There’s only one recording today, and it’s Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
I like the studio logos in the sea at the start.
I’m not saying this film is pandering to its audience, but…
Somehow, this movie is feeling a lot more like a Bond film, particularly when they go underwater.
An earthquake has uncovered the legendary Lunar Temple, and Lara has calculated where it is. She finds a orb there.
But there’s more people after the treasure, and she and her Greek friends are attacked by a group of Chinese treasure hunters. Her friends are killed, so I guess it’s good that the film gives us almost no chance to get to know them. The Chinese get hold of the Orb.
Lara manages to get out before the temple inevitably collapses. She doesn’t have her SCUBA gear going out, so she has to have help getting to the surface – she cuts her arm to make is bleed, attracts a shark, punches it in the face (was that in one of the games?) then grabs it by the fin as it swims up. Why do I think that sharks can’t swim up? Was that one of those bits of received wisdom, like “Dogs can’t look up” from Shaun of the Dead? Anyway, this one does and she makes it to the surface.
She’s rescued by Hillary and Bryce in a submarine. I’m going to assume it’s not actually her submarine, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Now we’re introduced to the villain, Jonathan Reiss, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who now makes biological weapons, and is introduced in a scene where he’s getting a lot of people to pay him $100m each for the new super-weapon he’s developing for which there’s no cure or treatment. To underline how evil he is, he kills one of the people there with Ebola because he betrayed him to MI6. This is really James Bond, isn’t it?
Lara is also contacted by MI6, and learns that Reiss is looking for Pandora’s Box, which is hidden in the Cradle of Life, and contains an unstoppable plague. The Orb that she found then lost is the key to finding it, so she has to get it back from the Chinese bandits who took it, and to help her get it back, she insists on recruiting Terry Sheridan, who’s in prison in Kazakhstan, descrbed by the MI6 agents as a “mercenary and traitor”. He’s played by Gerard Butler, so in the second film running, Lara’s working with an old acquaintance who might just betray her at any point. On the other hand, he’s Gerard Butler, so that’s good.
They have to get into China undetected by the bandits, which they do by motorcycling along the Great Wall. This whole sequence is very silly, as they each take turns jumping their bikes over each other. I know Tomb Raider is hardly a safety-first concept, but they’re just being reckless now.
There’s a sequence where they try to get the Orb from the Chinese bandits, but end up leaving empty-handed. It’s just there to provide more action and doesn’t seem to move the plot along at all. There’s a lot of Chinese locations in this film, so I wonder if there was co-production money in there for the Chinese market.
There’s another elaborate sequence set in Shanghai involving a helicopter in an unfeasibly small space, and Lara swinging on a neon sign. At least during this she manages to put a tracker on the box with the Orb in it, so it’s not entirely plot-neutral.
Next Stop, Hong Kong there Reiss is analysing the Orb, so Lara and Terry have to get into their lab and get the Orb back. During this she uses a tiny screen – way before Google Glass was almost a thing.
She gets captured by the bad guys, which gives him an opportunity to explain his evil plot to her. “Do you honestly believe you can control what’s in that box and turn it into another of your weapons?” “Really, Lara, you disappoint me. [To his henchman] Have you received payment from all the buyers?” “No. You don’t want it controlled at all. You’re using the buyers. They’ll release it, thinking it’s just another weapon, and the world blames them.” “What’s left of the world blames them. Once I’ve got the virus, I’ll make enough antidote to protect the best and brightest. Heads of corporations, heads of state… Life will go on. Don’t tell me you’ve never looked around and thought, “Wouldn’t the world would be better off without some of these people”?” Hmm. If it were me, Heads of corporations and Heads of State would be very low down on my list, but this totally tracks with supervillain motive.
But Terry gets Lara out of her spot, and they make it out, to the top of the very tall building they’re in, where Terry has arranged their exit strategy. Wingsuits.
They have a little alone time on the ship that’s taking them out, but afterwards Lara handcuffs Terry to the bed, telling him it’s for his own safety. She still doesn’t quite trust him, and worries she might end up having to shoot him.
She interrupts a local family watching Spongebob Squarepants (or Bobsquare Cheesepants as one of my kids thought it was called when they were little) and asks to borrow their TV so she can set up a zoom call with Bryce, and he can send her the results of decoding the symbols on the orb. The symbols decode into sounds, and shen they’re played, the Orb glows and projects a David Attenborough documentary onto the walls. The location of the Cradle of Life, and therefore the box, is somewhere in Africa, near Kilimanjaro.
Unfortunately, unknown to Lara, Reiss and his men have found Bryce, and heard everything so they know where she’s going.
Not only that, but Terry has got out of the handcuffs, and finds where Lara was, and asks if they know where she’s gone. The little girl there is happy to tell him.
In Africa, she meets with another friend, Kosa (Djimon Hounsou) who takes her to meet the tribe who live in the area where the Cradle resides. He translates for them. “To trespass in the Cradle of Life is to risk flooding the entire world with death.” She tells them “Men are coming for the box. Unlike me, they won’t look at it with fear or respect. They’ll open it. They want to use it. Now, I’m sorry if I’ve got to disturb your gods to keep this from happening. I will do whatever I must.”
Reiss and his men attack them. Reiss wants Lara to show him exactly where the cradle is.
He uses Hillary and Bryce as leverage to get Lara to cooperate.
Lara and Kosa go with Reiss, while Hillary and Bryce are taken back to the helicopter, where Terry suddenly appears and kills all the guards. Bryce offers to fly the helicopter because he plays a lot of video games. I was struck by the fact this scene appears to be shot day for night, which you don’t see very often nowadays.
On the walk through the mountain, Reiss’s soldiers get attacked by creatures who appear to come out of the rock. Although the picture is so dark it’s hard to see what’s going on most of the time.
Reiss and Lara end up with the box, and Reiss wants Lara to do the heavy lifting.
Reiss eventually ends up falling into the black goo that surrounds the box, and it does nothing for his complexion.
Then Terry inevitably wants to take the box back. This is quite an unpleasant scene where he’s taunting her saying she can’t stop him, so it’s quite a relief when she shoots him dead. I’m so disappointed in him. I know they foreshadowed this in the earlier dialogue, but you don’t actually do it in an actual film you want people to enjoy. Such a curious choice.
Returning to the surface, she’s reunited with Bryce and Hillary, and she has to tell them that the glow-up they’re undergoing is because they’re going to be married (I think to women of the tribe, not each other) so they take their leave. Maybe this is the high point the makers wanted us to leave on.
I’m sure I remember watching this when it was recent, and thinking it was better than the original, but nothing about this is familiar, so now I wonder if I just watched the original again, thinking it was this one. It’s not very good. Director Jan de Bont is definitely not a consistent winner, is he? For every Speed or Twister there’s a Speed 2 or this one.
Media Centre Description: Globetrotting action sequel in which intrepid archaeologist Lara Croft is recruited by British intelligence to track down mad bioweapons genius Dr Reiss, who holds the orb showing the whereabouts of the mythical Pandora’s Box. When he threatens to unleash a deadly plague contained within it, Lara and her marine-turned-mercenary partner face a race against time to scupper his evil plan.
Recorded from BBC THREE on Sunday 7th June 2009 20:06
BBC Genome: BBC THREE Sunday 7th June 2009 20:00
After this there’s a trail for Personal Affairs. Then the recording ends with Outtakes: US Presidents with some quite amusing gaffes in speeches during presidential campaigns,
VHiStory 