Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft - Globetrotting Animated Adventure Edges Lara's Arc Forward | Push Square

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We’re in the eye of a video game adaptation frenzy, but Tomb Raider has always been well ahead of the curve. During the peak of its early 2000s popularity, Angelina Jolie signed on to star as the well-endowed archaeologist Lara Croft, in a movie that would buck the trend of game-related Box Office busts and gross over $250 million worldwide. It was followed by a sequel and, more recently, an Alicia Vikander reboot – cementing the action adventure series as a true cross-media property.

This animated instalment feels like a no-brainer, then – a collaboration between Legendary and Netflix to help bridge the gap between Crystal Dynamics’ recent trilogy and whatever it’s been quietly concocting next. Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft’s plot blurs the lines between the vulnerable Lara found in the most recent games with the strong and capable heroine from the original PS1 trilogy; that means there’s still a lot of handwringing over the star’s selfish, isolationist personality – but also plenty of acrobatics along the way.

The first episode, with a running time roughly 10 minutes longer than the remaining seven that follow, is a little stodgy and, dare we say, dull – as a flashback shows the protagonist discovering a non-descript box in Chile with her mentor and family friend, Roth. It then skips forward to the present where, wrestling with her demons at the infamous Croft Manor, she decides to do-away with her father’s stolen archaeology possessions – only to find the aforementioned artefact swiped from under her nose.

A globe-trotting story ensues which takes Lara from London and China to France and Iran, with all of the touristic spectacle you’d expect along the way. The visuals are largely adequate, although there’s an overemphasis on cheap-looking CG in some spots, which wouldn’t look massively out of place in early PS2 games, like The Angel of Darkness. There are a lot of set-pieces which fiddle with perspective, and they remind us of the ballroom shot from