Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Note: the screenshots featured here are taken from the standard definition DVD release of the film and should not be considered in any way representative of the actual quality of the HD DVD's transfer.

Video game adaptations represent a sort of no-man's land in the movie industry, in which a stalemate exists between pixel perfect translations of the source and those that take considerable liberties in their quest to adapt the material to a format workable on the big screen. No matter which method is chosen, it seems that those responsible can't win. Make the film too much like the game, and the hard core fans will complain that they've seen it all before. Deviate too much from the original formula, and they'll be flogged for their sacrilege. The situation is not helped, of course, by the fact that most video game adaptations have been pretty awful - a by-product, I suspect, of inept handling and the fact that many of the chosen properties are simply not rich enough to survive the move from cartridge (or nowadays, of course, CD or DVD) to celluloid. After all, as wonderful as Nintendo's classic Super Mario Bros. games were, one can hardly make the claim that Mario and Luigi are dynamic, living, breathing personalities capable of carrying a two-hour feature film.

This is where the Tomb Raider franchise is something of an anomaly. A rarity in the medium of gaming, at least at the time of the original Sega Saturn offering's 1996 release, its success was due to its protagonist, the adventurous and improbably large-breasted Lara Croft, rather than the game itself. A brilliantly calculated marketing move, Lara somehow managed to function as both a male fantasy figure and a female role model, and almost immediately became an icon in an industry that, until then, had never really had anything approaching a female action hero. In fact, were it not for their heroine, I rather fancy that the games would have passed by with a whimper. After all, while the first game was something of a revelation with its marriage of classic puzzle solving and gun-toting action, the series got progressively worse the longer it went on, with developer Core Design's commitment to releasing a new instalment every Christmas scuppering any chance of offering anything other than more of the same, hastily rushed through production in order to meet a pre-determined release date. Amazingly, though, despite the fact that the franchise for which she is known is, well, a bit rubbish, Lara Croft the icon has endured, arguably in spite of rather than because of the games.


Lara, then, would seem to be the prime candidate to make the sub-genre of video game to movie adaptations respectable. After all, her back-story, while certainly not the richest ever assembled, was fleshed out considerably more than that of most game characters, and the fact that she had often been likened to an Indiana Jones suggested plenty of scope not only for multiple adventures but also for plenty of the crowd-pleasing adventuring and heart-stopping action sequences necessary for a summer blockbuster. And, it would seem, public familiarity with the series' heroine (after all, most people, even if they've never played the games, have heard the name of Lara Croft) succeeded in drawing in the punters: as of late 2003, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider has grossed more than $270 million worldwide. Just like the game franchise on which it is based, however, it has been successful in spite of rather than because of the film itself. For, while it's not actually anything like as bad as the critics have made out, at the same time it's hard to deny that elements of it are very, very bad.

Let's start, though, with what works, and that is the casting; specifically, the casting of Angelina Jolie as Lara. It's fair to say that this is her movie more than anyone else's, operating first and foremost as a showcase for her pouting and death-defying acrobatics. A number of different actresses were touted for the role, from Sandra Bullock to former Lara model Rhona Mitra, but Paramount eventually went with the at the time relatively unknown Jolie (who had recently won an Oscar for her role in Girl, Interrupted, and was reportedly paid $7 million for the part of Lara, but was far from the prominent tabloid sensation that she is today). In terms of appearance, she has little in common with the CG-rendered character of the games, and she sometimes struggles a little with the accent (although it has to be said that this is one of the best English accents I've heard coming out of the mouth of an American), but you never get the sense that she's taking the role anything less than 100% seriously, and, despite the often po-faced nature of character as written, she imbues her performance with all manner of barely perceptible smirks and eyebrow twitches which suggest that, deep down, she is aware of the patently ridiculous nature of the whole affair.


