The Tomb Raider Movie, Why It Is Crap
This is not going to be a big long argument against the movie, its going to be a short opinionated piece. I'm just sick of all the crap going around about this wonderful TR movie. I forced myself to watch it once, because I was looking forward to it, and even though I wanted to turn it off after five minutes, I knew it wouldn't be fair to write something like this without seeing the whole terrible thing.

The Storyline
Did anyone notice that the storyline of TR has been completely ignored? If Lara's father is dead, how did he turn up at her funeral in 2000? When is the movie set? I don't know (don't really care either), but If it is set between 2000 and 2002 (the period when the movie was made), then it is way off the mark, because this is the period of time that Lara is off gallivanting around the place on her own, after breaking contact with everyone. How did Winston get so young? When did the mansion get re-designed, and who is that guy in the trailer outside?
Anyway, once you get the fact that this film has nothing to do with Tomb Raider except in that it shares a few names with it, you can start looking at the storyline in isolation. I have (and I am being honest here) seen better B-movies than this thing. It is a generic action storyline with the details added in. I can see how it was made, double-click on the 'Action Movie Wizard' on the desktop, put Lara's details in when it prompts you, and it comes up with this. The fact that it is based on Tomb Raider makes it even easier to see that it had virtually no (intelligent) thought put into it. The main character is haunted by her past and has to solve a mystery that begins with her long lost father. They should have put a little effort into it.
I think this movie represents what Tomb Raider isn't. Tomb Raider is not a generic action/adventure game with a pointless story that only exists for the sake of it. Tomb Raider's story, Lara's story, is easily worthy of a movie (several), but as far as I'm concerned there are none yet, just idiotic rip-offs.

CG Anyone?
There was some prior warning that this movie was going to be a failure. How can you have a movie about a video game character if the movie isn't CG? I think it's ironic that the big CG movie, the Final Fantasy one, is based on a game where the characters always change, so you could get away with using real people who play different characters. But here we have the great Tomb Raider movie, done with real people. What, wasn't Lara herself available to do it?
One nice thing though, it is much easier to disassociate this movie from the games because it is just whatsherface, not Lara, who's in it.

Anyone who decides to buy the games because they liked the movie are in for a bit of a shock, Lara's super-heroic acts, like in the movie, are few and far between in the games (for realisms sake). She really is portrayed as a normal (though very strong) person. And now in TRVI, she is getting hard and darker and will be even less like Jolie.