“...a genre plagued by poor adaptations. ”

March 27, 2018 3:46 PM

Has 'Tomb Raider' Broken the Video Game Movie Curse? [The Hollywood Reporter] “The new Tomb Raider currently sits at 49 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn't enough to earn a "Fresh" rating, but the score does make it the most positively reviewed live-action video game adaptation of all time (the top rating of 50 percent goes to last year's animated Japanese release Resident Evil: Vendetta). In fact, only four other video game films even crack 40 percent on the site: 2017's Pokemon: I Choose You! (43 percent), 2016's The Angry Birds Movie (44 percent), 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (45 percent) and the aforementioned Resident Evil: Vendetta — making Tomb Raider a clear standout in the genre. Other than Jolie's Lara Croft, commercially successful video game film adaptations are few and far between, with the Resident Evil franchise being the notable exception, having made over $1 billion at the global box office over the last decade and a half. Only two video game films in history have managed to cross the $100 million mark domestically, Jolie's Tomb Raider and Angry Birds, while films like Assassin's Creed and 2016's Warcraft failed to make back even half of their production budget at the domestic box office.”

• Tomb Raider: new Lara, Daddy Croft, and Indiana Jones ripoffs [The Guardian]

“Video game adaptations have a long history of being, well … mostly completely terrible, thanks largely to the vapid efforts of one Uwe Boll. And even the most ardent Angelina Jolie fan would presumably admit that the Tomb Raider movies were hardly the Oscar-winner’s finest hour. So why would Alicia Vikander, Hollywood It girl and current art house dahling, sign up to star as Lara Croft in a reboot of the action-adventure series? Were there no Marvel superhero parts available? Critics have reacted with predictable sniffiness to Norwegian director Roar Uthaug’s debut Hollywood outing, with the movie rated just 50% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. And yet a quick glance at the site’s rundown of its best and worst reviewed video game adaptations suggests that might not be such a bad score after all. In fact, hang on a minute! It’s the joint highest ever rating for this type of film, sharing that honour with last year’s animated Resident Evil: Vendetta. What’s your verdict? Should Lara have been allowed to climb out of her tomb and back into multiplexes? Or would you bury her back under some ancient rubble for at least a few more decades?”

• Tomb Raider Is a Gritty Reboot of a Video-Game Classic [The Atlantic]

“There are little moments that work well, like Lara letting out an exhausted sob after her first kill (the film fortunately keeps her relatable throughout the intense final act). I also perked up anytime the story revolved around Lara decoding an ancient puzzle, which was far more enthralling than the bow-and-arrow fighting. Still, Tomb Raider as a whole feels frustratingly by-the-numbers, a video-game reboot that’s been committee-designed to avoid any sexism controversy. Uthaug’s staging of the action is workmanlike but could use more style; the revelation of the Himiko myth never drifts into wild fantasy (don’t expect any walking CGI statues like in the first Tomb Raider movie, or a shark being punched in the nose like in the sequel). Vikander, who can balance flinty charm with sympathetic humanism, helped keep me invested, but Tomb Raider could best be described as a solid step forward, away from past wrongs. I’ll take competence over silliness, but the Lara Croft brand still has a long way to go before her movies are truly memorable.”

• The 2018 Tomb Raider movie dials down the franchise’s tackiness [The Verge]

“Tomb Raider is too busy solving the problem of how to make a Lara Croft movie work to justify its own existence. Though this 2.0 version pares down the Illuminati hokum of the original film, there’s still the requisite need to square elements of the game with the serialized matinee adventures that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark. The platform and puzzle elements and the secret antechambers and conspiracies all tie back into the game’s myths and rhythms, but they take away from its cinematic flow. The 2018 Tomb Raider does well enough to satisfy a video game and movie franchise simultaneously, but the two aren’t easily reconciled. When Lara is pinned to a stone wall, trying to figure out which colored gem goes into which slot, it can’t help but feel like some offscreen controller is managing her actions. She isn’t a movie character anymore, she’s an avatar. As a machine-tooled diversion, however, this Tomb Raider improves considerably on the previous films, if only by dialing down the tacky excesses.”