And is is ridiculous - the script is not merely bad, but bafflingly so. The final credits list six different writers for the screenplay, story and adaptation, among them director Simon West, and, if the 2002 BBC documentary The Hollywood Machine is to be believed, at least another 30 went uncredited. In a break from tradition, I didn't begin this review with a plot synopsis, because I fully believe that it would be impossible to write one with any semblance of coherence. There's a story in there somewhere: something about the mystical Illuminati racing against time to discover the location of two halves of a mystic triangle in time for an inter-planetary alignment, and Lara trying to either stop them or get there before them (I'm not sure which, and I don't think the film is either - perhaps the numerous writers' opinions differed on the matter). When assembled, this triangle allows the owner to control time, but this little detail is mentioned only fleetingly and not revisited until incredibly late in the game, so for the bulk of the film we find ourselves watching people killing each other in order to get their hands on a lump of granite. If this is supposed to create an air of mystery, it fails miserably. Indeed, I've often considered it a shame that the plot outlined in the manual of the first game - the 21-year-old Lara's Himalayan plane crash and battle for survival which awakened in her the adventurer spirit - wasn't used, as it would have provided a more interesting and focused narrative than the mess we get here. Then again, I suppose they wouldn't have been able to call it Tomb Raider.

Ditto with the way in which Lara's back-story has been changed. The basics are retained - Lara is the daughter of a wealthy Earl, she lives in an ornate manor and steals priceless artefacts from tombs - but virtually everything else has been changed, seemingly to facilitate a rather hokey back-story between Lara and her father (called Richard in the film rather than Henshingly - presumably that name would have been considered too much of a mouthful) and to allow Jolie to play alongside her real-life father, Jon Voight. Now, instead of a snooty aristocrat who disowned his daughter because her adventuring was bringing the family name into disrepute, the senior Croft is a fellow adventurer who was killed with Lara was a young girl. Throughout the film, he appears in flashbacks as a sort of guiding angel for Lara, but this aspect of the plot is underdeveloped and rooted in clichés. It's a bit embarrassing to see Voight muddling through the thinly-written material he has been handed, but even this pales in comparison to the comedy routines that the over-qualified Noah Taylor and Chris Barrie are made to perform as Lara's in-house aides (both characters invented for the film). The film does, however, offer the opportunity to see the current James Bond, Daniel Craig, sporting an American accent in the role of Lara's ex-lover and frequent sparring partner, Alex West.


The film also features a number of extremely effective if decidedly silly set-pieces, many of them filmed in locations as diverse as Cambodia (which sparked Jolie's orphan-collecting hobby) and Alaska (doubling for Siberia). The stand-out comes early, consisting of an armed raid on the Croft manor, in which the pyjama-clad Jolie, performing most of her own stunts, dispatches a SWAT team while suspended from the ceiling by a bungee cord, while Chris Barrie gets to tote a shotgun while wearing his dressing gown and slippers. The sequence is well-shot and, unusually for an action set-piece in a recent blockbuster, coherently edited (West is a graduate of the Jerry Bruckheimer School of Filmmaking, but thankfully he keeps the ADHD-cutting to a minimum here), while the impressive stunt choreography allows full use to be made of Kirk Petruccelli's evocative set design. The rest of the action sequences are not as good, and at least one is hampered by some jaw-droppingly bad CGI, but they all manage to pull off the difficult task of being enjoyably over the top rather than just completely ridiculous.

Tomb Raider is far from the disaster that it has so often been characterised. Yes, there are moments that will have you shaking your head as you wonder how anyone could possibly have thought they would be a good idea, but I suspect that the knowledge that this was a video game adaptation did far more damage to the film's reputation than any of its own inherent flaws. The script is a monumental disaster, but that doesn't make it any worse than countless other summer blockbusters that get a much easier ride at the hands of the critics, and at least this one has enough self-awareness to know that it is, first and foremost, a cheesy action spectacle and a vehicle for Angelina Jolie and her padded bra. And, when all said and done, it can't help but be better than Super Mario Bros.


HD DVD Presentation

As the third of the major studios to pledge allegiance to the HD DVD format (although it will also be releasing title for the rival Blu-ray at a later date), Paramount entered the game after some delays with a considerably less ambitious slate of titles than Warner or Universal, and it has to be said that the films chosen for release are somewhat surprising. A naturally soft-looking title by virtue of the manner in which it was shot, Tomb Raider looks decent, and is a considerable step up from its extremely blurry standard definition incarnation, but it simply doesn't "wow" in comparison with the likes of Universal's stellar work on Serenity, or even a lesser release like Warner's Constantine. Brief moments are as good as anything I've seen so far (for example, Lara's sun-tinted shower sequence looks razor-sharp - whoever encoded this scene certainly took pleasure in their work!), but for the most part, there is a sheen of softness covering the image that occasionally looks more like the screenshots I have seen of Blu-ray releases like House of Flying Daggers.

