In short: Tomb Raider (2018)

Young and adventurous Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) follows the traces of her long missing action archaeologist father (Dominic West). Eventually she teams up with Chinese boat captain Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) and ends up on an uncharted island where an evil organization is searching for the tomb of the same Japanese death goddess her father was obsessed with.

This is one of the recent major mainstream Hollywood films I honestly wish I would have enjoyed more. I do like the approach the film shares with the last couple of Tomb Rider videogames to tone the exploitation factor down quite a bit from the incessant leer of the Angelina Jolie films. I also think Alicia Vikander turns out to be a fine choice for the more human version of Lara Croft; and I enjoyed a couple of director Roar Uthaug’s Norwegian films (particularly the genre-wise pretty relevant Escape) quite a bit.

Unfortunately, Uthaug’s film also takes some of the less great elements of the current of Tomb Raider games on board. There is the pretty damn tedious attempt at providing what is still a superhumanly capable pulp heroine with a “relatable background”, so there is a whole slew of scenes about Lara’s tragic Daddy problems to go through, which is about as interesting and exciting as it sounds, and also so badly written it does nothing at all to make our heroine more relatable, but only quite a bit more boring than she needs to be. I’d suggest if you have a character who will eventually get around to have biggish pulpy adventures, trying to give her a believably human background is at best unnecessary, at worst, as it is here, a hindrance to the film ever actually getting around to showing the audience what it actually came to see the character do. I believe what I’m saying is that, instead of daddy issues, I’d rather have seen some Tomb Raiding.

Alas, the first and only tomb to be raided here (unless you count the hidden room in Daddy’s crypt, though you might also count it as an attempt by the film to go all metaphorical on us) pops up 74 minutes into the movie. Of course, this reluctance to get to the actual meat the title promises is another weakness the film shares with the newer videogames. Instead of tomb raiding, we get more daddy issues, a pretty boring villain (Walton Goggins), and a handful of survivalist action sequences. I suspect these scenes are why Uthaug was hired in the first place, but compared to the much cheaper, not overly CGI-laden Escape, they are not terribly good, and demonstrate a curious inability to create action sequences that take place in what feels like actual physical spaces; they are indeed much less convincing than those in the videogames. It’s possible a degree of inexperience of the director with CGI is in part responsible here, but then, a lot of blockbusters now are directed by people who have never made green screen heavy film before and do not suffer from this.


It’s certainly still a watchable enough film – this is no Cruise-Mummy – but it is neither the wild, female-lead pulp adventure of my dreams nor the survivalist yet emotionally gripping thriller with some surprise rage zombie-ism the production company was probably aiming for.

Europa Report (2013)

It's quite a good thing to see the POV style slowly spreading out from Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity style horror movies into not just other types of horror but into different genres as well, places where the techniques these horror films more or less pioneered might be put to good - or even new and interesting - use.

Case in point is Sebastián Cordero's Europa Report, a film that documents a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in search of hints for life outside our ecosphere via the internal and external cameras of the vessel manned by a group of astronauts (Anamaria Marinca, Daniel Wu, Karolina Wydra, Michael Nyqvist, Christian Camargo and Sharlto Copley). This being a movie, things go neither all that easily nor too well for the crew. Their mission is a bit of a different case, and they might in fact find more than they ever could have expected.

POV style techniques work wonders for doing this sort of tale on a budget, with the need to show space in form of vast, spectacular vistas mostly negated by the reality of what cameras in such a situation would be able to capture. On the other hand, Cordero does not use the film's style to avoid showing things to his audience - it's always at least as clear to the audience what's going on as it is to the characters, and the supposed multitude of cameras on board never so much constricts the information we are getting as it focuses it. To me, this seems to be an approach highly appropriate to the kind of SF Europa Report is, as close to hard SF as you'll come and still be able to tell an actual story, but not so close as to mirror the experience of reading a bad science book instead of a novel that is so typical of too much hard SF.

I'm less impressed by the fact that the film seems to get some of its science rather wrong, even though the production design as well as the special effects look perfectly believable and authentic. However, what the film gets right is rather more important to me here, for Europa Report is finally a SF film again that buys into the idea that the endeavour of science, the attempt to widen human knowledge of the universe, particularly through manned space flight, is a heroic thing, something worthy to risk one's life over, and even possibly to die for if one has so chosen. It's one of the rare movie that understand that a space flight going terribly, tragically wrong does not mean space flight or science are bad or a sign of human hubris, but rather that things in a random universe sometimes just go wrong for no reason at all.

This doesn't mean the film is blithe about human pain and suffering. In fact, Europa Report gains some of its strength by acknowledging it absolutely, by showing its characters often shaken by a mixture of awe and fear and trauma, never pretending even a heroic death to be anything but a catastrophe. It's just also arguing that if you die, you might as well die doing something good.

Cordero makes this case with the help of an excellent ensemble cast (uncommon for POV films, all actors you might have seen before in other movies, which isn't really a problem for me but might be for other viewers with a higher need to be convinced of a film's fictional reality), an ability to become emotional without becoming melodramatic - something particularly seldom found in films concerning the idea of personal sacrifice as Europa Report does -, and an equally strong ability to create a sense of wonder out of a handful of ideas, effects, and sets. It's what Science Fiction on a budget should more often be doing, if you ask me.

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