Since the reveal of Tomb Raider 2013 reboot at E3 I had been against it. I did not like the re-design of Lara Croft and change in setting at all but I was in the minority. Luckily after a few years and games passed most people seem to agree with classic Lara being better than nu-Lara, this is including the IP holders as well. With that said I won’t say I didn’t give the survivor timeline a chance I went through the movie, animated show and I’ll even talk briefly about the games and comic book.
Tomb Raider 2018
Something you’ll see me mention plenty of times in here is something similar to the likes of: I would’ve enjoyed this movie if it wasn’t named Tomb Radier. First thing I have to point out is there’s a Nintendo Wii at the pawn shop, not that the survivor timeline was ever in any Nintendo console but the Wii did get the LAU trilogy. Overall it’s a fun little story, but not interesting enough to really want to watach it again or care for it. I think Arrow just did a much better job at the survivor on a mysterious island and that was a tv show. This isn’t epic or anything of the like which they tried to make it out to. I do think overall it mimics the game well enough and it’s a decent adaptation of that. The ending does start to feel something a little more Tomb Raider, at least more than the original movies did. To finish on a positive note I liked the song for the movie and I thought Alicia Vikander was a good choice for the main character. She just shouldn’t have been called Lara. Since the movie’s sequel never happened because of lack of excitement I guess you can think of the cartoon as the sequel for it even though there’s some continuity problems.
Legend of Lara Croft
The design of Lara Croft is really distracting, she really does look like a man at times. It’s not a good design at all, since she doesn’t resemble survivor Lara too much and instead by forcing her on classic Lara outfits and look she looks so off model. This mixing the timelines is not going well, should’ve kept them separate. The animated show does get Lara Croft in some classic Tomb Raider like situations which is nice but the character doesn’t feel like Lara and that doesn’t make things flow right. Ironically I also think the show portrays different cultures poorly, a criticism classic Tomb Raider has now but in a way it worked better. The animation is fine most of the time. The show is sadly a bit on the boring side. I like the style they were going for and the premise isn’t bad but the writing is just mediocre. The show had potential and it’s being drivend own by the bland dialogue, unlikeable characters and the Tomb Raider license. There was plenty here that was good, I actually think if it had been strictly Survivor it would’ve fared better, the classic elements just show how much this is not Lara.
Survivor Trilogy Video Games
Somehow I own Tomb Raider 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think I got them through some Tomb Raider sale a long while ago and some I also got for free, so I might own the first two games in two different platforms. I’ve only ever played the first one and that was good enough for me, the others I believe I only launched them and played around for a bit before uninstalling them. It’s not a bad game per se, it’s just not a Tomb Raider game. I’m sure if it had a different main character and a different name I’d appreciate the game more. It’s just not Tomb Raider at all. It feels like a generic high budget cinematic game of the 2010s and I’m not a big fan of those, so that already made it a bit generic for me but adding nu-Lara just makes it worse for me.
Survivor Comics
Despite being totally different and missing the point of games, the original Tomb Raider comics in the 90s still oozed the attitude that made Lara Croft in the 90s popular and I will forever love them. The Survivor comics however seem to take themselves far more seriously, tried to be in continuity with the games which only caused continuity problems and I don’t know. I didn’t really check them out, just read briefly about it on a wiki. Doesn’t seem like I’ll actually ever care to check them out.
I hope they take the least amount of influences from this continuity going forward and that they slowly fade away whatever they did take from it. I can’t say I didn’t give it a chance despite disliking the idea from the start. All I know is that adding more Tomb Raider elements to this continuity only makes it worse. It really should be its own separate thing as any influence from classic Lara just contrasts how different and worse this is to it. I think without the comparison it could do much better and even have a chance to grow in other directions.