5 / 10
Official trailer
Tomb Raider (2018) is the reboot of the Lara Croft film franchise built on the 2013 Crystal Dynamics video game continuity.
Roar Uthaug directed. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons wrote. Alicia Vikander plays Lara Croft, here a twenty-one-year-old bicycle courier in London who has refused to declare her wealthy father legally dead. Dominic West plays Lord Richard Croft. Walton Goggins plays Mathias Vogel, the Trinity Order operative running an archaeological dig on a Japanese island. Daniel Wu plays Lu Ren, the ship captain who takes Lara to the island.
The plot follows Lara discovering her father’s research, traveling to the island, and confronting the cult searching for the tomb of Queen Himiko.
Tomb Raider leaves me shrugging. Vikander works hard, the shipwreck is terrific, and the rest of the film spends ninety minutes apologizing for the character it’s named after. A 5 feels right for a film this competent and this joyless.
The film made approximately two hundred and seventy-five million dollars worldwide on a ninety-four million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was modest. The film was meant to launch a new Tomb Raider franchise. The planned sequel has been in development purgatory since 2018. The reboot exists as the cinematic version of the property’s deliberate de-sexualization, framed as feminist progress but functioning as a wholesale replacement of what made the character a property in the first place.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The Lara Croft property has a cultural history.
The 1996 Eidos video game launched the character as a deliberately heightened pin-up: large breasts, short shorts, twin pistols, athletic confidence. The character was designed for the male teenage gaming demographic of the late 1990s. The 2001 Angelina Jolie film inherited this aesthetic and pushed it further. Jolie’s Lara was overtly sexual, overtly competent, and overtly the product of the 1990s gaming sensibility. The character’s commercial success was inseparable from this presentation.
The marketing framed the 2018 reboot as a corrective.
It positioned the new Lara as a grounded, realistic, post-#MeToo version of the character. Alicia Vikander’s casting was the visible argument. Vikander is a serious dramatic actress with an Oscar. The new Lara would be real instead of spectacle. The grounded approach was a 2013 game decision Crystal Dynamics had already made. The film adopted that decision and added the framing that the new Lara was the morally correct version. It implicitly framed the old Lara as a problem it was solving.
The position is the wokeness. The marketing didn’t say “we made a different kind of Tomb Raider film.” It said “we made the right kind of Tomb Raider film, and the previous version had something wrong with it that we have now corrected.” The audience for Lara Croft was being told that what they’d loved about the character was the problem. The new film was the apology for the previous films.
Audiences who came to Lara Croft for the heightened pin-up presentation were the demographic being told they had been wrong to want it. That framing is the worst part. The grounded approach was already sitting there in the 2013 game, ready to use. I’d have kept it and dropped the sermon about what was wrong with the old Lara.
For Writers
A reboot that frames its predecessor’s audience as morally wrong is a reboot that’s fired its existing fanbase. The 2018 Tomb Raider’s grounded approach was defensible. The framing that the previous approach needed correction was the problem. The lesson is that reboots inherit their predecessor’s fanbase. You can reframe the property. You can’t at the same time claim moral superiority over the previous version and expect the previous version’s audience to feel welcome. Choose one.
The Origin Trap
The film is structured as a Lara Croft origin story. The 2018 Lara has never raided a tomb. She doesn’t have her father’s resources. She’s a young woman discovering her path. The arc is the conversion from ordinary young woman to capable adventurer. The structure is the standard origin-film template.
The structural choice is the same replacement narrative the rest of the late-2010s woke-reboot wave used. A younger, more politically correct version replaces the legacy hero and has to earn the title.
The film asks the audience to invest in the new version becoming Lara instead of receiving the existing Lara doing existing Lara things. The 2001 Jolie film opened with Lara fully formed and immediately put her in motion.
The 2018 reboot opens with a Lara who’s not yet Lara and spends ninety minutes making her into Lara. The audience that came for Tomb Raider got a film about becoming the protagonist of Tomb Raider. The origin structure loses me. I don’t mind an origin story in principle, but ninety minutes of Lara not yet being Lara is a long wait for the thing the title promises, and by the time she finally becomes the character, the credits are close.
For Writers
Origin films for established characters are usually a sign that the production has decided the audience must be re-educated about who the character is. The 2018 Tomb Raider reset Lara because the production wanted a different Lara than the audience had. The lesson is that origin reboots are creative decisions to start over. The audience knows. They have to decide whether they want to start over with you. Many of them didn’t.
The Vikander Performance
Alicia Vikander is doing serious craft work. The physical preparation, the climbing, the running, the combat choreography are all visible and committed. Vikander is one of the more capable performers of her generation. The performance is intelligent and grounded. The character she’s playing isn’t the Lara Croft the property’s audience signed up for. The performance is the production’s argument: this is what a Tomb Raider should be.
The argument works depending on whether the audience accepts the framing.
Audiences who came to the 2018 film without 2001 attachment found Vikander’s grounded Lara workable. Audiences who came with attachment to the previous version found the new Lara competent but missing the property’s energy. The performance isn’t the problem. The performance is doing exactly what the production wanted it to do. The question is whether what the production wanted was what the property’s audience wanted.
I like Vikander in this more than I like the film. She’s physically committed and never winks, and I’d have happily watched her play a Lara with some swagger. The script just won’t let her have any fun.
For Writers
Strong execution of a poor strategic decision still produces a film whose strategic decision the audience rejects. Vikander did what the production asked. The production asked for the wrong thing relative to the property’s audience. The lesson is that performance can raise good material and can’t save misjudged direction. If your reboot has chosen a strategy the existing audience rejects, the lead performance can’t persuade them otherwise.
Craft Note
The shipwreck sequence in the Pacific storm is the film’s strongest individual passage and one of the better action set pieces of its release year. The sequence stages Lara’s fishing boat breaking up in heavy seas through practical water work and committed stunt choreography. The scene runs about six minutes and ends with Lara washed up unconscious on the island. The shipwreck shows that Roar Uthaug, whose Norwegian disaster film The Wave (2015) launched his career, knew how to stage physical chaos.
The sequence is the film’s argument that the grounded approach could produce real cinematic adrenaline. The argument works in this passage. The rest of the film doesn’t sustain it.
Is Tomb Raider worth watching?
5/10. A reboot whose framing alienated the property’s existing audience and whose execution didn’t build a new one. The shipwreck sequence is excellent and Vikander deserves a better script, and those two things are the whole reason it isn’t lower. Everything else is a competent, humorless origin story I’d never choose over the 2001 Jolie version, the more entertaining cinematic Lara Croft by a distance. Watch the 2001 film. Skip the 2018 reboot.
- Tomb Raider (2018), IMDb
