A strong, flawed and relatable Tomb Raider

In the new Tomb Raider movie Lara Croft comes across as a real human being with actual emotions, which isn’t something the original movies showed at all. Alicia Vikander plays a moody, temperamental young lady who is dealing with her fathers disappearance by refusing to deal with it.

By giving viewers Lara Croft’s origin story we get to see her grow up and come into her own. Instead of a fully developed, somewhat cold Lara, we see a young and angry one. Seeing Lara get beaten while in a fighting gym and playing the fox gives viewers a nice background effect. Lara doesn’t magically have the skills needed, she worked for them, even if not intentionally.

There were three parts of this movie that had a big impact on swaying me toward thinking this movie was awesome. Firstly, Vikander was fully dressed the entire movie, and not in skimpy clothes. She actually looked like a normal person, albeit with a good deal more muscle tone than most of us. I’ve been hearing a lot about how the movie has no sex appeal, I’m not really sure why it should. Granted, I never played the game so this review is strictly for my opinions on the movie. But, the movie is about a strong young woman who goes off on an adventure to find her father and faces a lot of dangerous situations (I really hope she had her tetanus shot). Vikander spends most of the movie dirty and actually looking like she’s in real pain. If you want a movie with a ridiculous amount of sex appeal and very little reality, watch the original movies or most of the other female action movies out there. This Tomb Raider gets by without it.

The second part of this movie is that Vikander’s Lara was injured…and she stayed injured. Again, she looked like she was in actual pain. While most injuries in action movies focus on it for a few minutes and then pretend it never happened, Lara stayed injured. It had a huge impact on her action sequences and the part where it gets sewed up made me cringe. I really enjoyed the fact that this Lara didn’t go running and jumping about without a care in the world, like she didn’t have a hole in her lower torso. Half the time we see her doing anything she’s holding onto her side and wincing.

The third part is when Lara kills a man, I think we can assume this is the first man she’s killed, she cries. It’s an up-close and personal fight and you can tell Lara’s shell-shocked. While she doesn’t really have time to deal with it and it was in self-defense, Lara doesn’t just brush it off. You can tell it had a real effect on her. Action movies have a problem with just killing a ton of people without showing any psychological damage to the killer. With some movies that works fine, but with Tomb Raider it added an air of reality and made her a much more sympathetic character.

This Tomb Raider is strong, flawed and relatable. Who hasn’t tried to deal with something tragic by denial? The movie mixes just enough science and superstition to keep me interested and I never saw that plot twist coming. While there are a few questionable parts to the movie, not liking it because it doesn’t relate much to the original Angelina Jolie movies or because of something about the game is a personal choice a lot of people are making. But, if you watch the film as an independent movie? I think it does the job pretty well. Watch the trailer for Tomb Raider here.