TOMB RAIDER, still and always stand – Review

Reboot and prequel adaptation of the video game which was already a reboot of the old episodes of videogames, Tomb Raider propels Alicia Vikander as a replacement of Angelina Jolie in the shoes of Lara Croft, 17 years later.

After I shot the first feature film horror noticed in Gerardmer in his native country, (Cold Prey), the Norwegian Roar Uthaug has confirmed some of the expectations placed in him with the disaster movie The Wave. The first hour was used as the stage of exposure at the same time that we are familiar with the characters by slowly but surely increasing the pressure, until a spectacular scene of tsunami, the highest point of the film. The suite can be transformed into a survival a little less surprising, but quite effective. Noticed by Hollywood, he agrees to sign his first big budget american reboot of the adventures of Lara Croft, simply titled TOMB RAIDER , and co-produced by Square Enix, house that published the video game of the same name.

It would seem that from the first minutes of the film, Roar Uthaug we redo the same move with The Wave, namely taking the time to clearly expose Lara in his environment routine. The intention is laudable, but is conducted with much less success. The implementation is a bit laborious, and surprisingly matter-of-fact, presenting us with a Lara a boxer and then livreuse bike that we instantly recall the Peter Parker of the Spiderman 2 de Sam Raimi, before a field/counter-field filmed in the waiting room of a police station. Not very sexy to start a story is wanting to panting as he quickly becomes riddled with flashbacks annoying, repetitive, and tasteless, the only idea found to tell us the content of the relationship intermittently between Richard Croft and his daughter.When finally the adventure is initiated, it finds its cruising speed by bathing in a fidelity exacerbated towards the video game that it changes, which is not inherently unpleasant. Alicia Vikander looks a lot like his model of the pixels, proudly displaying the 10 kilos of muscles that it took for the filming, in spite of a stature a little frail and fragile. A print desired by the chronology of this episode featuring a young Lara, not yet adventurous and still less warlike.

This is exactly what was trying to do video game released in 2013 on our consoles, namely break completely the image of this woman’s luscious braving many traps and dangers, which subsequently became a real sex symbol doing fantasizing their male counterparts. For this, it was enough to put the heroine in the middle of a natural environment that is hostile, to increase the mechanical survival (hunt for a cure…) and then push its vulnerability to the extreme in the face of the various attempts of rape, torture, serious falls, transforming little by little his physical over hours of play, between injuries, cuts and dried blood on the clothing. In the film, except for a scratch or two, we will regret this refusal to go that far, sanitizer the whole, as often with big productions.

“Not great cinema, but an adaptation that is respectful to the video game, marked by the signature of its director, who bring a wonderful energy to the action scenes.”

The artistic direction is also a copied-pasted from the video game, at the level of the sets and costumes, up to the accessories that players will recognize instantly. If the scenario also follows scrupulously the same frame and some twists to the letter, a little more liberty was taken around the end, and not necessarily for the better. These last 20 minutes are bogged down in a anything, in general, between infection of zombies and big shots-the legacy of american cinema type B-series of the 90s, is still and always be situations ultra warm. The non-players, meanwhile, will be a quite low and will always have the impression to follow a sub – Indiana Jones, or something peeping out of the side of a Benjamin Gates (Benjamin Gates’ being a sub – Indiana Jones, so).

So yes, the film does not often on the road and no surprises ever, and yes, you can laugh in front of some acrobatic tricks, daring and unlikely as during jumps of a gazelle of Lara, such as powered by springs giants, but you have to admit that the show is beautiful and well-marked by the signature of its director, always at ease in sequences of aquatic and we rewarding action scenes, driven by a beautiful energy and an assembly with the chalk line, for a result that is sometimes enjoyable.

In the end, the exercise terribly perilous to the game adaptation, the film is rather successful. Because Roar Uthaug does ringardise not have a license as not been done by Paul WS Anderson with Resident Evil, it does not deliver a nanar grotesque as the Doom ‘s Andrzej Bartkowiak , and does not fail there or Mike Newell was wrong with Prince of Persia. However, it is still behind Christophe Gans and Silent Hill, to this day still indétrôné in this category, but seems to have understood that for a successful adaptation of a video game, sometimes you just need to be faithful to him, leaves to prepare the same shots and camera movements insights joystick in the hands. One way to complete a loop, since the video game has been seeking for many years to make his own film.

Loris Colecchia

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