Eventually, Lara stumbles upon a clue to his ultimate whereabouts and heads to Hong Kong to search for him. Vikander does well to render her as someone more believable: a young woman running away from the life of wealth and privilege that consumed her father (who vanished on a trek to a hidden island years earlier). Lara Croft is not quite the sex robot she played in that film, but she is a pixelated character who has long existed at the crossroads of gaming and misogyny.
Vikander, the Oscar-winning Swedish actress from costume dramas like Anna Karenina, Tulip Fever, and The Danish Girl, excels at mixing the sensitive and the steely, best exemplified by her breakout work in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Tomb Raider is a straightforward reboot that does away with most of the supernatural mumbo-jumbo that previously defined the property as an action movie, it’s competent stuff helped along by a surprisingly magnetic performance at its center.
She hasn’t mastered every cheat code yet-Uthaug wants to communicate that Lara is still learning, still vulnerable, and recognizably human in a way she hasn’t been on screen before. This Lara is still an heiress to the fortune of her aristocratic father, Richard (Dominic West), but when she gets put in a sleeper hold by her boxing opponent, she taps out rather than execute some dazzling counter-attack. ‘I Am a Writer Because of bell hooks’ Crystal Wilkinson But the character was rebooted in a 2013 game that made her more grounded and gritty-a choice that Roar Uthaug’s new film apparently draws inspiration from. Simon West’s 2001 adaptation similarly feels like an ancient relic, an innuendo-laden monument to Hollywood shallowness. Though she became a video-game icon in the ’90s, Lara Croft was always an example of the medium’s silliest tendencies, a cartoonishly proportioned, handgun-toting heroine lacking much of a personality beyond, well, a propensity to raid tombs. Hollywood has a ways to go in terms of presenting female heroics onscreen, but I suppose you could call that progress. Five minutes into the 2018 reboot starring Alicia Vikander, Lara has taken part in a punishing boxing match and an electrifying bike-messenger race around the streets of London the only thing the camera has ogled are her abs. Five minutes into the 2001 video-game adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the title character (played by Angelina Jolie) takes a luxuriant shower that includes a Flashdance-style hair flip as preparation for her tomb raiding.