• What Future Video Game Movies Can Learn From Tomb Raider [Hardcore Gamer]

“It’s a two-hour film, but it has the pacing of a movie half that length. Rather than use its first half-hour or so to fully establish Lara and the characters who will be important throughout the rest of the movie, Tomb Raider instead spends all this time on either defining Lara or introducing things that ultimately don’t matter. Lara’s character benefits from this, but not as much as she could have. Everything else might as well have been thrown away. There’s a bicycle chase in the beginning that exists solely to land Lara in a police station so that she can exposit on why she’s eking-out a living rather than accepting the inheritance left to her by her presumed-dead father. That bicycle sequence took up at least fifteen minutes, time that could have been spent either better defining Lara or introducing one of the movies other important characters. Even after Lara gets to the lost island of Yamatai, the pacing problems continue to persist. Decisions are made way too quickly, proper time isn’t afforded to what should be surprising or at least emotional developments, and the film’s villains make forcibly rash choice in order to make more generically evil.”

• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: In praise of the best video game movie we have (so far) [Syfy]

“That kitsch factor remains with Jolie’s presence. It helps that she looks like she’s having an absolute ball in the role, imbuing that untouchable glamour with a cartoonish awareness. When it’s time for the seemingly required shower scene — hey, it’s in the game — Jolie plays it like she’s in a melodramatic shampoo ad. Why be serious when there’s so much fun to be had? How else are you supposed to play a character that’s part-Indiana Jones, part-Jessica Rabbit? All of this is what makes the film work as a video game adaptation — it knows the medium and plays with it on those terms. It has no qualms with keeping its tongue firmly in cheek, refusing to delve into faux-edginess or forced nihilism in the name of making a “serious movie.” That’s not to say the film isn’t willing to get serious — there’s some surprising pathos to be found in scenes involving Lara’s father, played by Jolie’s real-life dad, Jon Voight — or that it’s flaw-free — the villain is dull, Jolie doesn’t have much chemistry with Craig, and the CGI was dated even in 2001. Whatever blemishes there are in the film, they feel inconsequential to what is ultimately a rollicking good time. ”

• Male film critic blames Alicia Vikander’s ‘lack of curves’ for Tomb Raider’s box office failure [Metro]

“And this week in ‘men who should probably stop talking’, a US film critic has suggested that Alicia Vikander’s portrayal of Lara Croft has failed because she has a ‘lack of curves’. Comparing Vikander with Angelina Jolie, who has previously played the Tomb Raider video game character, Jerome Maida wrote in his review, published on Philly Voice that ‘Vikander’s appearance is also markedly different than Jolie’s’. ‘She never comes across as having an ounce of sex appeal and, at times, looks like she could be 16. Toss in the lack of curves and Warner Brothers could have decided to gender bend and make a film titled “Luke Croft” – and it would have come across the same way,’ he wrote. He then added: ‘Such interchangeability is not exactly empowering for women.’ The review has now been edited by the Philly Voice – after an outpouring of rage on the internet – and an editor’s note has been added to the end of the review: ‘This review previously made references to Vikander’s appearance in comparison to Angelina Jolie. After consideration, we have removed that mention.’ But the internet never forgets and thanks to social media we have Maida’s full quotes. [via: Twitter @ItzWaffleTaco]”

• There’s Something Different About the New Lara Croft [The New Republic]

“It is with a small shiver of self-disgust that I must sit down to write about the body of Alicia Vikander. The role she plays in her most recent movie is Lara Croft. Since 1996, Croft has run and jumped and spun across screens. In the old game Tomb Raider, she used to say “A-ha!” when she picked up something useful. Her breasts were sort of triangular, made of light and pixels. As a nod to that incarnation, Angelina Jolie in 2001 said “A-ha!” once to a bunch of huskies as she was escaping the tomb that she had raided. In the new game, she is different. And so she is different in the new movie of the new game: more human, less funny, more abs than boobs. It’s a dizzying, serpentine flow of identities for a character who has kept little other than her name and her interest in tombs. Tomb Raider (2018) is based on Tomb Raider the video game (2013), which reimagined Tomb Raider (1996), which gave rise to the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), to which moviegoers will now compare Tomb Raider (2018). To add to the confusion, Croft’s Wikipedia page encourages you not to confuse her with Laura Croft, Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in July 2008.”

