If Tomb Raider hasn’t aged particularly well, it still holds a special place in the pantheon of video game movies-which is a little like being the most distinguished pile of garbage, but still.
#ANGELINA JOLIE TOMB RAIDER MOVIE#
Before the decade was over, Angelina Jolie would even get another crack at making a solid action movie with Salt. In the early 2000s, it was rare to see a blockbuster with a female lead, and Tomb Raider’s success as a kind of female Indiana Jones is the kind of thing that laid groundwork for the later, better female-led action movies Hollywood would eventually produce. It’s not for nothing that Lara Croft is a polarizing figure in the annals of video game history-simultaneously one of the first female leads of her own action-adventure franchise, and an openly sexualized figure with proportions so absurd that Angelina Jolie was deemed insufficiently buxom to play her without a little extra padding.īut just as it’s difficult to fully dismiss the original Tomb Raider games because they were a breakthrough for representation in triple-A video games, it’s difficult to dismiss the movie for being the rare female-led action blockbuster. We didn't want to make them as big as in the game, but at the same time we didn't want to take away from her the things that are, you know, her trademarks." But we did want to put in something for those hardcore game fans. But we did give her a bit of padding there. And in the game, she's a double D, so we took her down some. You know, we just had to enhance me a little. So it wasn't like we had to completely change me. When I wear a tight T-shirt, I look a certain way. "C’mon, I'm not so flat-chested to begin with. In one interview, Jolie was actually asked about whether her breasts were big enough to play Lara Croft, and her answer… well, it’s certainly a snapshot of the dumb shit actresses were forced to contend with in 2001:
Apart from some pretty good stunt work and a basic physical resemblance, there’s just not a lot of skill required to dig into this version of Lara Croft-a problem reflected in the ludicrous questions Jolie faced on the promotional trail leading up to Tomb Raider’s release. Spoken like a true archaeologist!) Instead, Lara lounges around her palatial mansion, fighting training robots, doing bungee-yoga, and taking long, painstakingly shot showers.Īngelina Jolie glides by on charisma alone, winking and raising her eyebrows through pretty much every cool action scene-but it’s safe to say Tomb Raider isn’t really the best use of her talents as an actress. ("Egypt is nothing but pyramids and sand," sulks Lara. When her butler suggests some possible missions, she turns each location down. It begins with Lara rejecting the opportunity to go raid some tombs.
So, 16 years later: Does it hold up? Viewed today, Tomb Raider feels, fittingly enough, like a relic of its era.
#ANGELINA JOLIE TOMB RAIDER SERIES#
Arriving near the peak popularity of the video-game series on which it’s based, Tomb Raider grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, and almost instantly became Jolie’s highest-grossing movie to date. Into that mix came the year’s biggest movie starring a woman: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. And most of the year’s biggest action hits-which included The Mummy Returns, Rush Hour 2, and Jurassic Park III-were sequels to franchises that were already on the decline. Spider-Man, which kicked off our modern superhero era, was still a year away. The first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies heralded a boom in large-scale fantasy. Sign up for as much as you can, give yourself a few months, push yourself to the limit and see, ‘What can I do?’ And you find that there’s a lot you didn’t know and some crazy, weird things you can do or you’re capable of, so I love it.Two thousand one was a strange time for the blockbuster. And I would encourage anybody to do that. But they said you can travel the world and train with the British Military and so I had three months of seeing what I could do. “I said, ‘I really didn’t feel like that character suited me.’ I actually didn’t at first want to do it I said no. While it wasn’t a surprise to hear Jolie credit that realization to the 2001 Tomb Raider movie, it was a surprise to hear that, initially, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to do the movie at all. With Those Who Wish Me Dead now available to watch on HBO Max, I got the opportunity to chat with Jolie about the film and opted to look back on when she first recognized the value of doing her own stuntwork. Needless to say, this is a role that came with a good deal of stuntwork, stunts like jumping off a 60-foot tall fire tower.
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