For Fans of Tomb Raider

When Crystal Dynamics stripped away the confident, quipping Lara and replaced her with a frightened 21-year-old fighting to survive, the gaming press debated whether it was necessary. It turned out to be a franchise-saving move. The 2013 Tomb Raider and its sequels made Lara's competence feel earned rather than assumed, and in doing so created one of the most compelling character arcs in blockbuster gaming. The reboot trilogy (2013, Rise, Shadow) stands apart from the classic era not as a replacement but as a complement -- two different emotional registers on the same fundamental idea.

The 2001 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider film is easy to dismiss as a product of its era -- CGI spectacle over substance, plot that barely holds together. But Jolie understood something about the character that took the games years to articulate: Lara is not a fantasy action figure but a person defined by grief and obsession. Her performance gave the franchise its first real screen anchor. The Jolie films are imperfect artifacts that are still more interesting than the critical consensus suggests.

Naughty Dog openly acknowledged Tomb Raider as a major influence when designing Nathan Drake. But by the time the two franchises were both in full swing in the 2010s, something interesting had happened: the series that started as an homage had become the more cinematic experience, while Tomb Raider had pushed harder into survival horror and environmental storytelling. Playing through both lineages back-to-back reveals how differently two studios can interpret the same source material.

The Legend of Lara Croft Netflix anime (2024) slots directly into the timeline after Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which means it inherits the character work of the full reboot trilogy. It is one of the more confident attempts to translate a video game protagonist into animation without stripping out what made the source material interesting -- the mixture of physical capability and psychological damage. Whether or not it sticks the landing on its own story, it rewards anyone who has played through the reboot games.