• The New ‘Tomb Raider’ Movie Doesn’t Care About Your Boner [Junkee]

“If you thought we could go almost a full year without straight men complaining that a female action star’s boobs are too small then time to reset the clock, my friends. Just nine months after bros complained that Gal Gadot’s breasts weren’t big enough for her to be Wonder Woman, they’re up in arms because apparently Alicia Vikander’s cup size has something to do with her ability to believably raid tombs in 2018’s Tomb Raider reboot. They’re not being sexist, though, you hysterical women: the argument is simply this Tomb Raider doesn’t come close to Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider. Although it would be easy to just palm this off as another example of the world being a dumpster fire and men being terrible, their anger is somewhat understandable. The first Tomb Raider movies were made for them: everything was filmed with the male gaze in mind. From the shots through Lara Croft’s hot-pant clad legs to the fact it only takes six minutes before Jolie is both wet and naked in the first movie, this was their boner fodder made real. The new Tomb Raider, however, doesn’t give a flying fuck whether you have a stiffy or not. In fact, it wants to punch you in the stiffy… hard.”

posted by Fizz (42 comments total)

The problem was never the content, it was the execution.
posted by Sphinx at 4:03 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just watched RE:Vendetta. Don’t expect it to live up to that 50%.
posted by P.o.B. at 4:12 PM on March 27, 2018

One of the best parts of the rebooted Tomb Raider (2013) game franchise was Lara Croft's friendship with her boat crew. Sam, Johnah, Conrad, etc, they cut out too many of these characters and I think it would have worked a lot better if they were part of the film. In particular, Lara's friendship with Sam, that's a key part of the story of the game and this film suffers for that.

And even though I'm a big fan of Walter Goggins, he chews a bit too much scenery in this film. That being said, I think Alicia Vikander played Lara quite well and it was nice to see her kick some ass. I'm all about that, I hope that the film picks up a bit of steam and we get a sequel because it is a fun franchise and one worth exploring further.
posted by Fizz at 4:12 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Did Paul W.S. Anderson run over someones dog or something?
posted by Artw at 4:13 PM on March 27, 2018

Also, the plane/waterfall sequence that is pulled directly from the video game is well-shot and choreographed. I was on the edge of my seat and smiling the entire time. I really enjoyed this film, not perfect, but lots of fun.
posted by Fizz at 4:15 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Rampage is gonna be the first to certify fresh, because Dwayne Johnson versus kaiju.
posted by linux at 4:38 PM on March 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

The new Tomb Raider currently sits at 49 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn't enough to earn a "Fresh" rating, but the score does make it the most positively reviewed live-action video game adaptation of all time

This is only because they never made a No One Lives Forever movie
posted by NoMich at 4:40 PM on March 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

No, it's because they never did Wim Wenders' Katamari Damacy movie.
posted by happyroach at 4:45 PM on March 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

Director Roar Uthaug* has just turned 23 when the first version of the Tomb Raider video game was released, so it checks out.

*I have never encountered a feature film director whose name was so suited to a D&D Barbarian's signature move: "As I close with the hobgoblins, I unleash my Uthaug Roar!"
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:53 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

Still waiting for a Day of the Tentacle feature film.

Fuck you, Uwe Boll, stay away.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 5:02 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Roar Uthaug

Did someone thaw out a Magdalenian cave dweller from the Alps or -- well, I'm sure he's heard it all before.

If everyone lives, I think we can look forward to video game movies made out of video games with actual stories and aesthetics worth following. Papers Please, We Happy Few, even Dream Daddy -- these could all make movies that appeal to audiences very different from the traditional video game adaptation audience.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:05 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I still want a Saints Row movie. One where the Boss is played by 6 different persons on different parts of the film.

I agree with the assessment the biggest problem with adaptations is that the kids that grew up with games once they started having plots that could be defined in more than one sentence are still in their 20s or early 30s and lack the knowledge or industry pull to do them properly. What's left are cash-ins because a studio bought the option and didn't want to go to waste, and put some people with zero interest in the source material to produce it. And then the tonal shifts, the plot rewrites, the character changes/removals, etc begin pissing everyone off.

