Hacker Cinema
Tomb Raider
2018 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Roar Uthaug
Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she finds herself on the island where her father disappeared.
1 positive4 negative10 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
I was referencing the one you were implicitly defending that started this line of chatter: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 Most of the books from that list are widely available and easily accessible. The 'under threat' rhetoric is just from them being removed from some schools due to content being deemed age inappropriate. Those pg13 movies with nudity tend to be things like a few seconds of sideboob in a shower or whatever.
The top book on that 'challenged' list is a diary style book of a 13 year old girl who is sold into sex slavery, repeatedly raped, abused, and so on - with descriptions of each 'encounter.' The book is meant to be, and indeed is, extremely disturbing as it's part of the author's activism against sex trafficking throughout the world - as it was based on real events as per her research. In any case, it most certainly is not PG13 by any stretch of the imagination. It's much closer to something like Requiem for a Dream than it is to Tomb Raider.
I also think that's a great book to have on top, because it emphasizes that the issue isn't ideological, but content. I think there's few people who would claim Sold doesn't have tremendous value, or that it should be banned. But there's going to be a lot of people that don't want books like that anywhere near children. And for good reason - it's the same reason I wouldn't really care if my kids wanted to watch Total Recall or Terminator, but no way would I let them watch Requiem for a Dream. The violence and triple titted aliens of Total Recall are borderline comical, but I don't think stuff that gives you that awful 'ughhhh' feeling like Requiem for a Dream (or indeed - Sold) is something that's going to be at all healthy for a child's development.
Oh, and there was actually a 2D Tomb Raider game for the GBC which really used the same grid game mechanics as Prince of Persia.
Another fun fact: There was an Indiana Jones game for the N64, which was heavily inspired by Tomb Raider. Which was heavily inspired by the Indy movies.
They are good. Can you name a better game in the same genre? The only competition I can think of is Uncharted 4. The older Tomb Raider games are too many generations behind to run on modern consoles.
Tomb Raider has become a major movie franchise, so it's not too surprising that the new games from the last decade are essentially movies.
It can be fun to express yourself, and some games get plenty of mileage out of offering people various opportunities to do just that. But sometimes you want to "play" a movie, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. I had a lot of fun with the Tomb Raider games despite the lack of creative expression -- the mechanics were fun, the story was dumb but entertaining, and there was a lot of spectacle to soak up. I don't need to engage every part of my brain all the time.
The resolution here:
Librarian: Happy Easter X
feels eerily similar to an ending from a National Treasure / Tomb Raider movie. In fact, I think we can go ahead and assume that some globe-trotting high jinx occurred. Maybe there was a map to the actual Tree of Life?
macOS 11 = "Vista for Dummies"
"User" Interface? Who needs it? Hide everything! There, no more fiddly buttons or controls to get in the way of your Magical experience.
Lots more e-moji's, Me-Moji's, iMojiogies, etc. And they get face coverings now! Yes, our devs are hard at work on your face covering experience. We want it to be magical and courageous. We'll fix those pesky kernel panics in Catalina later.
The iPad is now the perfect tool for EVERY TASK THAT IS OR EVER WILL BE KNOWN TO HUMANITY. Coding? iPad. Gaming? iPad. In the kitchen? iPad. In the Bedroom? iPad. Unlock your fancy BMW? iPad. Three Spoiled Brat Kids at a restaurant? an iPad for each little monster of course! Oh, don't forget to add this expensive stand, keyboard, mouse, case, cover, pen etc so it's tolerable.
1000 new Dumb Answers and Useless Things you can Ask Siri! "Hey Siri, open Google..."
AirPods Pro: Watch a Movie on your MacBook while spinning your head around in all different directions and simultaneously moving from room to room while carrying your laptop and waving it around. Finally!!
Play Tomb Raider in Emulation mode - no changes and look! Almost as good as on a circa-2007 PC with mediocre graphics card!
No more hours of confusion and head-scratching as your tiny brain struggles to switch between your iDingus and your Mac -- With Big Sur (B.S.) we've taken the best elements of macOS and just thrown them right into the Trash! There, that's better, now your Mac is just another iPad. Oh, and don't try to use the disk for anything, it's all write protected now, we can't have you pesky power users mucking around in there with your fancy shell scripts and krazy kernel extensions...
Storywise I think a lot games would make a good source for good movies. My personal problems with the ones we're getting is, that they are so similar to the original that they are basically just remakes.
Take the recent Tomb Raider movie, after I've seen the trailer I had no desire at all to go watch it. Why would I watch something that I've experienced for over 20 hours in depth and on my own pace already. I don't know, maybe a lot of people got excited when they saw her with the plane: "Hey, look, it's exactly like the game!" For me it was just boring.
