TOMB RAIDER
Alicia beats Angelina’s rating on IMDB... and the picture on UHD Blu-ray looks superb, despite the plot holes...
Some intellectual property — I guess that’s what we call fictional characters these days — simply won’t translate well to the movie screen. Or so it seems. It’s a mystery why this might be. How come Thor and Iron Man can work so well, but poor old Lara Croft only gets IMDB ratings of 5.8 and 5.5 for Angelina Jolie’s two outings in the character, and a slightly better 6.4/10 for Alicia Vikander’s version.
Could it be the actors? It seems unlikely. Jolie and Vikander are both first-class. Indeed, both are Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners (Jolie in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted and Vikander in 2016 for The Danish Girl).
It has been quite a few years since I watched Jolie’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and I never caught the sequel. But I think I know what’s wrong with this attempted reboot — ininspired cliches, careless writing and characters doing dumb things.
Lara’s father disappeared some years ago. She looks to be in her twenties, but I spent the first part of the movie trying to reconcile in my mind the claim that he’d gone missing seven years earlier with the flashback of their farewell, when she’s clearly about eight years old. That’d make her 15 years old now. But later there’s another flashback to another farewell between her father and a now teenaged Lara. Oh. I guess he make it back safely from the earlier trip.
But enough of that. This is an action movie, and the action is well-realised. There are a couple of fine set piece sequences, including one involving a rusted-out WWII plane hanging perilously over a waterfall. The physics looked realistic.
And clearly international audiences enjoyed the spectacle. Back in 2001 Jolie’s movie made US$274 million worldwide (off a production budget of $US115 million). Almost half (47.7%) of that revenue came from the US. The 2018
Tomb Raider also made a worldwide box office of US$274 million (production budget: $94 million). But the market has changed. Only 21% came from the US. The film made more money in China than in America. I think we can expect a sequel. With both Tomb Raider and Ready
Player One, it seems that Warner Bros is beginning to establish a trend. Again we have Dolby Atmos sound (although again it defaults to the DTS-HD Master Audio
track) and again with Dolby Vision. The sound is excellent. It’s clear for the exposition and the exchanged words which are supposed to be heartrending. As always, louder guns would be better, but that’s something that’s rarely done really well.
The picture is gorgeous. The extras make it clear that most of the work was in-camera. Even for the storm scenes with the small ship, they dismantled it and put it inside a huge studio.
The movie appears to have been shot entirely in digital format. IMDB tells us that 3.4K Arriraw was used. This is not like the 2K or 4K on your phone, or even your interchangeable lens camera. This stuff is RAW, as in unprocessed and uncompressed. Nothing is lost before it gets to things like colour grading. The digital intermediate was 4K. And it looks like it. Limitless detail on UltraHD. There was one scene (in her family tomb) near the start which was rather soft, but that was about the only weakness, and that was only a few seconds. Tomb Raider is a fine visual spectacle, showing just how good Ultra-HD Blu-ray can look.