No, no one was clamoring for a reboot of the Tomb Raider movie that originated with Angelina Jolie as the video game franchise’s archaeologist heroine Lara Croft in 2001. The action flick was butchered by critics, and while a box office success ($274 million worldwide) that spawned a sequel, Jolie is usually singled out as the primary (or even sole) highlight of an otherwise unremarkable movie. But Jolie has presumably been too busy making artsy and “important” movies as of late to pull a Harrison Ford, and Hollywood can’t go a day without reviving properties old and new—so in stepped Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander.
The Oscar-winner is our new Lara Croft, and the first trailer is here to show her off as the “fiercely independent” protagonist. According to the official site, for years she’s avoided taking over her adventurer father’s “global empire” following his mysterious disappearance, and is working as a bike courier in London while going to college. But that all changes, for some reason: “Going explicitly against his final wishes, she leaves everything she knows behind in search of her dad’s last-known destination: A fabled tomb on a mythical island that might be somewhere off the coast of Japan.”
The trailer is pretty standard action fare with at least one utterly cliché line of dialogue—“The fate of humanity is now in your hands”—but Vikander has proven to be excellent in both utterly inspired projects and more conventional ones, so one can assume she’ll at least manage to shine in the role. Tomb Raider, which is directed by Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug, and also stars Dominic West as Lara’s father, is set for release on March 16, 2018.
