Netflix Tomb Raider Is A Hilarious Nightmare

So, you may have noticed that I've been away for a week or so, doing my best to drink every bar in New England dry, and generally having a delightful time away from YouTube. But hey, all good things have got to come to an end, and in my case, they ended on the flight home, where I decided to kill some time by firing up Netflix and watching a few episodes of Tomb Raider, The Legend of Lara Croft. I mean really, when you've got a smoking hot, kick-ass woman as your main character, action, adventure and exotic locations, how can you really go wrong? What face is that? My thinking one. Jesus wept. Honestly, apart from the god-awful Resident Evil series that I'm still having therapy for, I don't think I've seen any show misuse its source material in such spectacular fashion before. Tomb Raider is a fucking embarrassment that shames the very name of Lara Croft, sacrifices character and story integrity to work in all the tedious and cringey tropes of modern writing, wastes its talented voice cast on clunky dialogue and rams it all home with shitty animation that looks about 20 years out of date. In short, it's a boring and pandering mess that proves once again why Lara Croft absolutely cannot be adapted for modern audiences. Anyway, grab your sports bra and wildly impractical bow and arrow that's far less efficient than a gun and let's get the plot summary over with. So the show kicks off with a young, relatively green Lara on a mission in Chile to recover an ancient puzzle box artifact, and for the first few minutes things seem to be going relatively well. There's all the usual Tomb Raider hallmarks you'd expect, plenty of traps, dangerous wildlife, death-defying leaps of faith and a few bad guys to spice things up. Lara duly finds the box and hands it off to her mentor, Roth, only for more baddies to show up, forcing Roth to kill them. I love how Lara acts all shocked when she sees this, like Jesus, these guys were trying to kill you a few minutes ago, what the fuck did you think was gonna happen when they caught up to you? Anyway, flash forward 3 years or so and we're introduced to a much tougher and more experienced Lara who for some reason is having a fistfight with a woman in a Lucha Libre mask, and at that moment I knew that this show was fucked. See I get why they did this, they wanted to show the audience how much of a tough, tenacious fighter Lara is now, taking a beating but refusing to back down against a superior opponent, and how she's no longer the naive young woman that we saw in the intro. That's nice and all, but the thing is, it completely misunderstands the essence of her character. Lara Croft isn't some lumbering brawler who gets into bare-knuckle boxing matches for fun. She's supposed to be smarter, more sophisticated and cooler headed than that. She's an adventurer, not a fighter, and she doesn't have to prove herself to anyone. The thrill for her is exploring the unknown, finding the unfindable, overcoming obstacles and outthinking traps and enemies. Yeah, she'll defend herself when she has to, but in that case, she's more likely to resort to guns than fists. You know, because guns are actually pretty good at levelling the playing field and they allow someone who isn't particularly big or strong to hold their own against bigger opponents. But oh well, whatever. Pretty soon she's contacted by non-threatening male sidekick number 1 and told to stop moping around and come home because apparently her little group of super friends just can't live without her. So she comes home to Croft Manor and runs into non-threatening male sidekick number 2, who's an absolute fanny with a personality more irritating than a sandpaper condom. And after more moping around, she decides to donate all her family treasures to a museum because she thinks it'll help her move on or something. I literally cannot understand how they expect to reconcile this version of Lara with the one in the original game, which canonically is due to happen shortly after the events of this show. Anyway, whatever. The point is that after going off alone to mope around some more, Lara spots a thief who steals the puzzle box from the start of the episodes. And in the 3 years that she's had this thing, she's never once tried to open it. Anyway, this is our main baddie, Charles, who's out to take revenge against the secret society who murdered his dad. And the way he plans to do this is to recover 4 ancient artifacts that have been scattered across the globe, bringing them all together and then using them to blow up the world or something. I don't really know, man. The methadone was kicking in pretty hard by that point, so I was tuning out towards the end. Anyway, for the most part, it's your standard Tomb Raider setup. We've got a bad guy trying to unleash powers beyond his control, so Lara has to travel around the world in a race against time to recover the 4 pieces before Charles does. I say, old boy, this calls for some HARD. CORE. MOPING. Not to mention the classic staples of all good Tomb Raider games. Interpersonal dramas, daddy issues, a good bit of crying and a possible lesbian relationship. Oh yeah, Lara's gay now, by the way. Or