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Lara Croft had approximately 0.6 seconds as the adventurous, crypt-crawling Indiana Jane she was intended to be before she was immediately burdened with absurd physical proportions and tasked with propping up the half-formed sexual fantasies of millions of teenage boys. It’s a fact that mars her achievement as one of the first popular female protagonists in gaming—after all, Mario never had to look like Fabio — and shows that just because you’re polygonal, doesn’t mean you’re three-dimensional. But developer Crystal Dynamics is hoping to change all that with Tomb Raider, their upcoming reboot that hits stores March 5 and serves as a gritty origin story-slash-fresh start for Croft.
The actress who reimagined this iconic character was Camilla Luddington, known for playing Kate Middleton in the royal courtship Lifetime movie William & Kate and more recently for playing Dr. Jo Wilson on Grey’s Anatomy. Not only did the English actress voice Croft, but she also provided her movements, recording most of the game’s action and cut-scenes with elaborate motion capture. We spoke with Luddington about inhabiting the (now somewhat more realistic) body of gaming’s premier action-hero archeologist. (Sorry, Nathan Drake.)
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Our neighborhood Blockbuster did not exactly have a sparkling selection of cinematic classics. It was rare to find a film made before 1970. The foreign-film section was mostly bad martial-arts non-classics; actually, the store probably had more Shannon Tweed movies than subtitled movies. You could find the 1998 TV-Movie Rear Window, starring Christopher Reeves and Daryl Hannah, but you could not find the somewhat-better-known 1954 film version, starring James Stewart and Daryl Hannah and directed by Alfred Freaking Hitchcock. But I can’t hate on my old Blockbuster too much, because it gave me one cinematic treasure that I still value to this day: The Planet of the Apes series. 
The problem with modern action movies is not that they are stupider than vintage ’80s action movies, but rather, that they have become so bland, so milquetoast, so flavorless, the entire genre rendered insubstantial by the triple tidal wave of political correctness, the 
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