Tomb Raider is the video game franchise Hollywood just can’t leave alone. After Lara Croft dominated 1990s pop culture, it was only a matter of time before she conquered the big screen, and Angelina Jolie portrayed the intrepid explorer across two cinematic installments between 2001 and 2003. The video games would later revitalize themselves with a more modern approach, and Tomb Raider‘s movie output duly followed suit with Alicia Vikander in 2018.
Despite abandoned plans for a sequel to Vikander’s movie, Tomb Raider is making a third attempt at live-action glory, with Game of Thrones‘ Sophie Turner inheriting Lara’s green tank top in an upcoming Prime Video TV series. 2018’s Tomb Raider reboot represented a vast improvement over the Jolie movies, and Prime Video may well continue that trend. Nevertheless, it seems like every live-action Tomb Raider adaptation has made the same mistake.
Tomb Raider Still Hasn’t Adapted The Games That Made Lara Croft Iconic
Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider duology borrowed the basic concept of the video games and Lara Croft herself, but ditched everything else. Neither movie had any narrative basis in the game series, introducing completely original supporting characters and an unfamiliar storyline. In 2018, Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider movie loosely mirrored the game reboot from five years prior.
It isn’t yet clear what Prime Video’s Tomb Raider story will be, but the presence of characters such as Zip and Atlas DeMornay suggests any video game inspiration will be taken from the mid/late eras of the franchise.
25 years down the line, the world of live-action Tomb Raider adaptations is, therefore, continuing to ignore the stories that made Lara famous in the first place, namely 1996’s Tomb Raider and the following year’s Tomb Raider II.
Tomb Raider & Tomb Raider II Are Perfect For The Live-Action Treatment
The very first Tomb Raider game involves Lara being hired by a revived ruler of Atlantis, Jacqueline Natla, who was locked away by her fellow leaders for crimes against her people. Lara competes with rival explorer Larson to obtain pieces of the Scion artifact, discovers Natla’s true identity, then defeats her in battle after thwarting her evil plan to breed an army of Atlantean mutants.
In Tomb Raider II, Lara becomes embroiled in a race against the mafia to nab China’s fabled Dagger of Xian, hidden under the Great Wall. The mafia wins, and Lara is forced to take down a giant, fire-breathing dragon with a pair of uzis that keep running out of ammo.
These are the adventures that turned Lara Croft into a household name. One could argue that the respective plots of Tomb Raider and its sequel are too thin to sustain a movie or TV adaptation, and they’d be absolutely right. Still, it’s not like concocting original narratives has served the movies well thus far, with each of Lara’s cinematic installments falling short of critical acclaim.
1996’s Tomb Raider offered great villains, exciting set pieces involving dinosaurs and mutants, and a juicy mythological backstory. There’s plenty of room to flesh out the Natla angle with extra subplots and deeper characterization to turn that first game into a worthwhile feature-length movie.
Likewise, Tomb Raider II‘s mafia antagonists and massive stonking dragon represented a high point the games struggled to beat. The sequel also included a host of cinematic locations: an opera house, an oil rig, a shipwreck, and a paranormal temple guarded by moving statues. There’s enough in Tomb Raider II for a live-action movie or TV show to dig its teeth into and embellish with additional material as opposed to starting from scratch with a script that bears no correlation whatsoever with the video games.
Let’s Be Honest About Why Tomb Raider Keeps Getting Remade
It’s impossible to deny the role nostalgia has played in keeping Tomb Raider going for the past 30 years, both in the video game realm and with the ongoing string of adaptations. Despite her successful 2013 reinvention, it’s Lara Croft’s status as a ’90s icon that has created a constant demand for more Tomb Raider on our screens, and one look at the retro style of Sophie Turner’s iteration confirms as much.
There’s nothing wrong with Prime Video’s Tomb Raider being fueled by fond memories of the ’90s, but it’s all the more baffling that no one is adapting the games from that era. If nostalgia is the name of the game here, nothing will get audiences more fired up than Lara driving a speedboat through the canals of Venice or shooting down a Tyrannosaurus.
- Created by
-
Toby Gard
- First TV Show
-
Revisioned: Tomb Raider
- Latest TV Show
-
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft
