Tomb Raider (film)

Tomb Raider is a 2018 action-adventure film directed by Roar Uthaug, with a screenplay by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, from a story by Evan Daugherty and Robertson-Dworet. An American and British co-production, it is based on the 2013 video game of the same name, with some elements of its sequel by Crystal Dynamics, and is a reboot of the Tomb Raider film series. The film stars Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, who embarks on a perilous journey to her father's last-known destination, hoping to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, and Kristin Scott Thomas appear in supporting roles.

Principal photography took place from January to June 2017 at the Warner Bros. Studios in the United Kingdom, and in Cape Town, South Africa. The first Tomb Raider film not to be distributed by Paramount Pictures, it was released in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2018, and in the United States on March 16, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures, in RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, IMAX and 4DX. The film grossed $274 million worldwide, equal to the Angelina Jolie's original film in 2001 and more than its 2003 sequel.

The film received mixed reviews from critics, with some describing the plot as "paint-by-numbers", and others praising the action sequences, tone, grittiness and realistic take on the franchise. Vikander's performance was highly praised but the characterization of Croft drew a polarized response; some described her as a "capable, powerful, and unobjectified heroine", while others called her bland, and a "punching bag and onlooker." It is the all-time best reviewed film based on an video game, currently sitting at 51% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes tied with Rampage.

Plot
Following the disappearance of her father, Lord Richard Croft, Lara Croft makes a living as a bike courier. When she is arrested after a bike accident involving a police car, Richard's business partner Ana Miller posts her bail. After never claiming her inheritance for many years, believing her father to still be alive, Miller warns Lara that if she does not claim her vast inheritance, her father's country estate, Croft Manor, will be sold off. Lara reluctantly accepts and gains access to a secret chamber in her father's tomb. There she finds a pre-recorded video message from Richard detailing his research into Himiko, the mythical Queen of Yamatai who was said to command the power over life and death. Richard warns Lara to destroy all of his research, but she ignores his warnings so that she can investigate further.

Lara travels to Hong Kong where she hires Lu Ren, captain of the ship Endurance, to sail into the Devil's Sea and the island of Yamatai. The ship capsizes in a violent storm and Lara is washed ashore where she is knocked unconscious. She awakens only to encounter Mathias Vogel, the leader of an expedition to locate Himiko's tomb. The expedition has been funded by a shadowy organization called Trinity, which seeks to harness and weaponize Himiko's power. Vogel takes Lara prisoner, claiming that he killed her father and revealing that he intends to use Richard's research to continue his expedition. He adds Lara and Lu Ren to his slave force; eventually, the two of them try to escape, and Lara is the only one successful.

After surviving rapids and narrowly avoiding getting thrown over a waterfall, Lara is forced to kill a Trinity guard after nightfall. She follows a mysterious figure through the jungle, and discovers that the figure is her father, who stayed on the island to prevent Trinity from finding Himiko's tomb. After Lara convinces him that she is real and not a figment of his imagination, Richard treats her injuries. Despite his protests, Lara sets off the next morning to recover his research from Vogel's camp. Lara makes contact with Lu Ren, and he, along with the other slaves, stage distractions that allow Lara to infiltrate the Trinity camp and recover her father's journal. In the ensuing chaos, Richard makes his way to Himiko's tomb and is captured by Vogel, who persuades Lara to open the tomb.

The party navigates a series of booby traps and locates Himiko's sarcophagus. When a Trinity soldier attempts to remove her corpse, he is infected by a highly infectious pathogen that reduces those infected to an aggressive zombie-like state. Lara realizes that Himiko was an asymptomatic carrier of the virus, who chose to entomb herself so that she could not infect others. Vogel concludes that he cannot remove Himiko's body and instead settles for detaching a finger, which he seals in a pouch. In the confusion, Lara and Richard overpower the remaining soldiers, though Vogel escapes and Richard becomes infected. Knowing there is no cure, Richard proposes destroying Himiko's tomb to prevent the disease from spreading across the world. Lara pursues Vogel as Richard sets off a bomb, killing himself and sealing the tomb. Lara confronts and kills Vogel by infecting him with the finger. She escapes the tomb as it collapses, regrouping with Lu Ren and the slaves; they commandeer a Trinity helicopter to escape Yamatai.

Lara returns to London, where she formally accepts her inheritance and inadvertently discovers that Trinity's front company, Patna, is actually a subsidiary of Croft Holdings. She proceeds to investigate Trinity further and begins to suspect that Ana is one of their agents who manipulated her into accepting her inheritance; this was to have Lara sign over control of Croft Holdings' business operations to her when Richard stopped cooperating with Trinity. Having witnessed Trinity's ruthlessness firsthand, she prepares for her next adventure.

Cast

 * Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft
 * Maisy De Freitas as 7-year-old Lara
 * Emily Carey as 14-year-old Lara
 * Dominic West as Lord Richard Croft, Lara's archaeologist father.
 * Walton Goggins as Mathias Vogel, a rival archaeologist of Richard Croft, and a member of Trinity, a shadowy organization.
 * Daniel Wu as Lu Ren, the ship captain who helps Lara to search for her father.
 * Kristin Scott Thomas as Ana Miller, an associate at Richard Croft's company, Croft Holdings.
 * Derek Jacobi as Mr. Yaffe, an associate at Croft Holdings.

Additionally, Nick Frost plays pawn shop owner Alan and Jaime Winstone portrays his wife Pamela. Hannah John-Kamen and Antonio Aakeel play Lara's friends Sophie and Nitin, respectively. Duncan Airlie James plays Terry, a mixed martial arts club operator. Josef Altin portrays Lara's boss Bruce, Billy Postlethwaite and Roger Nsengiyumva appear as Bill and Rog, Lara's co-workers and opponents at the race, and Michael Obiora portrays Baxter, the Croft Holdings' receptionist.

Development
GK Films first acquired the rights to make the film in 2011. Norwegian director Roar Uthaug came on board in November 2015, and Alicia Vikander was announced as the new Lara Croft in April 2016. Deadline Hollywood had previously reported that Daisy Ridley was considered for the role, though she later stated in an interview that it was just a "crazy rumor." Walton Goggins was announced to play the villain in December 2016, and much of the rest of the cast was revealed in early 2017.

Filming
Principal photography on the film began on January 23, 2017, in Cape Town, South Africa, and ended on June 9, 2017, at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden. Wilton House near Salisbury in Wiltshire was the location for exterior shots for Croft Manor. The waterfall sequence involving the plane was filmed at a waterpark at Lee Valley, outside of London, at a venue that had been built for the 2012 Summer Olympics, and was combined with footage filmed in South Africa.

Music
On September 11, 2017, It was announced that Junkie XL signed on as the film's composer after being removed from Justice League. The soundtrack was released in digital and physical formats on March 9, 2018 by Sony Classical Records with the Vinyl being released later on August 24, 2018.

Visual effects
The visual effects are provided by Scanline VFX and Supervised by Nick Crew and Paul Linden with the help of Method Studios, Rising Sun Pictures, Mr. X, Soho VFX, Zero VFX and Factory VFX.

Release
Tomb Raider premiered on March 2, 2018, in Berlin, Germany, at an exclusive preview with invited guests and cosplaying fans. It was released in the United States on March 16, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures, days after the fifth anniversary of the franchise's video game reboot. The film received an IMAX 3D and a RealD 3D release. It also received an 4DX release in selected countries.

Outside the US, the film was released in most territories between March 8–16, 2018, in Japan on March 21, 2018, and in Poland on April 6, 2018.

Home media
Tomb Raider was released on digital streaming platforms on May 29, 2018. A 4K UHD Blu-Ray, Blu-ray and DVD release occurred on June 12, 2018. It was released in Australia on June 18, 2018 for Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D and DVD.

Box office
Tomb Raider grossed $58.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $216.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $274.7 million, against a production budget in the range of $90–106 million. In order to break even, estimations say the film needed to gross at least $275 million worldwide.

In the United States and Canada, Tomb Raider was released alongside Love, Simon and I Can Only Imagine, and was projected to gross $23–29 million from 3,854 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $9.1 million on its first day (including $2.1 million from Thursday night previews). It went on to open to $23.5 million, finishing second at the box office, behind Black Panther ($27 million in its fifth week). It fell 55% to $10.6 million in its second weekend, finishing 5th at the box office. It grossed $4.9 million in its third weekend, falling 51% and finishing seventh.

Internationally, the film opened in nine Asian countries a week prior to its United States debut. It made $14.2 million over the weekend, with Korea's $2.9 million being the biggest market. The film opened in China on March 16, 2018, and made $12.3 million the first day. It was the fifth-highest-grossing day for a Warner Bros. film, opening 6% higher than Wonder Woman, and went on to debut to $41 million. , the film's largest markets were China ($78.4 million), the United Kingdom ($10.4 million), France ($10.1 million), and the CIS countries ($7.5 million).

Critical response
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 51% based on 274 reviews, and an average rating of 5.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Tomb Raider reboots the franchise with a more grounded approach and a star who's clearly more than up to the task—neither of which are well served by an uninspired origin story." At the time of its release, it was the best-reviewed live-action video game film in the history of the site, before being surpassed by Rampage a month later. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, the same score earned by the 2001 film; PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it a 70% positive score.

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 2 out of 4 stars and said, "The Lara Croft reboot Tomb Raider isn’t half bad for an hour. Then there’s another hour. That hour is quite bad. It’s no fun watching your action heroine get shoved, punched and kicked to the sidelines of her own movie, while the menfolk take over and take turns overacting before expiring." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a mixed review, criticizing the story but praising Vikander, and writing, "When all the one-dimensional supporting characters and familiar action moves fall by the wayside, the one thing left standing is Vikander...The film strains credulity even for a vid-game fantasy by letting the leading lady recover awfully quickly from bad injuries, but other than that Vikander commands attention and is the element here that makes Tomb Raider sort of watchable." Matt Bobkin of Exclaim! gave the film a 5 out of 10 score, writing "Tomb Raider is at its best when delivering mindless action, but don't bother trying to glean any sort of deeper, subversive meaning."

Owen Gleiberman of Variety praised the film, saying that "The exciting surprise of the new Tomb Raider, directed by the Norwegian genre specialist Roar Uthaug, is that it doesn’t tamp down Vikander’s inner flame, or the three-dimensionality of her talent; it doesn’t fold and insert her into an overly gymnastic and CGI-happy thrill ride. The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness."

Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, and said, "this is a beautifully crafted and unpretentious piece of action cinema, with a number of sequences that are as gorgeous as they are thrilling, and a female hero who's as elegant as she is deadly: an ass-kicking Audrey Hepburn."

Retrospectively, some critics have argued that Tomb Raider was overly scrutinised by press compared to similar films in the same genre. Editor in Large of IndieWire Anne Thompson theorised that it wasn't marketed enough to smart women. Thompson also wrote that Tomb Raider "was a well-mounted, intelligently wrought adventure, more grounded in the real world than its fantasy predecessors" and that "it establishes the action bonafides of both Vikander and director Roar Uthaug"

Future
Alicia Vikander has expressed interest in returning as Lara Croft for a second film, stating that "If there's an audience out there for it, then I would love to".

In 2015, Adrian Askarieh, producer of the Hitman films, stated that he hoped to oversee a shared universe of Square Enix films with Just Cause, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Thief, but admitted that he does not have the rights to Tomb Raider.