The 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was a critical flop and a box office success. One of the first adaptations of a video game, the film garnered scathing reviews that derided its nonsensical plot and overblown special effects, but scholars were intrigued by its redefinition of feminine strength. Kate Stables and David McCarthy described Angelina Jolie’s embodiment of Lara Croft as a new type of female warrior “flaunting a soft-hard combination of exaggerated curves and no-shit hardware” (19). In contrast, the Lara Croft in the 2018 reboot Tomb Raider played by Alicia Vikander is described by director Roar Uthaug as a “normal girl next door”(Thompson). Uthaug’s use of the term “girl” is significant. The original movie aired at a time when two varieties of highly feminine female warriors dominated movie screens: the Asian and Asian-inflected characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix and the silly, hyper-feminine Charlie’s Angels. In contrast, Tomb Raider is following in the wake of the immensely successful Hunger Games franchise, and its promotional materials present Vikander’s Croft in images that deliberately evoke Katniss Everdeen. The subtle shifts which demote this action heroine from privileged super woman to scrappy tomboy—especially interesting given that Vikander is actually three years older than Jolie was at the time that the movie debuted—says much about our culture’s growing unease with mature female power but also our hopefulness regarding the potential of female youth. Further comparisons between this marginally successful film and the wildly popular Wonder Woman produce additional reflections on our different expectations for comic vs. video-game derived characters. Ultimately, I credit the influence of YA texts on popular culture for the transformation of Lara Croft from B-movie superbabe to a real(ish) girl whose “inner strength” matches her washboard abs.
About the presenterKatharine Kittredge
Katharine Kittredge is Professor of English at Ithaca College where she teaches courses in Science Fiction, Children’s Literature and Women’s Studies. She is the founder of the bi-annual conference “Pippi to Ripley: Sex and Gender in Imaginative Fiction” and is co-coordinator of ITHACON, one of the North East’s longest-running comic book conventions. She has published articles on 18th century juvenilia, Kick-Ass and Gunslinger Girl, South Park, and the Anglo-Irish diarist Melesina Trench.