Welcome back, Lara Croft. The official trailer for Tomb Raider, the new reboot film based on the rebooted games from Crystal Dynamics, is finally here. And just like the grittier new games, Tomb Raider wants you to forget its sillier, totally ridiculous past.
On Tuesday afternoon, September 19, actor Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands), who co-stars in the film with Alicia Vikander (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), posted the trailer on his official Instagram ahead of its scheduled online premiere.
In the new Tomb Raider, directed by Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug, Vikander plays Lara Croft, a young archeologist who gets shipwrecked on Devil’s Island. While being hunted, Lara becomes a hardened survivalist, as she’s determined to prove her deceased father’s theories about the island were right.
A lot of the film, from the shape of its plot to Lara’s use of a mountain pick, is based on the 2013 reboot from Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix, the famed publishers of the Final Fantasy series. Tomb Raider and its 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, were critically praised for the grounded, grittier reinvention of the iconic video game heroine; the new Lara ditches thigh holsters in favor of practical tools, such as makeshift bows and arrows, which helped characterize a more complex Lara Croft than her previous incarnation.
There’s no denying how much fun the old and new Tomb Raider games are, and Vikander really looks like Lara Croft has come to life, bad photoshop posters aside. But movies based on video games have an awful track record of failing to live up to expectations. Hell, this isn’t even new for the Tomb Raider series. But, hopefully, this is just another challenge for Lara Croft to conquer.
See the trailer below.
Tomb Raider will be released in theaters in March 2018.
