New Tomb Raider Trailer Faithfully Brings The Game To Life

Open the tomb! 

The new Tomb Raider movie continues to look way, way better than your typical "video game movie" has any right to be, and it appears to be pulling it off in part by being faithful to its source material. Imagine that.

Starring Oscar-winning actress Alicia Vikander as the adventurous Lara Croft, Tomb Raider will follow the origin story of the iconic action hero, who goes from being a paycheck-to-paycheck East London bike courier to a world-spanning explorer following in her father's footsteps after his mysterious disappearance years prior. When she sets out to discover what happened to her missing father (played by Dominic West), she becomes shipwrecked on an island full of secrets, killers, deadly threats, and hopefully answers.

The upcoming movie, a reboot of the Tomb Raider film franchise, which has been dormant since 2003, is taking heavy inspiration from the 2013 Tomb Raider video game, which was itself also a reboot. 

For reference, compare the trailer's depiction of the waterfall survival scene with this sequence from the game. It's pretty bang-on, and very cool that it seems to work as well in a movie as it does in the interactive format. Usually, video game movies have a pretty hard time threading that particular needle.

 

In addition to Vikander in the lead role and West as Lara's dad, the movie stars Walton Goggins, Hannah John-Kamen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nick Frost, and Daniel Wu. It's being directed by Roar Uthaug, working from a script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons. The soundtrack—which may or may not include the Inception-"wom" trailerfied version of Destiny's Child's "Survivor" featured in this spot—will be composed by Junkie XL.

Tomb Raider is set to be unearthed on March 16. For more, you can check out the first trailer for the movie right here.