Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft

The Weight of the Tomb

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of my life watching Lara Croft run. So have most of us.



Since 1996, she’s been a jagged-polygon icon, an Angelina Jolie action-star vehicle, and, in the modern games, a battered survivor held together by grit and scars. With Netflix's *Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft*, showrunner Tasha Huo is trying to bridge those versions of the character. That’s not an easy ask. The show has to connect the bruised, constantly suffering heroine of the recent "Survivor" trilogy to the older image of Lara as a dual-wielding, preposterously confident acrobat. The result is messy and uneven, but I do think it’s reaching for something interesting: what does a person do once the worst thing has already happened and stillness feels impossible?

Hayley Atwell is the main reason it stays watchable. I don’t think the scripts always give her enough interior life to really dig into, but she brings a tired, guarded sharpness that keeps Lara from flattening out. We mostly know Atwell from playing Peggy Carter with immaculate poise and command. Here, the voice is rougher around the edges. She sounds like someone who uses globe-hopping as a way to avoid being left alone in a quiet room. (Which, if we’re honest, is pretty close to the psychological engine of tomb raiding.) When Lara snaps at Jonah—voiced again by Earl Baylon—you can hear panic under the irritation, the fear of someone who doesn’t know what to do with closeness.



The sequence I keep coming back to has Lara threading her way through a collapsing Paris catacomb while basically arguing with her own haunted mind. Powerhouse lets the animation go strange there. Shadows stretch too far. Rooms stop obeying physical logic. It reminded me of fear-toxin hallucinations from older Batman cartoons, only rerouted through Lara’s survivor guilt. The series doesn’t maintain that level of invention scene to scene—too many daytime exposition stretches look stiff and undercooked—but when it leans into grief as something surreal and destabilizing, it clicks. IGN's Ryan McCaffrey called the show’s animation "generic and minimalist," and I understand that criticism in the talkier sections, even if the action set-pieces still carry a frantic bit of life.

Whether you stick with the show probably depends on how much patience you have for macguffin-chasing. There is always another jade box, or key, or map leading to one more box. That stuff usually has me checking the clock.



What kept me engaged were the quieter moments between the gunfire. Lara keeps removing artifacts from cultures that don’t belong to her, and the series at least gestures toward the colonial residue built into her profession. Maybe it doesn’t press hard enough. Maybe the show is too cautious about really interrogating the fantasy it’s built on.

I wanted to love this cleanly, and I can’t. It’s unruly, and it trips over the weight of its own lore more than once. Still, there’s a stubborn heartbeat under the familiar machinery that feels faithful to the version of Lara Croft we’ve ended up with. We keep dragging her back into danger so she can fall, crawl up, and keep moving. Maybe one day we’ll let her be still. Not this time.