MovieChat Forums > Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life (2003) Discussion > This Movie is a Indiana Jones RIP-OFF!

This Movie is a Indiana Jones RIP-OFF!

posted 18 years ago by Jammer81386
28 replies | jump to latest

Has anyone else noticed the several parallels between this film and in the Indiana Jones Trilogy. Here is just a few.

The movie starts with Lara(Female Indy) venturing into a acient temple looking an orb(Golden Idol), the orb is stolen from her by Reisse(Belloq) and the site collapses. During her escape she is threatened by a shark(snake).

Later, she is approached by two british agents who need her skills and knowledge of the artifact.

In Raiders Indy is approached by two american agents who need his skills and knowledge of the artifact.

Also but converstations include a reference to sunday school
Lara: "Well, thats the sunday school version."
Indy: "Any of you guys go to sunday school."

Lara decides she need help and goes to a snowy location to find terry.(love interest)
Indy needs helps and goes to a snowy location to find Marion.(love interest)

The orb, the Lara carries around her neck, is also very similar to the headpiece that Marion carries around her neck. And the both are used to located the resting place of the artifact. Cradle of life and the Well of th Souls.

The final similarity is when Lara is forced to kill terry because she knows that the Box is to powerful to be in human hands. This echos the scene in Last Crusade where Elsa dies trying to obtain the Holy Grail. Both characters are to obssesed with the material value of the object and both die because of their ignorance and greed.

These are just the most noticeable of the similarities between the two movies.

[–] mcquestion 17 years ago

Huh. I thought it was obvious that Lara Croft, her games and movies, are just a low rent Indiana Jones rip off.

[–] Matthew_Diamond 17 years ago

Very poignant observations, however, Hollywood is truly running out of ideas, and most of the "new" ideas are rehashes of old ones. So what you are saying is that originality is all but dead, and you would be right. I'm sort of disturbed by that myself. But the real point is that you and I have seen many movies, but the young have not seen them, and thus are not able to draw parallels between then. I've seen enough movies where, for any given one, I could tell you what the recipe is made of. For example, if you take Independence Day, one of the worst movies ever made yet glorious in its presentation, you can recognize elements of "Predator" (savage aliens), Star Wars (laser beams), Top Gun (fighter scenes), Star Trek (countless inferences), and so on. So what Hollywood does these days is just follow the recipe for a movie. Take a protagonist, a hero, a girl, a villain, a setting (which is actually another character), throw them into the mixing bowl, add a huge scoop of suspense, a dollop of love, a twist of plot here and there, a climax, and so forth. So, really all we are seeing these days are just different sequences of the same movie. Good point you have made in recognizing this.
I will have to say, though, for action and adventure, the Harry Potter series have quickly become my favorites, however, what they really did was take the 1985 movie "Young Sherlock Holmes" by Steven Spielberg and add elements from Rowlings' novels that they were not able to graphically produce because of the lack of CGI technology back then. In fact, George Lucas himself said that the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV) was only 25% of what he had envisioned because the technology did not exist to put it on screen the way he saw it in his mind--the computer generated images and graphics that are commonplace today--the same images, if seen in the 1960's and 1970's would have left audiences speechless, wondering, "How did they do that?"