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Lara's Identity Confused By Exploitation?
Thanks to BBC News for their article exploring whether the diversification of the Tomb Raider brand has helped lessen it. The author points out: "Rather than consolidating the brand, the multiple incarnations [games, comics, public appearances, adverts, movies..] of the character seem to have diluted it which begs the question - who exactly is Lara today?" In fact, he suggests that the public may be forgetting Tomb Raider was a game: "At least Angelina Jolie seems to be giving the stunts and iffy dialogue of The Cradle Of Life her all. As such, she is arguably now more Lara than the original digital incarnation." As well as there being no single 'image' of Lara Croft, he concedes videogame quality may have a lot to do with it: "The [most recent] game itself is such a source of irritation that the personality of its heroine gets subsumed into the negative experience of playing it."
I think Eidos went the obvious way. The first game received so much media attention (for those two obvious reasons) which focused on Lara, and not the game. So the logical choice is to build a brand based on the character Lara Croft, not on the game.
This makes it much easier to market products - all they need is Lara. And with that, you can sell movies, games, soft drinks, action figures, magazines, condoms...
The question which figure (digital Lara or Angelina Jolie) is perceived as Lara is valid, but not necessarily relevant. If a product features a picture of either digi-Lara or A. Jolie doesn't really matter, a consumer will accept both of them and think of the product as an official Lara-product.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
I don't think there is that much of a difference. In my opinion, both James Bond and Lara Croft are incredibly shallow characters, but they continue to have incredibly substandard games and movies built around them simply by merit of being cultural icons.
Well, the thing is, Jolie herself already has bigger-than-average breasts for a woman her size to begin with (Implants?), bhile the Lara of the original games has enormous torpedoes jutting out from her chest.
The makers of the first film decided to compromise, by padding Jolie's boobs about half-way to Lara Croft size... and even that resulted in the most fake-looking breasts in Hollywood history. And that's really saying something!
The first movie was so insanely bad that there's no way I would consider watching the second one, but I would not be surprised if they got rid of the padding this time around.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The progression was obvious and what we have now is a dilution of a brand. When the first one came out the pixels were large and graphics were grainy, people used their imagination and made lara into a sex object. At that time the controls and camera were not the best but given the state of technology it was not unexpected.
Many years passed and every subsequent release was barely an improvement of the previous, camera work was still poor, graphics were not leading edge (or even close), gameplay too tedious and frustrating.
Lara became a marketing engine more than a game, that is the dicotomy. Eidos concentrated on selling Lara rather than making her a game heroine (unlike games like Gabriel Knight where the game improves with every release due to the software company's dedication).
Licensing to consoles also dampened the character as the implementations were less than stellar.
Lara Croft when introduced was a fun, spelunking game that was enjoyable by people of all ages, as time went on it was molded into a game that only males 15-29 could enjoy and the gameplay mechanics became too annoying to enjoy the real goal of the game, adventure.
The latest installment is the proverbial nail in the coffin. The story is weak at best, the controls are atrocious, the came is downright poor and overall the game becomes an excersize in frustration after about 10 minutes of playing it (once you enter the first room and to find things you have to manually rotate the camera and click 30 times to finally get things to open.
It's just sad to see greed overwhelm creativity (but is anyone surprised?)