Tomb Raider (2018)

I've been an on-and-off fan of the Tomb Raider franchise since playing the first game on the Playstation back in the late '90s. High adventure, exotic locations, lost civilisations and a heroine who was part Indiana Jones, part James Bond and part Lady Penelope managed to fill a void that had been not been properly filled since the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989.

I lost touch with the franchise after the third game, although I was eager to see Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. An enthusiasm that latest until about twenty minutes into the film. What seemed to me to be a formula that a filmmaker could hardly go wrong with turned out to be a formula that a filmmaker could easily go wrong with. Badly cut together with a film score written in two weeks (for which the composer apologised), and a story that is ultimately forgettable (seriously, I can't remember anything at all except a vague recollection of some nonsense about time travel, a clock and huskies).

I do have something of a soft spot for the sequel, The Cradle of Life, which I felt managed to at least attempt to reproduce the sense of adventure that the Tomb Raiders films should have - and it had an Alan Silvestri score which is usually a Very Good Thing. But it's ending was a bit pants, and everyone else seemed to hate it, so that was that for Angelina's Tomb Raider.

Fast forward ten years and Tomb Raider is being rebooted for the (then) current generation of games consoles with greatly improved graphics and a stripped-down origin story for Lara Croft. It also happened to be written by Rhianna Pratchett, a writer I was familiar with in part because of her parentage but perhaps moreso because she had written Overlord, a video game that works as an anti-Lord of the Rings comedy.

The game ranks among my favourites in terms of both fun gameplay and - in what is becoming more expected from video games - a decent story. Narratively it blows both of the Tomb Raider films out of the water.

The recently released Tomb Raider film owes much to that game. The stripped-back Lara Croft, the main location, the mythology, some of the stunts, and even the colour pallet are all rooted in the game. It's definitely its own beast though, diverging considerably from the story told in the game, but there's no doubting its influence.

That's all evident in the trailer, so it was with this expectation that I went to see the film.

I'll start with the conclusion: I liked it. I liked it enough that I saw it twice in the same weekend. It's a huge improvement on Lara's previous cinematic outings.

That's not to say it's a great film. For me it's a solid B. It's fun, exciting in parts, there's an absolutely fantastic central performance from Alicia Vikander who seems custom-built for the part. It's pacey with very little chance of causing the audience to nod off. Even the slower sections (i.e. when Lara's not running from something, shooting something, or falling off something) still manage to engage and maintain interest.

It also manages to capture the essence of the game. The action in some cases could have been lifted straight from it - but not in the sense that you're watching a character being manipulated through a series of actions by someone with a game controller - Vikander's performance raises it above that.

The film is let down in a couple of areas though. Firstly, the story takes too long to get going. We spend too much time cycling around London in the opening reel - something where the film could have learned from the narrative of the game, which instead drops us in media res in the middle of a shipwreck.

The other letdown is that it isn't quite big enough. The final act manages to hit a lot of the right spots for puzzling solving under pressure in a deathtrap tomb, but the climactic action feels more like an opening level of a game rather than the full fireworks finale. It felt as if budget constraints had limited the extent of the storytelling.

Ultimately, it's a film that made me want a sequel - hopefully Lara can progress way beyond level two.