Movie Lara receives a gut wound that bleeds through her sweaty tank top, so her film costume lines up perfectly with the game version. Just like in the game, Lara washes up onto the storm-wracked shores of Yamatai after a shipwreck, and someone knocks her unconscious as she cries for help. Watching Lara pull herself out of a raging river, then escaping a rusted-out, disintegrating airplane, practically triggers muscle-memory. That brawl is just one of numerous scenes Tomb Raider’s screenwriters cribbed almost directly from the 2013 game.
On my first play-through, I failed half a dozen times, watching Lara fall in various ways based on what I’d gotten wrong.
It’s the first time in the game that Lara kills someone, and the fight requires precise timing to break free from her attacker and avoid being shot. I remember struggling through the notoriously difficult section of the game that inspired the scene.
But as a fan of that game, I found my hands sweating during the film sequence. It’s a tense scene even for people who aren’t familiar with Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 Tomb Raider video game. Doing everything she can to avoid capture and the strong threat of sexual violence, Lara breaks his grasp by biting him, then grapples with him in the mud, finally killing him by drowning him in a puddle. In one particularly brutal scene in the new Tomb Raider film, protagonist Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) wrestles with a mercenary in the jungle. Warning: spoilers ahead for the 2018 Tomb Raider film and the 2013 Tomb Raider video game.