Rupturing Colonial Narratives: Examining Decolonial Disruptions in the Tomb Raider Films

The Tomb Raider film franchise, including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003), and Tomb Raider (2018), has captivated audiences globally with its tales of daring archaeological adventures led by the iconic Lara Croft. However, these cinematic narratives remain deeply imbricated within colonial legacies – perpetuating tropes of the ‘white saviour’, fetishising the Other, reinforcing patriarchal ideologies, and glamorising the plundering of indigenous cultural artefacts. This chapter conducts a decolonial intersectional critique while focusing on productive disruptions that emerge across the Tomb Raider films, momentarily fracturing their overarching colonial scripts. The critique interrogates how the films occasionally trouble reductive representations of indigenous communities as primitive or mystic. It explores instances where Lara’s character stutters or deviates from the monolithic ‘white saviour’ femininity inscribed onto her and analyses the narrative inversions that destabilise colonial binaries of Self/Other, Man/Woman, Civilised/Savage.