Tomb Raider 2018

[GeneChing]

Why we’ve been arguing about Lara Croft for two decades
From fembot to feminist, her many paradoxes reflect our cultural ambivalence about what makes “strong” women.
By Aja Romano@ajaromano Mar 17, 2018, 9:10am EDT


Ilzek Kitshoff/Warner Bros.

Since Lara Croft blew up gaming culture in 1996 with the first installment of Tomb Raider, her character has been so predominantly defined by her sex appeal that two decades on, we’re still trying to extricate conversations about her from conversations about her breasts.

Lara Croft has always been a cultural flashpoint, always in direct relation to her gender. Over the years, she’s also served as an example of gaming evolution, particularly in terms of graphic design. But it’s virtually impossible to find an abiding cultural conversation about Lara that doesn’t ultimately return to debate over whether she’s an empowering character.

And it’s impossible to consider her as a character without also considering the role she holds within gaming as essentially the first, and still one of the only, female characters to helm an action gaming franchise.

Lara Croft was the original “cyberbabe” — but from the beginning, she was also a whole lot more

When Tomb Raider first appeared on the scene, swiftly followed by Tomb Raider II a year later, Lara Croft was critiqued as belonging to a long cultural tradition of science-fiction fembots. With her “polygonal breasts” and breathy voice, it was hard for some critics to see her as representing more than a digitized sexual fantasy. A flurry of user-made game patches with titles like “Nude Raider,” made solely for the purpose of removing her clothes to reveal her pixellated body, didn’t help that impression.

“Launching a franchise with a female archaeologist was seen as a novel concept,” Samit Sarkar, an editor at Vox’s sister site Polygon, told me. “Her character model was relatively primitive, since 3D graphics were in their infancy at the time, but it was plainly obvious that she was designed as an adolescent male fantasy: chest twice as wide as her waist, teal tank top, khaki booty shorts. At the same time, she had a take-no-guff attitude and dry British wit that people latched onto, and her video game exploits were, of course, badass.”


The evolution of Lara Croft over the years Modified from Reddit

By 2000, the media was crediting Lara with originating the concept of the “cyberbabe.” The idea of the hyper-unrealistic female game character who served as a repository for male fantasies would go on to become a much-parodied and much-debated part of gaming culture. And the apparent contradiction between Croft’s sexual appeal and her sophisticated persona would spawn two decades of cultural ambivalence about what kind of character she was. “The battle between these parts of Lara defines the debate around her character,” Sarkar said.

Ironically, Lara’s sex appeal is also what made her one of gaming’s most groundbreaking characters. If she’d been less sexy, she arguably couldn’t have gotten away with being the lead of a video game franchise — and that was huge. Aside from 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man and a twist ending of Nintendo’s 1986 game Metroid that revealed the lead character to have been a woman all along, major game franchises basically didn’t have playable female characters as their leads at that point in the medium’s history.

Lara Croft was a huge exception to a rule that still sadly holds true for much of the gaming industry today: building a franchise around a female lead is seen as a risk. In an unpublished study whose data was reportedly shared with gaming site Penny Arcade in 2012, the video game research company EEDAR found that just 3.6 percent of nearly 700 games it surveyed had playable characters that were exclusively women — that is, female characters who couldn’t be swapped out with a male avatar. And the games in the study with male-only playable characters were said to have sold better than the ones that included women.

So Lara was, in at least one sense, an extraordinary example of female empowerment. It was rare enough that she helmed a franchise in which players can only play as a woman — but that franchise was also a worldwide bestselling cultural phenomenon. Lara, in her earliest incarnations, may have been a fembot, but if male gamers wanted to fantasize about her, they had to get to know her first.

And there was a lot to get to know. As “the female Indiana Jones,” Lara was aristocratic, filthy rich, highly educated, adventurous, and a technological wunderkind. She even killed Bigfoot. In 1998, the British Ministry of Science named her as an ambassador for British scientific excellence.

But despite these character traits, she was still seen primarily as a sexual object — and, disturbingly, as a power fantasy for male gamers who enjoyed having direct control over her. In a 2000 interview with one of her creators, Adrian Smith, he described her as “frail ... someone you’ll want to protect and nurture.” This idea would surface again over her franchise history, most notably in 2012. He also presented her as a universal romantic fantasy — for straight men like himself. When asked, “What’s Lara looking for in a soul mate?” he responded, “Definitely someone like myself: suave and sophisticated.”

