Angelina Jolie left her indelible mark on Lara Croft back in the early 2000s, but this video game character constantly regenerates with impunity. She’s resurfaced again, with a whole new look and level of sass, thanks to Oscar-winning star Alicia Vikander, Norwegian film director Roar Uthaug, and writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Alastair Siddons and Evan Daugherty. In this origin story, they’ve reimagined Lara as an orphaned enfant terrible, an MMA-fighting, radical bike courier rebelling against her privileged past.
But when she’s forced to confront it, she discovers her long-lost father Richard Croft’s (Dominic West) passion for dangerous treasure hunting, and follows in his footsteps. In this case, it’s to the treacherous island Yamatai, where he’s gone raidin’ the tomb of Himiko, an ancient Japanese queen sorceress. Lara follows suit to Yamatai, where she shows her old man just how to raid a tomb, while battling career raider Vogel (Walton Goggins), employed by a mysterious company to retrieve the dangerous contents of said tomb.
Truthfully, there isn’t very much plot here at all. But this movie isn’t about plot or story, and that’s OK for its form, which mimics a video game. This is very much a film about puzzles and tasks, which Lara has to complete to move on to the next level.
This is why Uthaug is such an ideal choice of director. His previous film, “The Wave,” was brilliant in its simplicity of depicting a tsunami devastating a small village, focusing on the mechanics of the evacuation and the ticking clock. Here, he again focuses on mechanics, in a way that harkens back to early silent cinema, just like “The Perils of Pauline.” Like another silent star, Buster Keaton, she’s possessing of an incredible physical acumen she applies to getting out of sticky situations.