at least as heavily implied as the writers could possibly get away with, because heterosexual relationships in modern entertainment are rarer than female apologies these days. You know when you construct an image of a showrunner for something like this, and you keep telling yourself, nah, that's just a cliche, they can't possibly look like that. Well, there you go. Now, there's a lot of things to criticise about this show, but by far the biggest one is the fucking protagonists. And what's so annoying for me is that the path to success was practically laid out for them. This show actually had the potential to be a neat bridge between the rebooted prequel trilogy and the classic original games that follow on from them, finally giving us a Lara who's more in step with the version that we all know and love. Are you serious? Nope. Instead, we're stuck with the same mopey, weepy, emotionally fragile wet rag that we've been dragging around for three increasingly tedious games. The only difference now is that she's swapped one dead father figure for another one to feel sad about, putting her in exactly the same position as before and accomplishing absolutely nothing. You know, for a show that's supposedly all about female empowerment, it's kinda weird that it insists on making its protagonist beholden to men at all times. Why does everyone insist on sucking the fun out of a protagonist like Lara Croft when she's literally the easiest character in the world to write? She's an adventurer who takes on jobs because it's fun. She likes the challenge. She loves travel and history and finding lost treasure. She was designed to be a female Indiana Jones with a touch of James Bond sophistication thrown in, and that's why she worked so fucking well. She wasn't really a character that we were supposed to know intimately. She was more of an icon, an archetype who was compelling precisely because of what we didn't know about her. It gave her a mystique that teased little bits of information but always left you wanting more. It's not rocket science, but the more layers of narrative complexity and cliched backstory they've tried to heap on her over the years, the more they've polluted the simple elegance of her original archetype. I don't want Lara Croft to be tied down by constant guilt and fun-killing self-doubt, or surrounded by a bunch of naggy friends who do half the work for her and are constantly having to push her forward against her will. The Lara Croft that I grew up with was a loner by choice, because she didn't need other people to validate her own existence. She only had herself to rely on, and that was enough. And it's not like we're dealing with the A-Team here either. Jonah's a big affable buffoon who exists only to support everything that Lara says and does. Camilla's inserted purely so the writers can have a will-they-won't-they relationship with Lara, and Zip makes me want to punch right through my TV screen every time he shows up. The guy is simply insufferable, he's about as funny as a bridesmaid's speech, and the decision to make him as campily, flamboyantly gay as possible undermines what could have been a perfectly good aspect of his character if it was handled with more subtlety than a rainbow-coloured chainsaw. Why do you have to reduce guys like him into the most tedious stereotypes imaginable? Charles had a tiny bit of potential to act as a decent foil for Lara by morphing into a villain that's more complex than he seems at first, and there's a clumsy attempt to parallel their different ways of dealing with personal loss, but it never gets going because his character is so melodramatic and weighed down by clunky dialogue that you just can't take him seriously. And I've got nothing against the voice actors here. Richard Armitage and Hayley Atwell both do their best with their horrendous material, but man, even the best actors in the world can't elevate this shit. Even the animation looks like garbage, trying to replicate the style of 80s and 90s cartoons, and there's a weird jerky quality to the character movements that make them look stiff and robotic. Lara's character design swings wildly between slender and borderline feminine, and bulked up and butch with absolutely no explanation, like she was being worked on by completely different creative teams with their own takes on the character. And the thing is, that animation approach made sense in something like Masters of the original 1980s cartoon, but here it just feels like some weird callback to a previous show that never existed. I mean, I know the Tomb Raider games started in the 90s, but man, that's a pretty tenuous link. Shows like Arkane proved what can be done with modern animation technology, and it really feels like Tomb Raider could have benefited from a more mature style like that. Ultimately, the legend of Lara Croft managed to fumble the ball in the worst way possible, somehow turning Lara Croft into someone we don't want to go on an adventure with. And if you've got any love for the character at all, you'd do best to remember her as she was and give this turd a wide berth. Believe me, it is not worth your time. Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Go away now.