Though Tomb Raider’s original publisher Eidos wanted to keep her image strictly PG, it also didn’t even try to pretend Lara appealed to women, as seen in the game’s 1997 “Where the boys are” ad campaign, which suggested men were abandoning traditional male spaces — including a strip club — to go hang out with Lara.

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[GeneChing]

In 1999, Eidos went to court to keep Lara’s name and the Tomb Raider logo out of Playboy, successfully arguing that such a public association of the character with pornography would forever ruin her image. By that point, however, it was clear that Lara’s design was part of the problem.

The cultural conversation about Lara has always involved her breast size

Though most people associate Lara Croft with gaming culture’s problem of sexual objectification, the truth is that she’s probably less representative than you think. In fact, a 2016 study examining three decades of gender representation in games found that “extreme sexualization” of women — all the traits Lara Croft came to embody, rightly or wrongly — actually reached their peak in 1995, the year before Lara appeared on the scene.


So when considering that we have spent two decades being fixated on Lara Croft’s cup size, it’s helpful to keep in mind that this ongoing cultural conversation about boobs has arguably done more to curb systemic sexual objectification in gaming than to perpetuate it.

Part of the reason for the constant scrutiny of Lara’s boobs — which famously got larger in the second installment of the game, allegedly due to a coding error that the developer decided to keep — is that in the late ’90s, larger questions about who was meant to play Tomb Raider and relate to Lara Croft kept getting derailed by the issue of whether women could relate to her if they didn’t also have enormous breasts.

For the 1998 essay collection From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender in Video Games, Cal Jones, then the reviews editor for PC Gaming World, articulated an argument that would recur throughout Lara’s history: that her impossible anatomy made her a sham of a feminist role model, and that women (and himself) knew better than to fall for it. “Lara, get those melons out of your vest and I’ll like you a whole lot better,” he concluded.

In 1997, the Independent lightly examined the way tabloids had been ranking potential actresses who could play Lara based primarily on their breast size. Teenage girls were supposedly driven to get breast implants because of her. The models who played her were hailed for matching her physical proportions.

In essence, while it was assumed that male gamers would be eager to embrace Lara because she was hot, the idea that women could also relate to her if they didn’t mirror her physically was hotly contested.

There also seemed to be a nebulous sense of unease around the idea that Lara was virtual and not real — that we could inhabit her and even manipulate her, but never fully know her. The perpetual discussion about her breasts, then, may have served as a way to both negotiate and combat this anxiety.

At first, the discussion mainly fixated on the weird triangle boob effect caused by the early days of graphics, and the way it emphasized just how alien she was to the typical presentation of a male sexual fantasy. But update after update, the breast chat kept right on coming. And the more physical we made her, the more we kept her cyborg-like nature at bay.

The focus on her cleavage also, of course, gave us a perennial starting point for larger discussions about the depiction of women in the media. In 2015, for example, a website devoted to fighting eating disorders depicted Lara with anatomically realistic proportions as part of a series devoted to pointing out how unnaturally women are depicted in game design.

As gaming culture advanced, the mainstay conversation about her physical appearance also began to expand and overlap with an emerging critique of an archetype she had arguably helped originate.

Is Lara Croft a strong female character? Or a “Strong Female Character”?


2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider Square Enix

Lara Croft’s success is built on a number of paradoxes. She had a list of badass character traits, but was also, for most of her franchise, a total cipher with zero development. For all the conversation about her boobs, early installments of the game showed her from behind most of the time during the actual gameplay. According to her own creator, she was simultaneously “strong” and “frail.” She was a virtual fantasy, but was made flesh and blood by the first Tomb Raider movies starring Angelina Jolie — which necessitated yet more discussion about cup size.

All of this made her synonymous with a conversation that recurred throughout geek culture in the late-aughts and early tens: the issue of the “strong female character” and the pernicious embedded sexism within its presentation as a form of female empowerment.

For most of the first decade of her existence, Lara was lauded as a strong female character — no quotes. But as conversations about depictions of women in media began to evolve, and notions about pop culture tropes began to expand, the early critiques of her character as anti-feminist began to return. Lara increasingly began to be seen as an example of a character whose “strength” is deceptive, usually depicted as purely physical, while her primary purpose is to placate the male gaze, and her overall character satisfies a patriarchal depiction of femininity.

