Who made the better Tomb Raider: Angelina Jolie or Alicia Vikander?

Angelina Jolie was a bigger-ticket Lara Croft, but don't sleep on the Alicia Vikander reboot

This year actually marks the 25th anniversary of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the 2001 feature film that put the character on the big screen, where she was first embodied by a British-accented Angelina Jolie. The movie was a massive financial success, raking in nearly $300 million worldwide. This made it the biggest-grossing video game adaptation ever made, a position it held for the rest of the decade. It was also Jolie’s biggest movie ever at the time, firmly establishing her as a box office star. Less prestigious was the way the movie pioneered a form of particularly disposable big-ticket entertainment, more temporary arcade distraction than immersive action-adventure. (Now may be a good time to note that I do not play the Tomb Raider games. But I will watch nearly any movie where an adventurer raids a tomb.)

There were bad summer movies before Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, of course — dozens if not hundreds. I wouldn’t even call the 2001 movie especially bad. It’s briskly paced, endearingly ridiculous, and even if it’s not quite as delightful as “Indiana Jones knockoff from the director of Con Air” should be, it’s at least slick-looking junk. (It would probably be greeted as a blessed relief in some more recent summer seasons.) What holds Lara Croft: Tomb Raider back (and feels more predictive of future bad summer movies) is the simulation-level weightlessness of it all; it’s like a demo reel that someone went ahead and filled out into a 100-minute feature. Jolie, to her credit, leans into it, playing Lara as unflappable and a little smug, truly larger than life. (Makes sense: Who wouldn’t be smug about a big payday for playing the hottest, coolest woman in the world?) The PG-13 film is too machine-tooled and sanitized for sex, but more than sexualized enough for Lara to take a shower within the first 10 minutes, a distillation of its teen-boy target market.

Despite this (or by tapping into that sensibility exceptionally well), Jolie and the Indiana Jones similarities were enough to propel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider beyond the mallrat audience that buoyed Mortal Kombat. But the movie itself wasn’t enough to keep that audience pumping quarters into the machine. A sequel, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life followed two years later to much less impressive numbers. Roger Ebert stayed on board, bless him, but for most people, it fell between the cracks. Anyone who enjoyed the trashiness of the original might be put off by this one’s relative class, while anyone yearning for an improvement still wasn’t exactly getting Last Crusade, nevermind Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s probably a testament to the global Tomb Raider brand that Tomb Raider, a 2018 reboot of the film series, made virtually the same amount of money worldwide as the 2001 film, despite no Jolie and a much smaller North American performance. Of course, 17 years of inflation makes this success more marginal, and after some early sequel movement — at one point director Ben Wheatley was on board! — the pandemic seemingly killed the project for good. Then the prospect of a TV show was announced, and here we are, reading GameStop’s dumb complaints implying that no one gets it right. If any online hordes say Sophie Turner “is not” Lara Croft, it’s safe to assume they feel the same way about Alicia Vikander. (The less said about the root of some of those objections, the better.)

What’s overlooked in all of this is how much fun that 2018 movie is — easily one of the best (and least chintzy!) game-to-movie translations. I understand, via sources including Polygon’s original review, that for some fans of the video game series the movie plays like a mish-mash of recent game elements, rendered without much additional inspiration. For someone who just enjoys action-adventure movies, though, Tomb Raider is a refreshingly straightforward one, without the dual fakeness of ropey CG and limp banter that sank that Uncharted movie.

That’s not to say Tomb Raider doesn’t have some CG, some green screen, and other contemporary blockbuster trappings. Its entire final act — the part where the characters actually raid a tomb at length — looks like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with the brightness turned way down. But properly raiding Spielberg eludes plenty of other filmmakers, and director Roar Uthaug takes inspiration from the master in other areas, too. In the middle of the movie, when Lara sneaks around an enemy’s jungle camp, Uthaug assembles the scene in a series of single shots that are Spielbergian in their graceful utility. Another scene with Lara repeatedly dangling from the ruins of a rusted-out airplane wedged at the top of a waterfall feels a bit like the literal cliffhanger from The Lost World.

Before she’s dangling off of things, the movie’s Lara is a scrappy Londoner, dragging her feet on collecting a massive inheritance from her presumed-dead father Richad (Dominic West) out of thin hope that he’ll materialize. Just before signing paperwork to declare him legally dead, she gets ahold of a possible clue to his whereabouts: He may have traveled to a Pacific island in search of a tomb holding Himiko, a queen said to have dominion over life and death. On the island, Lara finds the stir-crazy Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), exiled to this remote island on the same quest.

This Lara isn’t an unstoppable superhero badass. Vikander absorbs her aloofness into stubborn resilience, and the movie establishes her athleticism with an early London-set bike chase and a foot chase on some Hong Kong docks. Vikander’s physical performance early on (doubtless fused with a stunt double) is convincing enough that the film can later have Lara make some (literal) leaps into more fantastical feats. Similarly, those chase scenes set a standard that the movie will either use real locations or make a good-faith attempt to fake them. Obviously there isn’t a real rusted-out plane perched on the edge of a waterfall, but enough of the movie looks real-ish to afford some audience buy-in.

Tomb Raider is still an origin story and wannabe franchise-starter that waits until the very end to award Lara her signature dual pistols. This is (presumably) a problem for pre-existing fans, though, not for someone in the market for a muscular, un-quippy adventure movie with a lead actress good enough to let the material breathe. (Wielding a bow and arrow is actually a lot cooler than two-fisting guns, anyway.) The 2001 Tomb Raider is a blockbuster engineered to bring a video game to life, and revels in a highly synthetic form of fun. Even if Amazon’s new series avoids that trap, it’s clearly making a play for some kind of visual fidelity. The 2018 Tomb Raider seems unbothered, and is all the better for it. This is not Lara Croft. It’s a good movie with her name in it.

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Tomb Raider (2018) is currently streaming on Tubi. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) is currently streaming on Pluto TV. Go ahead, see which one is better!