Of course, some of those also happen with any other cross-media adaptations, but it doesn't help that a lot of the movies are based on action franchises with paper-thin plots even today (which is even worse if instead of 90-100 minutes they must be the full 120+ blockbuster length - Far Cry was shit, but at least it ended quickly) and changing just a couple of things is likely to derail the movie waaay to much from the source material. The ones that have more fleshed out stories are already filled with cutscenes with cinematic pretensions, which is a trap of a different kind.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:41 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Rampage is gonna be the first to certify fresh, because Dwayne Johnson versus kaiju.

Uh, I might have to go see that.
posted by notsnot at 5:59 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Need I remind everyone that the movie adaption of Goldeneye, despite being in every way inferior to the game that spawned it, is a respectable 78% Fresh?

I’ve heard people say that the game is actually based on the movie, but that makes no sense.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 6:25 PM on March 27, 2018 [21 favorites]

Laura Croft has undergone an interesting progression over the years. As technology improved her games have become more story and character driven, and it seems like something similar is happening in the movies. Angelina Jolie's Croft was more of an over-the-top action hero, while Vikander's version seems smaller scale and more realistic. Like Bruce Willis's John McClane in the first Die Hard, she's stuck in the middle of crazy events that are almost (but not quite) too much for her. It makes the character a lot easier to identify with.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:35 PM on March 27, 2018

Wreck-It Ralph and Ready Player One seem to be doing ok. I suspect that you get good movies about digital games the same way you get good movies about music or sculpture, say "to hell with it" and just do a biopic, a misfit movie, or a bildungsroman with the non-cinematic art used as set dressing or a maguffin.

(Or if your subject is Mozart, just make a lot of shit up.)
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:39 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mean, isn't it pretty well established that a lot of this is because these kinds of movies have historically been made with an eye to profiting from tax breaks and other incentives which relegates the box office performance to a position of fairly low importance? I seem to recall some articles on this at least 10 years ago, specifically regarding Uwe Boll. Game franchises provide some name recognition, and Hollywood Accounting does the rest.
posted by tocts at 7:05 PM on March 27, 2018

I can't believe I'm in here to defend him, but (as my fellow fuzzy-memorist above mentions), Herr Doktor Uwe Boll has probably made more for his video-game-film investors than either of the Tomb Raider films (although I don't know how well that has gone since his German tax shelter financing scheme expired in 2006).
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:14 PM on March 27, 2018

while films like Assassin's Creed and 2016's Warcraft failed to make back even half of their production budget at the domestic box office

Does the domestic box office even matter anymore? I just kind of figured that all the big CG action movies are made for China nowadays.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:52 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

(doffs his cap)

Raul Julia in Street Fighter.

That is all.
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 8:35 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

The first Resident Evil film was exceptional in that it was ahead of the curve on the whole zombie revival.
posted by cazoo at 11:46 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Castlevania, season 1, got 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think it was considered for movie release first.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:57 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Raul Julia in Street Fighter.

Still holder of the title for Best Villain Line Ever:

"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:20 AM on March 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

The Moral Kombat movie theme should give it a positive rating by itself.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:45 AM on March 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

For awhile I felt like the marketing people just didn't Get It that gamers don't want to see the stupid movies of the games they are playing.

A nostalgia or niche or dead property that was meta and snarky would probably work. Like how the Brady Bunch Movie has a 63% on RT, or 21 Jump Street has an 85%. Tim Burton could just make a Grim Fandango movie. They could make Monkey Island, or Saints Row, sure why not. People want to see those for nostalgia, and because there's no more of that thing being made that's any good, and maybe the games are too old or don't have replay value. You can't just play the game again, so maybe you'd go see the movie.

But I assume marketing people don't do that because they're so horny to link up with an active popular brand and maybe the movie doesn't have to be that good? So, as a joke example, they would make something like a PUBG movie. Well, they can't make a PUBG movie that's more fun than playing a game of PUBG. They can't sell, "PUBG but more," because video game companies are already working on that and gamers are quite aware. The gamers whose dollars they are after can just play the game instead, and IME they heap scorn on weird dumb horrible cash ins.

So I feel like there could be good video game movies but the way they approach making them, not thinking how games are different from passive entertainment, means they do the dumb wrong thing over and over. If X is a popular TV show, people will want to see an X movie because they want more X. If X is a popular game, then people are playing X, they are doing all the X they want, and their desire for more X is focussed on playing, not viewing. They're not actually interested in the X flavored brand of passive consumption at all.

