| Major Cast | |
|---|---|
| Angelina Jolie | as Lara Croft |
| Gerard Butler | as Terry Sheridan |
| Ciarán Hinds | as Jonathan Reiss |
| Chris Barrie | as Hillary |
| Noah Taylor | as Bryce |
| Djimon Hounsou | as Kosa |
| Til Schweiger | as Sean |
| Simon Yam | as Chen Lo |
| Terence Yin | as Xien |
| Daniel Caltagirone | as Nicholas Petraki |
| Fabiano Martell | as Jimmy Petraki |
| Jonny Coyne | as Gus Petraki |
| Robert Cavanah | as MI6 Agent Stevens |
| Ronan Vibert | as MI6 Agent Calloway |
| Lenny Juma | as Village Leader |
| MPAA Rating: | PG-13 |
| Production Companies: | * Paramount Pictures * Mutual Film Company * British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) * Lawrence Gordon Productions * Eidos Interactive * October Pictures * Tele München Fernseh Produktionsgesellschaft (TMG) * Toho-Towa |
| Distributors: | * Paramount Pictures (theatrical) * Paramount Home Video (VHS, DVD) * Warner Home Video (Blu-ray, DVD) |
| Release Date (US): | 7/25/2003 |
| Running Time: | 117 minutes |
| Domestic Box Office (IMDB): | $65,653,758 (11/07/2003) |
| Foreign Box Office: | $? |
| Production Budget: | $95,000,000 (Est.) |
This time the object of the search is Pandora's Box.1 In the film's version, the pithos — now a literal box — contains a virulent plague which Reiss hopes his clients will disseminate. Then, he can step in with the antidote and be hailed as a hero. Lara Croft, conversely, intends to prevent this.
Lara joins an expedition searching for undersea artifacts off Santorini. She seeks the fabled Luna Temple, and has an idea that the recent earthquake might have changed the currents. Sure enough, she and her companions find it: an enormous room filled with treasures untold — and handy braziers still holding fuel after millennia, which they use to advantage.2 While her companions exult over the riches they anticipate, she goes for a glowing orb which contains the knowledge of where to find the Box. High above the statue of Alexander the Great she climbs. So she survives when Reiss's men show up and murder her companions. But she drops the orb, and they make off with it.
It develops that a sequence of sounds is required to unlock the orb's knowledge — sounds which are encoded into a medallion Lara possesses, and she has her team working on assembling this sequence. Reiss's team is in the process of decoding the sequence directly from the orb using powerful computers.
In a daring raid, Lara and her partner Jerry Sheridan steal back the orb. They separate (she by choice, he not), and Lara drops in on a Chinese family living aboard a junk. She uses their satellite television to contact her team and they finish the decoding. The sequence of sounds unlocks the orb, which displays an impressive map of Africa, giving Lara a rough idea of the location of the Box. Unfortunately, Reiss and his men are monitoring her team back in the States, and take them captive. Thus the scene is set for a final confrontation. A native tribe plays a part in this, but it comes down to Lara, her partner, and Reiss.
Cradle of Life continues the tradition of portraying Lara Croft as a mix of Indiana Jones and James Bond. Indeed, she goes Bond one better; incorporating elements of Q, she is a master of electronics, and she speaks multiple foreign languages. There are plenty of over-the-top escapades: riding a shark out of the wreckage of the Luna Temple; escaping from Reiss's men by wing-suiting from the top of a Hong Kong skyscraper under construction to land on a freighter in the harbor; parachuting into a seat of the Land-Rover driven by her African contact Kosa.3
But this film is much less the comic book than Tomb Raider; it gives her a love scene and some character development with Sheridan, and better dialogue overall. There are glimpses of the support system she enjoys: the freighter and those wingsuits, for example, and the arrangement with the Khazakstan prison where Sheridan is held in the beginning. And the climax is better developed, forcing her to rely on wits rather than weapons, and to face not one but two moral quandaries. It puzzles me that IMDB users rate it the lower of the pair.
In the scene where Lara Croft and Sheridan jump off a building wearing wingsuits, the stunt was performed by the two men who developed the suits. No CGI, wires, nets, or other SFX were involved. This suit was invented by Patrick de Gayardon, who died in a parachute accident in April 1998 while testing a new type of parachute in Hawaii.
My Rating:
8 out of 10
Capsule review: While still having plenty of over-the-top escapades, Cradle of Life is less of a comic-book film than Tomb Raider. It has a better plot, better dialogue, and a wide variety of gorgeous exterior shots.4 It is a thoroughly enjoyable film on multiple levels.
| IMDB Rating: 5.5 | Raters: 138,835 |
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