Another problem is edge enhancement. It's not severe, but it's there, and affects some scenes worse than others. I am led to believe that the VC1 encoding tools currently offer no option for adding edge enhancement, so it stands to reason that the aliasing on display here was present in the original master. Whether a non-tampered master even exists is anyone's guess, but regardless of where the fault lies, Tomb Raider is the least impressive HD DVD title I've seen thus far.

One final note: like its Paramount stablemate, Sleepy Hollow, Tomb Raider was colour timed using a traditional lab process unlike the digital intermediates used for the likes of Constantine and Million Dollar Baby. As such, the HD DVD transfer is sourced from a film element rather than a digital master, which results in its look being a little "rougher", with more pronounced grain and some light print damage. This, however, is accurate to the look of the source and should not be seen as a defect in any way.

Paramount have provided four audio tracks: English, French and Spanish Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 variants and a DTS 5.1 track. The inclusion of the latter is a little strange, given that Toshibia's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players (the only ones on the market as of writing) automatically convert DD-Plus to a DTS stream in the absence of DD-Plus compatible hardware, and a comparison between the two English tracks revealed no noticeable differences. To tell the truth, I was a little underwhelmed by the sound of Tomb Raider. The mix is not poor by any means, but, for such an action-oriented title, it lacks punch, with the opening battle between Lara and the robot feeling rather constrained. By contrast, the French track has a lot more kick to it, although this is at least partially due to it being set at a higher default volume.

English, English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles have been included for the film and all of the extras apart from the audio commentary.


Extras

Paramount's initial slate of HD DVD releases have all duplicated the extras of their standard definition counterparts pretty faithfully, and Tomb Raider is no exception. The only new materials on offer are the film's teaser and theatrical trailers, which were absent from the DVD, but are present and correct here - in high definition, no less, unlike the trailers on Warner and Universal's releases, which so far have been limited to 480p.

Otherwise, it's business as usual. First up is an audio commentary by Simon West, which is a decent if somewhat subdued affair. West is given to lapses of silence, and the nature of his delivery strongly suggests that this is an at least partially pre-scripted track, but he imparts a fair number of interesting factoids, even if his comments are generally focused on the various action set-pieces rather than giving an idea of the broader picture, and the man is clearly proud of the film he has created.

A variety of EPK-style featurettes follow, covering a wide range of topics from the origins of the original game to Angelina Jolie's punishing fitness regime. The material on offer is fairly interesting, but unfortunately is hampered by its presentation, in that everything is edited together in an incredibly breathless manner that doesn't allow so much of a second of space to be wasted.

Four deleted scenes are also included, in addition to an alternate main title sequence, which showcases a more abstract concept that, ultimately, outstays its welcome, as well as a music video for the overplayed and extremely annoying song "Elevation" by U2.


Overall

As one of Paramount's HD DVD launch titles, the visual presentation of Tomb Raider is problematic but essentially faithful to its origins. As a catalogue title, the "only" element it offers over its standard definition counterpart is essentially the improved image quality, and I can't imagine too many people rushing out to buy this, but if, like me, you enjoy the film as something of a guilty pleasure, you could do far worse in choosing this from the current high definition line-up.

About My Equipment:

The HD DVD reviewed here was played on a Toshiba HD-A1 player outputting the video in 1080i mode. Two displays were tested: a 1366x768 Sony BRAVIA KDL-32V2000 32" LCD TV connected via HDMI, and a 1680x1050 Sony MFM-HT205 20" LCD monitor connected via component. Audio was output to a Creative Labs Inspire 5700 5.1 audio setup with an onboard Dolby Digital/DTS decoder. Because my hardware does not support the new Dolby Digital-Plus format, the HD DVD player automatically converted the audio stream to DTS.