With the film on the way to the big screen in March, Warner Bros. Pictures is ramping up the Lara Croft hype with the release of the Tomb Raider (2018) trailer #2. It shows off a little more of the story behind the cinematic adaptation of the computer game, as well as a good amount of the action, which sees Alicia Vikander in full adventure mode.
The film is a port of the recent reboot game in the series, which saw Lara heading off to a wild island off the coast of Japan in a bid to pick up the trail of her father’s work before his disappearance. This is pretty much the same for the film as she takes her very first steps to becoming the tomb raider that we know her to be from earlier games in the series.
Trailer #2 also shows off much more of the danger that Lara will face on the island, with a challenging environment, bad weather conditions and mean enemies taking pot shots at her all over the place. Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) plays the main bad guy, Mathias Vogel, and his story is hinted at in the trailer with a link to Lara’s father, who apparently put him on the island years ago.
He appears to be a departure from the Mathias that featured in the game, who was the leader of the sun worshipping cultists that lived on the island, but we’ll have to wait and see how the character develops in the film itself. He looks pretty mad-eyed for the most part, so he could end up being just as much a cult leader in the film as he was in the game, but there’s no reference to this as of yet.
Instead, there’s references to impending global genocide at the hands of the sinister organisation known as Trinity and Mathias appears to be the leader of it all. Either way, it’s all going to come to a head in March in a big way and we’re hoping it doesn’t turn out to be as disappointing as previous computer games adaptations like the Assassin’s Creed Movie.
Some of Lara’s stunts look a bit too Hollywood to be anything other than fantastical, which doesn’t really work all that well, especially with Alicia Vikander’s slight frame. She may well have trained a lot to strengthen up for the role, but there are still scenes that look like she’d do herself if mischief if she tried the moves in real life. You might want to suspend belief before heading out to catch Tomb Raider (2018) on the big screen.
