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Video Killed the Video Game Star
The danger of bringing Lara Croft to life — in a live-action feature film, at least — is that once the buxom cyber-action hero holsters her guns and is forced to banter with other characters, she might turn out to be lame. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — the most extravagant attempt to convert a video game into a Hollywood film — spends far too much screen time exploring what motivates its heroine, who often comes off as a rich brat and an emotional weakling. The tag line for some of the film’s publicity reads: "Who is Lara Croft?" But do viewers even care what makes her tick? The magic of the immensely popular video game series on which the film is based is that Lara is only an exaggerated outline.
Yes, players are told some basic facts about her: she is an heiress, a fiercely independent adventurer, and a well-educated young woman who lives to kick butt and decode ancient mysteries. But instead of probing the depths of Lara’s psyche, each installment of the game simply asks: "What can Lara Croft do next?" One of the key pleasures of the video games is directing and watching Lara’s jumping, shooting, climbing, back-flipping, and strutting. The digital version of Lara is essentially a series of algorithms placed in various perilous and picturesque settings. Lara Croft’s character in the video game series is only three-dimensional in graphical terms, not psychological ones. She offers a 3-D animated picture of fantastic proportions, and this is all for the best. In fact, some scholars who study 3-D graphical environments argue that it is the cartoonish aspect of game characters that give them their appeal. (See, for example, Bruce Damer’s "History and Manifesto on Virtual Worlds and a Vision for its Future.") After all, video game players, unlike movie-goers, are encouraged to become the main character rather than to simply identify with her. If Lara’s picture in the games were to become too detailed — or if her personality became too distinct — players might feel less a part of the action on the monitor. The movie version of Tomb Raider is at its best when Lara (Angelina Jolie) is in stunt mode. The opening scene, for instance, thrusts viewers into a dungeon where a camera hovers around Lara as she hangs upside down from a rope. Lara then stylishly performs acrobatics inspired by the game. Techno music and gunfire blares as she fights killer robots. And in a clever move, the whole scene turns out to be a practice session in Lara’s mansion — thus paying homage to the structure of the games, which always begin with a demo designed to let players practice their skills in a relatively safe setting. Visually, the movie also often succeeds in presenting Lara as a hyper-real vision that you just can’t take your eyes off. Yes, just like the games, this means objectifying Lara’s body, especially Jolie’s stuffed chest; one woman in the theater said as the closing credits rolled, "Wow, it really was boob raider." But the images can easily be read ironically, and even comically, since they are so exaggerated that it’s hard to imagine anyone really expecting a person to achieve the body and skills Lara possesses. One of the best non-action scenes in the film shows a figure showering — it at first seems to be Lara but turns out to be a guy. The film is playing a joke on the audience, teasing us for expecting a constant focus on Lara’s body — which, of course, it otherwise consistently delivers. Where the movie goes wrong, however, is its failed attempt to make Lara more than a superficial vision for our imagination to fill out. One example is the film’s overemphasis on Lara’s longing for her dead father (played by Jolie’s actual father, Jon Voight), an archeologist who perished in the field. In one scene, bad guy Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) tells our heroine: "I know what you want, Lara." "Oh, I doubt it," she replies coolly. But he does seem to know. He easily talks Lara into helping him locate a hidden triangle relic so that they can gain the power to control time (thereby allowing Lara to see her father again). Even more annoying, the movie suggests that Lara is in love with a money-grubbing archeologist named Alex West (Daniel Craig), who has joined a cult that wants to rule the world. All of this is probably meant to add depth, but it chips away at Lara’s mystique. After Lara saves the world, the movie even tries to suggest that Lara has grown as a character in the course of her adventure — something that I don’t remember the games attempting. Lara demonstrates her "character development" by wearing a white dress and a hat, like the true lady she is supposed to be. (Throughout the film, Lara’s servants had complained that she should act more like a lady, which she defied by constantly wearing revealing outfits, even in arctic weather.) In the film’s final moment, however, the butler and the live-in computer-geek offer Lara a silver platter with her two trusty pistols on it. Lara grabs the guns and prepares to switch back to adventure-mode, and a freeze-frame saves the thought for the inevitable sequel. So who is Lara Croft? She is a distinctly digital creation that defies rational or psychological explanation. The movie would have been far more enjoyable had the plot ignored Hollywood conventions that require a love interest and character development. Show us Lara in action. Unfortunately, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider takes its place among the many bad films borne of popular video games whose proud ranks include Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Super Mario Bros. Perhaps video game characters should be left in the interactive fantasy worlds where they were born. Jeffrey R. Young covers technology for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He can be reached by e-mail or via his Web site Related Sites |
