WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the new Tomb Raider film and the video game of the same name.


The Tomb Raider reboot incorporates a lot of elements from the video games, which blend well with the film's inventions. We see Lara Croft not as a wealthy archaeologist or a student, but as a courier trying to make her own way in the world, all the while holding on to the hope that her father, missing for seven years, is still alive. Just when she's about to give up, she discovers a hidden message left for her by Lord Croft that leads her to ship captain Lu Ren, who takes her to Yamatai, the lost island housing the tomb of the Mother of Death.

The island is uninhabited, save for Trinity agents, led by Mathias Vogel, and the unfortunate sailors forced into slavery to help uncover the tomb. After escaping Vogel's clutches, Lara finds her father alive, evading capture and covertly sabotaging Trinity's progress. The rest of the story goes as you might expect: Lara loses her father for a final time, but stops Trinity's ill-defined, by certainly evil, plan.

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There are a variety of action sequences, some of which have been adapted straight from the video games, and a surprising number of puzzles and riddles, which help to capture the spirit of franchise. The problem is that the film fails to capture the spirit of Lara Croft. The rebooted franchise isn't just about curses, puzzles and taking on an army with nothing but a bow and arrow; it's about survival, and growth.

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A Survivor Is Born, the 2013 game that inspires much of the film, depicts Lara as a student who's driven by a curiosity and a desire for adventure but is ultimately too inexperienced and unequipped to handle the dangers. Much like the Solarii Brotherhood she encounters on the island, Lara is just trying to find a way to escape the cursed shores.

Aside from the mystically conjured storms that prevent ships from leaving, the island contains plenty of lethal locations, creatures and people. Lara faces off against packs of wolves, a full-grown bear and the crazed members of the Solarii, who seek nothing more than a means to please Queen Himiko so she'll allow them to leave Yamatai. In the beginning of the game, Lara proves that she's not much of a fighter. She certainly doesn't want to kill anything, but the island forces her to become a keen hunter and a practiced killer.

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Even when there aren't any predatory animals or desperate castaways after her, Lara has to prevent starvation and dehydration, and endure the island's debris-filled rivers, icy mountains and treacherous cliffs, which keep her from her comrades or the next crucial location. She learns that nature is as deadly as it is beautiful, but that she can overcome its crueler aspects.

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She has friends and family in the video game, all of whom help in some way or another. For the most part, however, Lara is on her own. It helps her turn from that inexperienced student into the tomb raider fans of the classic series recognize. She wasn't born a powerful and confident person; she went through hell to get there, which makes her that much more admirable.

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The intention of the video game reboot is clearly to add a bit of backstory to the iconic character, who seemed to cheat death at every turn and face gargantuan mythical beasts without batting an eye. A Survivor Is Born shows us the kind of pain and loss that tends to turn people into that hardened fighter. The Solarii Brotherhood was clearly made up of all those kinds of people, although they all lost their sense of compassion and humanity a long time ago, qualities Lara managed to keep with her despite everything she had seen and experienced.

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We get none of that in this new film. Played by Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, Lara endures the loss of her father twice, and she's beaten up a lot. But none of that helps to demonstrate to the audience that she's the survivor her video game counterpart has become. In comparison, the brutality of nature and people is almost entirely gratuitous in the movie. Virtually every moment of emotional struggle and personal growth appears as little more than a byproduct of the often-unnecessary action sequences that preceded them.

There is one scene that stands out, not because it's a great moment -- although it should have been -- but because it's a perfect example of the film's ignorance concerning the point of Lara's story. It's when Lara drowns a Trinity agent who was trying to subdue her and take her back to camp. She stares at the corpse as her physical and emotional agony sets in. Unfortunately, it's then that her father shows up out of nowhere, not for a poignant reunion but because the film didn't know how to focus on Lara as a character, leading to another one of the narrative flaws that pushed the Vikander's protagonist further from the spirit of Lara Croft.

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The video game shows us that Lara was shipwrecked along with a half-dozen people, including her close friends and her father-figure Conrad Roth. They supported her and occasionally offered advice, but they were never able to help her the way the film's supporting characters do.

Lara takes a beating, but she doesn't patch herself up; it's her father that does that for her. Lara doesn't even destroy Himiko. Again, it's her father who does that. In fact, if it weren't for Richard Croft's timely explosives, Lara would have perished in the film at the hands of Mathias Vogel. For whatever reason, it's evident the screenwriters felt Lara needed someone to hold her hand across half of her perilous adventure. That's how the film ultimately manages to miss the crux of the story told in A Survivor Is Born, thereby warping the iconic heroine and giving us instead a lesser, generic action hero.


In theaters now, director Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider stars Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, Dominic West as Richard Croft, Daniel Wu as Lu Ren, Kristin Scott Thomas as Ana Miller, Hannah John-Kamen as Sophie and Walton Goggins as Mathias Vogel.