Alicia Vikander visited James Corden on his show and brought the brand new official trailer for the Tomb Raider remake coming out early next year. When it was first announced that this was happening, my reaction was similar to the Tom Holland as Nathan Drake news but this trailer changed my mind.
As a kid, I played a couple of Tomb Raider games casually whenever I felt like it. But honestly only because I wasn’t any good at it. In 2013, I played the newly released game and was HOOKED. Currently, I’m planning on (re-)playing every game there is. That being said, I know at least how a Tomb Raider game works, looks and feels. Is there anything in this trailer that would remind me of said games?
The first shot is of Alicia Vikander running in the woods and she looks EXACTLY like Lara. Her movements are smooth and sometimes almost identical to her video game twin. Vikander is stunning and would you look at her guns? That’s some serious muscle.
Despite being very tightly edited (a lot of jump cuts, which I usually don’t enjoy), I actually like the pacing of the trailer and the chunks of information the audience is presented in between the cuts. We learn that Lara’s father (Dominic West) is ‘gone’ but he left her some clues to continue his work. And who wouldn’t wanna go explore a tomb called ‘mother of death’? The only thing standing in her way is Trinity.
The Order of Trinity is an organization with intimidating military force that basically wants all the power. We get a very short glimpse of Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) who seems to be the big baddie. If I had to pinpoint the few things I have to criticize about this trailer, he would be one of them. His very short and extremely flat appearance makes me worried about his credibility.
What I want to see Lara doing is running, fighting, jumping, reading books, solving puzzles, chilling on boats and being smart. And guess what? That is precisely what they show us in the trailer and it makes me really excited. I have played enough to recognize iconic moments:
- The ship going down (It looks like we will get a wild combo of badass camera angles)
- Lara jumping and barely making it
- Lara falling
- Avoiding death traps
- The climbing axe slicing the wall and only fulfilling its job when you thought it was too late
- Balancing on a plane wreck
One might say it is rather cheap to just copy the games and count on fans salivating just because. But that is exactly what I did and I loved every second of it. Another reason to like this trailer is Daniel Wu, who I personally loved in Into the Badlands, portraying Lu Ren in this installment.
The only thing that really bothered me was the ending. And no, not because the trailer was over. Because there is a shift in tone happening so suddenly, it feels like someone used the bathroom while you were showering and the water went cold for a second. Don’t get me wrong, I love Nick Frost (have you seen the incredible Cuban Fury?), but what is happening in that scene? It’s not funny, it’s not feisty, it looks like they tried so hard to give Lara one final punchline but completely missed the target.
Anyway, to me this trailer is merely perfect, and yet, since we all know how video game adaptions have flunked in the past, I am cautious not to set my expectations too high. A generically edited trailer packed with action is exciting but now what really needs to be at least above average to make it the one film that breaks the video game movie curse, is a good, believable story. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the works of the director (Roar Uthaug) or the writer (Geneva Robertson-Dworet) but I am hopeful that they know what they’re doing.
Scapegrace Heroine 