I'm to tired to type... must let dude talk... festival...wai...ting...bye...
TOMB RAIDER SCRIPT REVIEW
WARNING -- SOME SPOILERS
I've just finished reading the first draft (dated 7/17/98) of Brent V. Friedman's draft of "Tomb Raider", the Summer 1999 movie based on the best-selling series of videogames.
As a fan of the games, and in particular the main character Lara Croft, I was intrigued and excited to see what Paramount, and the producing team of Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin had come up with so far. I'd been more than a little disappointed by their most recent stinker, the scriptless "Event Horizon", but I've always thought that Tomb Raider could make a really cool movie so I had high hopes for this script.
The first draft clocks in at 108 pages, and I'm sorry to report that the content is every bit as old and dusty as the ancient artifacts that Lara pursues in her gaming adventures. It should be mentioned that this is only the first draft, and it's likely (make that extremely likely) that there will be revisions and rewrites, and I hear that Paramount also has a second writer working on a completely different script which could be a lot better, so all is not lost. But for now, the script they have is pretty wretched.
I imagine that Friedman got this writing gig because he has worked on videogame adaptations before (he was a co-writer on the tepid Mortal Kombat: Annihilation), but from reading his first pass at "Tomb Raider" it seems doubtful that he spent much time, if any at all, researching Tomb Raider or Lara Croft. My first impression, upon reading the script, is that die-hard Tomb Raider fans will be shocked and dismayed at how much the game background and the character of Lara has been changed. For instance in the opening scenes, which depict the plane crash in the Himalayas, both of Lara's parents are killed -- this is not the way Tomb Raider fans know it to be!
On its own, this would only be a small matter -- but there are plenty of other deviations and a general disregard for the Tomb Raider mythos throughout the script. In an awkward contrivance, the grown-up Lara has been adopted (kinda) by a Himalayan monk called Karak who acts as her butler/trainer. I think they were trying to imbue Lara with some spiritualism, but the impression I got was a lame take off of the whole David Carradine/Grasshoper schtick from Kung-Fu. There's a laughable sequence in which Lara returns home from her mansion to be ambushed by baddies... and after a long action set-piece we realize that in fact it was all just a training routine that Karak set for her with the aid of the domestic staff. Remember when Inspector Clouseau came home at night and would be ambushed in his house by Kato? That's kinda how this seems, except here they're not playing it for laughs.
The main thrust of the story (into which Lara is propelled without any real motivation or credibility) concerns the search for the ancient lost city of El Dorado. So off to South America we go, where a bunch of Australian bad guys are also after the same thing. From here on in it seems like a mix of Predator-style chase set-pieces in the jungle, and an obligatory series of tricks and traps as Lara navigates her way through a subterranean temple. Obviously it's hard to make this kind of stuff not look like an Indiana Jones rip-off, but Friedman doesn't even seem to be trying -- she even has a colorful peasant guide to follow her around and be amazed by her ingenuity in defeating the various traps (just like Satipo at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Lara's love interest is a shady local by the name of Dodge -- fortunately, they DON'T get it on, but there is some flirting. That seems to be about the one part of her character that they got right.
After much more nonsense involving various boats, planes and more temples the pointless evilness of the Australians' scheme is revealed -- they're gonna detonate a nuclear device, for reasons which are never really made clear. Suffice to say, Lara saves the day and returns home to England safe and sound.
This really is a bad script. The character of Lara is just wrong, wrong, wrong. She relies way too much on contrived James Bond-style high-tech gadgets (designed for her by a trio of geeky college kids who seem a lot like The X-Files' Lone Gunmen) than her own ingenuity and her motivation is... well, a mystery. It's never really explained why she does these things that she does, or who it is she's trying to help. She just kinda... does them.
There's lots of other stuff but I don't want to bore you with it. Overall this script reads like a cross between Alan Quartermain (remember that?) and Anaconda, with lots of steamy jungle, perilous situations and a whole ton of characters you really couldn't care less about. The big question about who will play Lara is likely to remain unanswered for a while longer, because I doubt they'll convince any A or even B-list talent to sign on on the basis of this shoddy script. The whole strength of Tomb Raider is that Lara is a really cool and original character, but that potential has been completely passed over here.
Oh, to be fair, there is ONE pretty good one-liner, but I won't spoil it for you...
Regards
"Agent 4125"
