Movie Review: Tomb Raider

Samreen Siddiqui, Voices Editor|April 26, 2018

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  Strong, powerful, independent and badass. These are a few adjectives to describe the main character in Tomb Raider.

  Laura Croft, a young woman with a blurry life plan, goes to an isolated island in order to find out what happened to her father after he left for an exhibition.

  The Oscar winning Alicia Vikander not only portrays Laura, but becomes her character through the extensive training she went through for the role.

  Vikander, according to various interviews, wanted her character to be as realistic as possible. She trained at the gym every day and did her own stunts.

  I often go to the gym, and learning about Vikander’s preparation for her role was inspiring and empowering.

  Also, witnessing Vikander’s genuine portrayal of Laura Croft was incredible, as I have always been interested in acting and the work actors do.

  A scene that I was impressed by is when Vikander’s character kills a man who tries to attack her in her sleep. Her expression afterwards shows how shocked and terrible she feels about killing the man, even though he tried to kill her.

  One criticism I have about the film is how some action scenes went on for long periods of time without any “normal” breaks.

  An example of this is the scene where Laura avoids falling off a ledge by holding on to a old ship.

 

  My friend turned to me during the scene and told me about how we all know that the ship is going to fall, so the scene was long and expected.

  I liked the character Lu Ren, as he was comedic in the beginning and ended up being Croft’s good friend.

  I’m glad Laura didn’t get a love interest because I feel like it would have taken away from the actual storyline.

  They did have a cute and funny scene when a local guy who works for his family’s restaurant is too nervous to talk to Croft, but it was only a small element of the film.

  Laura’s father, however, was a large part of the film, and his situation created a shocking element to the movie.

  I agreed with actor Dominic West’s choices to portray Laura’s father, as he acted loving but also distant, as Laura has been separated from her father for most of her life.

  The one thing I would have done differently before watching the movie was to do more research on the video game this movie is based off of.

  Square Enix, one of my favorite video game companies, created reboots of the Tomb Raider video games, so I was happy to see their company name featured in the beginning of the movie.

  Video game nerd or not, go out and see this movie, as the great acting and commitment exhibited by the actors make the film as great as it is.

  And, as I quote myself after talking about the movie to my sister after watching it together, “This movie is badass!”