But I feel like maybe Overwatch has done something new and can break the mold? Like, it's solved the problem of creating some kind of cross-media worldbuilding thing? And people actually give a shit about the characters enough to consume some kind of outside media and pretend it matters? Which fighting games have been trying to do forever? It seems like it might be true, but every time I see people caring about OW backstories I black out and wake up in the desert.
posted by fleacircus at 5:39 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Raul Julia in Street Fighter.

I bet you a million Bison Bucks that movie will be rebooted within the decade.
posted by duffell at 5:52 AM on March 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think Wreck-It Ralph demonstrates that you can create a good video-game movie. You just can't create a good video game adaptation movie because video games are not necessarily stories in the same way that a novel is a story or a short story is a story. (And admittedly, Hollywood gets the novel and the short story wrong at least half the time.)

There's no good video game adaptation movie for the same reason that there's been no good, feature-length, and mainstream adaptation of music. No, Fantasia doesn't count for abandoning abstraction after one scene in favor of Mickey Mouse and dancing mushrooms.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:17 AM on March 28, 2018

All this will change once the Mass Effect movie comes out, just you wait!

(And wait, and wait...)
posted by ejs at 6:31 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

What if Mass Effect IS the Mass Effect movie?
posted by Artw at 6:38 AM on March 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

I bet you a million Bison Bucks that movie will be rebooted within the decade.

Bison Bucks will be the crypto currency used to crowdfund the movie.
posted by kmz at 8:04 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mean your biggest stumbling block is that video game stories are still pretty fucking awful.

The new Tomb Raider games are some of my favorite, but the stories they tell aren't good or deep or all that interesting. The movie disappointed by cutting out most of the story and keeping the boring and by the numbers stuff. It was, at best, ok, which is fitting at 50%.
posted by graventy at 8:18 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just watched the trailer for the old Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movie last night. Or I tried. It looked so horrible I didn't even finish the trailer.

Can we get a Psychonauts movie? Or how bout Parappa the Rapper? I'd watch those.

I mean your biggest stumbling block is that video game stories are still pretty fucking awful.

True. Thank god we haven't seen a Metal Gear movie ...yet. :s

I know that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was loosely based on the Tarkovsky movie (which I have not seen), but that game itself could make a decent movie/reboot.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:56 AM on March 28, 2018

I would also watch a movie of N.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:58 AM on March 28, 2018

In a world where cats run rampant through the department stores or possibly mansions of our cities...

Only one mouse is brave enough to um... Open doors on them or something.

From the producers that brought you the white-knuckle thrills of Mr. Do.

This Christmas. It's time to fall head-over-heels. For Mappy.
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:46 PM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

"For awhile I felt like the marketing people just didn't Get It that gamers don't want to see the stupid movies of the games they are playing."

I'm inclined to think that the medium of film just isn't as capable as the medium of videogame. Videogame in many ways is the ultimate art medium, it can learn from and apply elements from all other art mediums in history and add an interactive element most others could not. A "good" videogame movie might just be something like watching a "Let's Play," a shallower experience of the game piloted by someone else. I can't think of a lot of videogames that'd be improved by ripping out the interactive and personal elements to make just an 2 hour long gif with sound of a videogame instead.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:48 PM on March 28, 2018

If a board game like Clue could be made into an enjoyable film with a cult following, surely video games could do the same?
posted by FJT at 4:54 PM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

The "video game movie curse" is overly narrow America-centric bullshit anyway, because the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney movie, directed by Takashi Miike(!!!), is a goddamned masterpiece. "No score yet" on Rotten Tomatoes? OBJECTION!
posted by nicebookrack at 6:31 PM on March 28, 2018

So, as a joke example, they would make something like a PUBG movie

Battle Royale already exists!
posted by Panjandrum at 6:44 PM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Phoenix Wright: Ace Adaptation
posted by nicebookrack at 6:51 PM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

So Where the Hell Is My XCOM TV Show?
posted by Artw at 10:29 PM on March 29, 2018

It's in this music video!
posted by Apocryphon at 11:19 PM on March 29, 2018

"Lack of curves," when even Jolie wore padding for the 2001 Tomb Raider.
posted by Iris Gambol at 8:43 PM on April 20, 2018