Prime Video's Tomb Raider series needs to update Lara Croft in one crucial way that goes beyond casting
More than anything, Tomb Raider needs a Lara Croft that isn't just an idea – but a human being.
It was never going to be an easy task for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag creator and executive producer of Amazon’s Tomb Raider series for Prime Video, to cast Lara Croft.
Since her conception in 1996, Lara Croft has made a splash in the video game world. Her beginning as a cool and confident archaeologist who knew her history and who wasn’t afraid to shoot her way out of trouble was appealing – particularly to men, a fact that was further exacerbated by the game series ads which sexualised Lara as much as a person could to a 3D polygonal woman.
Yet, despite this treatment, Lara Croft was considered a triumph for women in video games, and as such, Amazon and Waller-Bridge are no doubt feeling the pressure to get it right.
This leads us to Amazon’s Prime Video series, from which casting of Lara is seemingly in its early stages, with Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) and Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody) supposedly being poised to test for the part.
Turner shot to fame with her portrayal of Sansa Stark, having even been nominated for an Emmy for her performance, and Boynton as Mary Austin was show-stopping. But, will they be able to fill the shoes left behind by Alicia Vikander back in 2018, or even Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider films of the 2000s?
As a character, Lara’s personality and development has been in constant flux, with her original iteration leaning on the smart and sexy archaeologist and her more recent portrayal in Crystal Dynamic’s Tomb Raider trilogy showing as a tough but far more emotionally naive young woman learning who she is.
With the Prime Video series adaptation choosing to continue on the tracks laid out by Crystal Dynamics trilogy – and being worked on at the same time as Amazon develops its own Tomb Raider game – it’s safe to assume that the series will focus more on the Lara of more recent times.
A Lara who is just coming into her own seems like a wise choice. While there will be plenty out there who wish we could return to the Lara Croft that’s sleek, sexy, mature and shrugs off personal attachment in favour of thrills and gun fights – a Lara Croft that feels more like an MCU superhero, an idea, more so than a person – I, for one, am far more interested in a Lara Croft that feels like a self-realised human being.
I argue that Crystal Dynamics managed to do this and more with their trilogy of games, which leads me to a question that actually matters to me: who will Lara Croft be in Amazon’s series?
After all, Netflix’s animated iteration starting Hayley Atwell as Lara was met with pretty positive reviews, and a second season was confirmed less than two weeks after. Having watched it myself, I enjoyed it for what it was, but felt that it leaned too hard on the same beats of the game trilogy that came before it. Overall, a fun adaptation, but one that played it too safe.
If Amazon is planning to take on a Lara after the same trilogy, I think fans and Lara herself are owed an adventure that isn’t about our favourite tomb raider finding herself again. The end of the game established that Lara can’t survive on her own, and that needing to rely on other people doesn’t make her weak, and it’d be nice for Amazon to acknowledge that without forcing her to redo the same steps over and over.
Whether that be by giving her people to work alongside her, or by simply showing us her using her new-found self-confidence as a springboard for something entirely different, the truth of the matter is that nobody is a monolith, that we all need someone, and a Lara Croft who acknowledges and embraces that is exactly the kind of Lara Croft I’d like to see on my screen.
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