Instead focus on a character that isn't the main one in video games, use the setting etc. F.e. as a Dark Souls fan I would love for a movie to add some backstory for Solaire. Scrap any stupid references to the game like putting a white sign on the ground to summon somebody, instead just let Solaire meet another traveller (at a bonfire ;D) or anybody dying and then respawning. There you have it: (A already beloved character, ) a man of faith looking for divinity (or whatever) while travelling to faraway lands (supernatural or not) is confronted with the unbearable evils of this world to have a crisis of faith which he either overcomes or goes mad over.
Movies and games are sufficiently different that the the key to making a good "video game" movie may be to pick a property that gives more options than it takes away.
For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting.
With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle.
Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
You can go on YouTube and have multi hour long recordings of single player games that turn the game into a movie for story focused games I can definitely understand why some publishers would like to put an end to this as I have watched a few of those instead of buying the game and I know quite a few other people that would.
I've done this, both for games I own and don't. Last I did it was for the new Wolfenstein game. I thought it looked cool, so when the demo came around I downloaded and tried it. At that point though, the suspense of what was going to come next was gone, and instead I just focused on controls and other things that bothered me. I didn't buy the game in the end.
Streaming has increasingly informed my purchasing decisions over the past year or so. Sometimes it's made my buy things I never thought I'd look twice at (e.g. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice) and other times as mentioned it's dissuaded me entirely. It's a double edged sword, for sure.
EDIT: To add to this, I feel that demos filled this niche for me before, but these days you rarely get anything but a super polished ad video that barely has any relation with the game. Back in the shareware days, demos were common place, and they definitely made me buy games more than once. Sometimes the rest of the game were a dud, most of the time it wasn't. A current game that does this to great effect is Tomb Raider – it gets you in the game proper, teaches you the controls, and drops you off right as the story is about to begin for real. If you purchase the game, you can then pick up right where you left off (which you can't from watching a video, or playing in a store.) It's a great example of demo design.
FWIW, the "ads on the lock screen" thing is a wee overblown. Microsoft is the single-party provider of any of their so called "suggested content". Aka, you saw Tomb Raider not because Square Enix paid to be on the lock screen, but because Microsoft was trying to push that you can get AAA games in the Windows Store. The Surface has been up there, I think they put a movie-related one up once or twice, again, referring you to their own Movies app. And they have no animations, moving bits, or arbitrary code.
They're not targeted ads, so they're not using a data profile on you to power them or anything like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they know how many screens displayed them, but there's not a lot of interaction tracking you can really do with a static lockscreen. So it doesn't have the sort of privacy implications of normal advertising either.
So, while you may not like their choice of wallpaper because it is related to a product they are releasing, it's not really much more egregious than the fact that it downloads daily wallpapers on the lockscreen to begin with: It's all stuff selected specifically by Microsoft. And as others have pointed out, it's really easy to shut off.
The problem is that most trailers actually don't give you enough to really understand the movie, and they're generally pretty good about not giving spoilers... but they're produced to give you the impression that you've basically seen the whole movie. So it's really easy (I do it too) to dismiss an entire movie based on a 15-second trailer.
Unless you're talking about the Tomb Raider movie. The trailer with the fight between Lara Croft and the robot is basically the first 5 minutes of the movie and you can stop watching after that. :P
OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman" is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will).
In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen.
I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold:
1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship
2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character
3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass
4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman.
5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear).
6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms.
No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?)
The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...
Somehow this made me think of the Indiana Jones / Tomb Raider movies: In both if the protagonist simply stayed uninvolved the various artifacts would never have been found. It is often the way with US military (perhaps replace never with "not for much longer"): Most enemy and potential enemy designs and innovations are the direct result of espionage on the efforts of the US.
It does suck that mainstream games nowadays are very macho-male oriented. But if you can look at the whole of gaming, there really are plenty of female protagonists, respectful and strong ones too. It's an annoyance of mine that games like Gears of War and Halo drive what most people think videogames are.
Online gaming is very male dominated. And yes places like Xbox Live are not exactly the best place for girls, unfortunately. But if you instead jump on Steam and play a game of Team Fortress 2 for example, it's a completely different story. Sexist, racist mouthy gamers are not always the norm. Different communities attract different types of players.
My fiancee loves the Tomb Raider movies. When I showed her that they are based on a video game series, she had no desire to play the games at all. I was careful to show her Tomb Raiders were Lara's boobs aren't ridiculous too. She has the opportunity to interactively play through the movies she loves, but that just doesn't interest her. Anecdotal, yes, but in my experience a lot of girls feel this way.
I'm pretty sure you got this from the Tomb Raider movie.