Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider starring Alicia Vikander came out in 2018, intended as a reboot of the 2001 film, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie. The film made $274 million worldwide, which interestingly, is the same amount that the Angelina Jolie film made when it came out. Tomb Raider (2018) very closely follows the plot of the 2013 video game of the same name, which itself was intended as a reboot of the Lara Croft video game series.

Time and time again, fans have complained that various video game movies are nothing like the games that they are based on, but no one can claim that about this film. However, Uthaug’s Tomb Raider is still only mediocre at best. To be fair, Tomb Raider is not necessarily a terrible film. It is entertaining and action-packed, and it is visually truthful to the video game it is based on, but the movie is very forgettable. And it is forgettable for a variety of reasons that make the majority of video game movies either mediocre or just objectively bad.

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The most obvious issue is that Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft is underdeveloped as a character. All the audience really knows about her is that she is highly athletic, and that her father went missing when she was a child. Her athleticism is portrayed believably, or at least, as believably as the athletic prowess of any action movie hero can be, surviving events that would kill most humans. It often seems as though it is obscenely easy to kill anyone but the protagonist in an action movie. However, the effect that her missing father has had on her, and her relationship with her father in the first place are both illustrated poorly through flashbacks and voiceovers that do little to tell the audience of their relationship other than the very bare minimum required to drive the plot forward.

The villain of the film similarly is not particularly well developed with very unclear motives, which arguably, is the worst thing that a movie villain can have. Underdeveloped characters are an issue that occurs often in video game movies because a video game can extend into its own world for so much longer than a film can. Tomb Raider, spanning two-hours, chooses to focus on action sequences as opposed to character-building moments that the film could have greatly benefited from.

The production of the film is very generic, with nothing particularly interesting about its writing, cinematography, or editing, all of which make it a very lackluster viewing experience. It is fair to say that each one of these issues could be rectified by the presence of individuals who care deeply about filmmaking as an art form, but it feels rare that it is the auteurs working on a video game movie. It is difficult to imagine someone like Wes Anderson or David Lynch directing a movie based on a video game.

This is because more than any other genre of film, video game movies seem to be made largely as a result of a greater chance that they will return a profit. It is easy to forget that the film industry above all else is a business, and it is often not as important to make a good movie as it is to make a movie that is going to make money. A movie based on something that already has a following virtually guarantees that the people who like that thing will go and see that movie iteration of it, even if they are quite certain that it’s not going to be good. Space Jam: A New Legacy is a great example of this phenomenon.

And so, with this in mind, one could make the argument that Tomb Raider is a pleasant surprise because by no means is it as bad as the majority of video game movies tend to be. However, one also has to question if it is the best film iteration of the Lara Croft video games that exists. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider definitely has lower critical ratings than Tomb Raider does, but the 2001 film seems to be much more memorable than the reboot was. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was bad, but it was also silly and absurd and cheesy and weird. Tomb Raider however was just ‘okay.’

To be just okay is not bad, but it is fair to say that it’s not really good either. In fifteen, twenty or thirty years from now, what will be better remembered? The movie that was so bad that a person couldn’t stop thinking about it, or the movie that was so okay, that the following week a person couldn’t even remember the name of it?

At this point in time, it feels almost expected that any movie based on a video game is probably not going to be very good. Many have been announced since the success of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, from Resident Evil to Borderlands, and perhaps one of these upcoming films will change the public opinion on video game movies. And if they can’t do that, then hopefully they will at least attempt to go more down the route of absurdity as opposed to opting for the mundane.

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