack everything around. Borderline zombie apocalypse shit.

"I'm done for. Farewell, go save the world!"

Despite seeing one of his men go through this, Vogel, desperate, carries on regardless, picking a finger off the corpse with pliers, securing it in a plastic bag. The Crofts attack by surprise, but the move is halted when the infected guard, dismissed as dead, rises and also attacks. See? Zombies! Richard fights the guy and kills him again, but gets infected in the process. Vogel has time to flee, and Lara, who meanwhile dealt with another guard on her own, has to chase him down. She can’t even hug her father one last time; he’ll stay behind and blow up the tomb, so that it endangers no one else.

Apparently, in this film, Lara's lesser talent in hand-to-hand
combat means she loses every single physical fight.
Come on, this is Lara Croft! She can do so much better!

Lara pursues Vogel and confronts him by the chasm of souls. They fight; owing to her imperfect hand-to-hand combat skills, she almost loses, but takes the upper hand again when Vogel gets distracted by the explosion triggered by Richard. In that moment, Lara retrieves the plastic bag and forces the mummified finger down the guy’s throat. I feel like puking just thinking of that scene, it’s so disgusting. She kicks Vogel down into the chasm, then barely manages to cross it with a leap of faith and some amazing luck. The tomb collapses around her before she gets to the top, using the rope; thankfully, Lu Ren and the other slaves of the expedition free her from the rubble.

In the nick of time!

Sure, she owns everything now... but she'll find out quickly
that giving the company away was a bad idea.

Lara, Lu Ren and the prisoners hijack the helicopter sent by Trinity. Back home, Lara, with Ana by her side, finally signs the papers declaring Richard Croft dead, giving her access to her multi-million (if not BILLION)-dollar inheritance, Croft Manor, ownership of all the companies owned by Croft Holdings, the whole shebang. Rich and now a proper hero, she’s almost the Lara Croft we know… she’s still missing something. Shuffling through the big book of properties while Ana leaves, Lara sees a name she recognizes; Patna, a company whose boxes and products were used on the island.

Tell me that logo of a triangle with three
spikes doesn't scream "TRINITY".

On to her next adventure*!
*Next adventure may or may not happen, depends whether we
remember to greenlight the film or pay to keep the rights.

This entire time, Trinity was hiding behind one of Croft Holdings’ companies. Documents found in Richard’s secret room confirm this, with several pages showing Trinity’s involvement as Patna, and how the shadowy organization is everywhere, trying to find other archeological supernatural treasures to control the world. Yeah, like I said: Full-on Templars from Assassin’s Creed. Lara makes it her duty to fight the dark organization. Her first action? Go back to the pawn shop and buy her emerald pendant back. She spots a wall of firearms behind the owners. Illegal weapons in the UK. She buys two pistols. That’s all she was missing; NOW that’s the Lara we know!

…Cue credits. Yep, that’s how it ends.

Final words

On one hand, it makes sense to begin with an origin story.
On the other, if there's nothing else to follow up on it...

Tomb Raider 2018 is fine… with a “but”. The movie was blatantly made with the goal in mind of a series, with the later installments potentially adapting Rise, and then Shadow, of the Tomb Raider. So what we have here is about as cookie-cutter an origin story as can be. Does this mean the film is without value? Not necessarily; however, it does mean that it was designed from the get-go to not be self-contained, and it shows. Unfortunately, real life frequently kills those dreams in the egg; MGM did begin work on a sequel, but a series of events (including Alicia Vikander getting pregnant and the Covid-19 pandemic) slowed things down, and the studio lost the movie rights to the franchise in 2022. All isn’t lost as Netflix acquired them the rights this year, but whether they’ll pick up work on a sequel to this film or start over again is yet to be seen.

This adaptation, which attempts a more realistic tone, brings some interesting ideas to a Tomb Raider story. Richard Croft being alive, there being no supernatural happenings (debatably), and the villains being a lot less crazy than the game characters they’re based on makes this feel like its own thing rather than a direct copy. Does a more realistic approach make the film feel blander, forgettable even? Some could say yes. I think the story doesn’t really make it go past “okay” as a result. “Okay” isn’t bad; it’s average. As an example of something that could have improved the story, Lara really could have used more people to interact with, such as the Endurance Crew from the original game, which included some women in the team, as Lara is the only woman on film for easily 80% of the runtime.

Definitely could have used more scenes inspired by the
game. They would have been standouts.

The acting is solid, and Alicia Vikander is believable as Lara, working well through the more emotionally complex take on the character that was brought by the reboot. Dominic West, Daniel Wu and Walton Goggins also do quite well as Richard Croft, Lu Ren and Mathias Vogel, respectively. The effects and setpieces are impressive, though bogged down by their uses in scenes that can best be described as “it’s been done before”. I said I didn’t want to make comparisons to other films/series, and I’ll stick to that for my final words; but the film could indeed have benefited from an injection of uniqueness to many of the latter moments. Perhaps picking more scenes from the games, like the fantastic “rusty plane over the waterfall” bit, could have helped.

Yeah – decent fare, average but not “bad”. Whether that makes it a film worth checking out or a forgettable venture is up to you; I think it is fine enough for a watch, at the least. My greatest disappointment is that, through its focus on being an origin story, the feature feels incomplete, ending on the promise of sequels that may never happen now. “This one walked so the next could run”, but there was no “next” that could run, so what remains is a movie that walks.

Still got one more film to cover this year – if all goes well, expect that review in two weeks, yet again.