Went and saw Tomb Raider today.

That’s not a recommendation, I’m just mentioning that that’s how I spent a few hours. I also laid landscaping tarp, mulched, and transplanted a bunch of Yarrow and Daisies (which are approximately as hard to transplant as dogweed and creeping jenny).

I would recommend any of these activities about equally.

Which isn't to say it's a bad movie... it's just.

Eh. It was all over. It had two movies of stuff in it, muddled about so much as to make it not worth it. First one was better in many way.

Interesting, since Randy's reaction about which of the two was the best was the exact opposite.

I'll wait and watch 'em both on DVD.

He said something similar about X2 ("They took the best 10% of the first movie and used that feel for 90% of the second.") and I wholeheartedly agree -- I haven't seen a sequel so far outstrip it's originating film since Empire Strikes Back (thought ESB did it better).

This... did not outstrip. My opinion, and you're welcome to it. :)

Hmph.

Plot. This is the Indiana Jones genre. Plots are expected (by me at least) to be overblown and cheezy. TR1 had the main O&C plot plus a feeble attempt at a romantic subplot. TR2 had the O&C and a much more interesting romantic subplot involving someone whose craziness was a much closer match to LC's.

IMNSHO TR1 was at it's best in the first part of the movie. After that the intensity level dropped, sets were a little off and AJ was a little off the mark on Lara Croft's personality. (LC has a personality? Yes, done right, she does.)

TR2 made better use of better locations. It looked better consistantly up until the end where there was no way anyone could satisfy the anticipation. This happens so often that I am fully armored against disappointment in that regard. (Movie makers should realize that when you promise the sky, like in, say, CONTACT, you'd better deliver the frelling sky -- and they can't.) The intensity level was sustatined. The second banana was much better than the guy in the first one. The villains were better.

But the best thing was Jolie nailing the character consistantly and interestingly. This is a very violent, arrogant, moderately cruel, theatrical, self-protective adrenaline junkie. She is acquisitive and possessive of both things and people. She likes, likes, likes shooting things, and people too if she has an excuse. Crazy intensity, meet Angelina Jolie; it's a perfect match.

The combats were less wire-fooey than most these days. Staves used against swords got chopped up. When she hit people with those huge pistols she did it hard, and they were not going to get up again soon, maybe ever. She made mistakes and people suffered for them.

I liked the undercurrent she and her former boyfriend are not like other people. No action hero is, but I thought AJ played it like LC had given it considerable thought, that it informed LC's arrogance throughout, and some of her second banana's attitudes as well. Yes, that has an Amber feel to me, but also a Slan touch or a resonance with two dozen other books or comics.

I liked it better than PIRATES, better than MATRIX2, close to as much as MATRIX 2 IMAX. For an in-sub-genre comparison, I liked it better than the 2nd or 3rd Indiana Jones movies, but not the first.

We just liked different things differently.

Plot. Horribly clumsy foreshadowing. Sometimes foreshadowing for scenes that themselves could have been lifted out entirely.

TR2 had the O&C and a much more interesting romantic subplot, yes... I think it should have gotten it's own movie... that was one of the two movie-stories in here, and it didn't get enough attention.

I disagree with the 'crazy like me' part as much.

A lot of the areas in TR2 felt like sets to me, not Locations -- that's me -- I hated Chinatown, and you liked it. Nothing to be done about that.

As for Jolie's portrayal -- I'm enough of a geek to have an opinion about the Croft character as an Action Junkie who, due to her activities, has to fight.

Violent? Cruel? These words don't fit for me, so alot of what Jolie was doing didn't work for me. Works within the subset of the movies, yes, not in the old Croftverse.

(It'll fit better when Tomb Raider: Angel of Death comes out and everyone in the world is trying to kill her... bleah... Eidos likes coded scenes from Hitman too much.)

My problem with a lot of the fight stuff is the lack of acrobatics. TR1 had, TR2 didn't. Say what you like about the violence level, but think back on that Robot fight in the first movie... LOTS of acrobatics, and that fits the base material. When Croft does stuff, it's acrobatic, ditto fight.

In TR2, she crouches and shoots at stuff.

Choppy scene transitions, fight scenes that weren't choreographed to accomodate the dialogue meant to go with it, clumsy foreshadowing, LAME bad guys. LAME.

Wait... oh yeah, LAME bad guys. Lame. They've been wandering around looking for work since they got rejected for Die Hard or something. Lame.

I like the idea that Croft is part of the World's Elite... that she does in fact think 'the world might be a better place with a few of these people gone'. I Did Like many of the same parts of the movie that Randy did.

But that's all they were to me: parts. I didn't get a feel of wholeness. I left the theatre shrugging my shoulders.

The LC character portrayal was the most interesting and important part of it to me. I think it fits. You think that she likes the adrenaline rush and all of her job so much that she can't be deterred by the violence. I think that if your job leads to killing people, quite a few of them, and does so pretty regularly, and you don't find some other job... then you're OK with it. Maybe you like it a little, on some level, or it just doesn't bother you. Either way, you're crazy. Anita Blake crazy, probably having arrived there the same way, one step at a time. And each step takes her that much farther away from normal people.

Probably a big part of why I found the performance so riviting is that in the Amber game I have a whole family of bloodthirsty (to varying degrees), arrogant, possessive, larger-than-life, highly sexed but frequently lonely characters, and hundreds of others who are mostly even nuttier in Chaos and the Brotherhood.

Lou and I saw it on Sunday night after GenCon, and we both enjoyed it.

A question - O&C?

TR:AoD is out (well, for PS2, dunno about Windows), and it...well, PSM just gave it a 5 out of 10. They were a bit harsh, but also not wrong. Lara is dark in this one, but not as dark as Jolie hinted at, I think.

Lou and I thought that the Cradle of Life was actually much more like the games than the first movie was. Admittedly, it's been some time since we've seen the first TR movie, but other than the robot fight, we recall the first movie as being very unlike the game with her abilities/motions/effects. This one had it in spades. Nearly every scene I could see being something right out of the game.

Which made the movie for me. Don't reinvent LC or TR; just give me the games made to life, with a bit more plot (the games' have plenty, don't need to do much more) and a few more characters for her to have fun with, and I'm happy.