The new Tomb Raider trailer dropped this week starring Alicia Vikander as the privileged thrill-seeker in search for adventure, and her antics remind you of the Instagram hit White Saviour Barbie.
White Saviour Barbie only had one joke, but it was a doozy: it followed the adventures of a wide-eyed Barbie doll as she travelled through the developing world on a gap year in the naive assumption that she was somehow helping. “What better way to bless the villagers than a fresh coat of paint?!” she asked in one post. “Many of them don’t know the calming effect that just the right colour can provide. I’m just doing what I can to help these huts become homes.”
White Saviour Barbie is so popular that they’ve now made a movie about her, starring Vikander. Let’s run through some quick comparisons.
Is Tomb Raider about a privileged young white woman who gets sick of trying to fend for herself and decides to gallivant around the world on her parents’ buck? Check. Does the trailer include a scene where a non-white character fruitlessly attempts to convince her of the severity of a situation that she sees as a fun adventure to be dipped in and out of? Check. Is the lead character in possession of a Photoshopped body that defies physics to such a degree that she ends up inadvertently resembling a disproportionate mutant? Check, check and check.
Yes, they’re calling it Tomb Raider, but that’s probably only so that Vikander and her partner, Michael Fassbender, can claim to have one absurdly terrible video game adaptation out each year.
Vikander certainly isn’t playing a Lara Croft I recognise. I saw both previous Tomb Raider movies, so I know that Lara is actually a bored-looking woman with a suspicious accent, a robot called Simon, and a memory card entitled “Lara’s Party Mix” containing the worst music ever heard by human ears.
That clearly isn’t the Lara that Vikander is playing. Hers was so inspired by the first Christopher Nolan Batman film that she’s gone all out to replicate it as accurately as possible, up to and including having loads of money, a vast corporation named after her, dead parents and a slightly uncomfortable tendency to equate anything Asian in origin with mystical woo-woo.
Obviously I’m basing all this on the trailer. Perhaps the film will have a bit more depth and all this gap-year malarkey has only been forced into the trailer for the purposes of exposition. After all, we’ve yet to hear her say either of the two sacred gap year mottos - “They don’t value life as much here” and “These people have nothing, but they’re so happy”. Perhaps we’ll get lucky, and the finished Tomb Raider movie will forgo all that in favour of telling a simple story about a girl who saves the world with her freakish springy-snake-in-a-peanut-can neck.
