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drwexOn the flight home we watched the 2018 Tomb Raider. The movie disappeared from theaters pretty quickly, has a 52% Tomatometer and a 6.3 rating on IMDB. It's also a reboot of a movie made from a video game one of whose main selling points for a long time was the scantily clad large-chested nature of its heroine. This is so very much a factor that the choice of Angelina Jolie to play Lara Croft in the 2001 movie was a significant discussion element and there was considerably awful commentary on Ms Vikander's comparably smaller chest size.
Well, fuck all those dudes, this is actually a pretty good movie, given the material it has to work with. 3/5 stars if you like action-adventure things and aren't too bothered by shock horror bits now and then.
You may recall that Vikander did a considerable number of her own stunts. The movie has the expected action sequences, death-defying sequences, and more fighting than I'd anticipated. Vikander handles herself well in all of it. The only thing that nagged at me is the movie makes some attempt to show her being injured (which you'd expect given what she goes through and the body beatings she takes) and then she just goes on about doing her athletic things as though there were no injuries.
There's a plot, sort of, but who really cares? This version has her being a recalcitrant teen/young adult, angry at an absent father that you just know she's going to set off to find. I do like that they also make her the smartest person in the room and, despite showing her working on her fighting skills, she still loses most of her fights. I think it looks good from this point in her character arc and it sets up some potentially good things to come. I hope they'll do a sequel.
Vikander is also surrounded with a good and competent cast, from Dominic West playing a much more interesting (if patronizing) father Croft, to Walton Goggins turning in an absolutely villainy villain performance. Daniel Wu does a good job of 21st-century Kato. And bonus minor appearance by Derek Jacobi.
As I mentioned above, the movie resorts to jump-shock things several times, which I felt was jarringly out of synch with the rest of it. The result feels like the director (Roar Uthaug, who had mostly done Norwegian films prior to this) couldn't decide what sort of movie he was making. I don't exactly mind the result but I don't feel like it helped the movie. I'd like to see what a more seasoned director could do.
Cutting one spoilery bit from the end:
I sort of liked how they set up Lara to acquire her dual pistols, but at the same time I felt like it was another incongruous bit. Everything else you see in the main part of the movie is set up, from her archery skills to her fighting style to her ability to deal with pursuers. Except the guns - why would she go for guns except that the video game character canonically has them?
Well, fuck all those dudes, this is actually a pretty good movie, given the material it has to work with. 3/5 stars if you like action-adventure things and aren't too bothered by shock horror bits now and then.
You may recall that Vikander did a considerable number of her own stunts. The movie has the expected action sequences, death-defying sequences, and more fighting than I'd anticipated. Vikander handles herself well in all of it. The only thing that nagged at me is the movie makes some attempt to show her being injured (which you'd expect given what she goes through and the body beatings she takes) and then she just goes on about doing her athletic things as though there were no injuries.
There's a plot, sort of, but who really cares? This version has her being a recalcitrant teen/young adult, angry at an absent father that you just know she's going to set off to find. I do like that they also make her the smartest person in the room and, despite showing her working on her fighting skills, she still loses most of her fights. I think it looks good from this point in her character arc and it sets up some potentially good things to come. I hope they'll do a sequel.
Vikander is also surrounded with a good and competent cast, from Dominic West playing a much more interesting (if patronizing) father Croft, to Walton Goggins turning in an absolutely villainy villain performance. Daniel Wu does a good job of 21st-century Kato. And bonus minor appearance by Derek Jacobi.
As I mentioned above, the movie resorts to jump-shock things several times, which I felt was jarringly out of synch with the rest of it. The result feels like the director (Roar Uthaug, who had mostly done Norwegian films prior to this) couldn't decide what sort of movie he was making. I don't exactly mind the result but I don't feel like it helped the movie. I'd like to see what a more seasoned director could do.
Cutting one spoilery bit from the end:
I sort of liked how they set up Lara to acquire her dual pistols, but at the same time I felt like it was another incongruous bit. Everything else you see in the main part of the movie is set up, from her archery skills to her fighting style to her ability to deal with pursuers. Except the guns - why would she go for guns except that the video game character canonically has them?
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Date: 2019-07-19 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 12:31 pm (UTC)