This critique got a major boost from 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot and the subsequent 2015 sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider. As part of the press around the reboot’s development, in 2012, Eidos announced that “you’ll want to protect” the new Lara Croft — from sexual assault. This famously caused a gaming community firestorm around the trope that equates female “strength” to forcing them to survive sexualized violence. (Though Eidos downplayed the element of sexual assault after it drew backlash, it’s still arguably present in the ultimate version players experienced.)

The Tomb Raider reboots provided a cultural touchstone for emergent criticism of the Strong Female Character archetype, while also providing a space for reimagining what that archetype might look like from a more overtly feminist perspective. Crucially, the new Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider drew heavily upon the reboot and sequel, and has carried all of the franchise’s frustrating litany of paradoxes along with it. “Can Lara Croft ever really be a feminist icon?” Mashable’s Jess Joho asked in response to the film:

Lara once again feels like a woman who was not birthed from a womb, but rather sprung from the mind of a patriarch, fully formed, like your modern-day Athena in a ripped tank top.

And fundamentally, that’s precisely what Lara Croft is. She began as the pixelated creation of a man, molded for the consumption of a presumed male audience, and continually iterated upon by teams made up of predominantly men. Yes, both the new games and movie have women in lead writing roles. But evidently, one woman’s voice cannot retroactively undo decades of Lara serving as a virtual plaything for boys and men.

Former game developer (and current congressional candidate) Brianna Wu told me she “never cared much about Lara Croft until the 2013 Tomb Raider because so much of the conversation was about her body. It felt like she was yet another character created for men.” Now, however, the focus is — finally, hopefully — off her body, Wu says, and “is now about her internal struggle to be more than she is.”

But as much as fans like Joho and Wu are ready for a more nuanced version of Lara, some male critics and fans have taken issue with Vikander’s version as too nuanced. In a much-maligned piece for PhillyVoice, writer Jerome Maida blasted the new Lara’s lack of sex appeal and “interchangeability” with any male character (comments that have since been redacted from his review). Others just kept focusing on her boobs.

“A lot of this discussion is about male geeks marking their territory,” Wu told me. “They liked it just fine when Lara Croft was a character created for their satisfaction. And they honestly can’t understand what others see in her.”

But Lara clearly resonates with women who’ve long been treated as afterthoughts in the gaming world. “There’s a reason when you go to Pax [a nationwide series of gaming conventions] you see so many women cosplaying her,” Wu said. “I know I identify fiercely with her — and I’m not the only one.”

How far this cultural reappraisal will carry the Tomb Raider franchise into the future is anyone’s guess — but it’s clear that the ongoing trend of reevaluating and reframing Lara Croft as a feminist icon has yet to outstay its welcome. The many paradoxes of Lara Croft have helped shape depictions of women in the first decades 21st century, and will be with us for a long time to come.

I found myself grappling with some of these issues when I wrote my review too. Lara is strangely complicated.

[GeneChing]

Asia megastar Daniel Wu on his supporting turn in 'Tomb Raider' and his journey back home — to Hollywood
By JEN YAMATO
MAR 17, 2018 | 3:00 AM


California-born Daniel Wu became a megastar in Asia and only now is getting traction in Hollywood, appearing in the "Tomb Raider" reboot and starring on AMC's "Into the Badlands." (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Twenty years ago, with a University of Oregon architecture degree under his belt, Bay Area kid Daniel Wu took a serendipitous trip to Hong Kong as his graduation present. He wanted to witness the handover, stay a few months, then go home and figure out what to do with his life.

But a chance scouting in a bar led to a commercial gig, then some modeling. Chinese director Yonfan saw the commercial and approached Wu with an offer he couldn't refuse — although he tried.

"He asked me to play the lead in his movie," said Wu, revisiting the moment his accidental career as one of China's biggest movie stars began. "I was like, 'What are you talking about? I've never acted before and you want me to be the lead in your movie? That's crazy!'"

Born and raised in Northern California to Shanghainese parents, and discovered in Asia, the details of Wu's unlikely origin story are well known to his massive Chinese fan base overseas, where the 43-year-old actor and producer is now a superfamous A-lister who gets swarmed by paparazzi whenever he leaves the house.

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Despite having never acted before, not to mention the fact that his Cantonese wasn't great, Wu took the role in that first film, "Bishonen," playing a closeted gay cop opposite fellow future star Stephen Fung. A few weeks after finishing that film, he landed his second role. By his first year in Hong Kong, he'd made three films. In his second year, he made six.

He's now acted in 60 feature films in Hong Kong and China — including crime thrillers, action comedies and historical epics, movies like "New Police Story," "The Banquet," and "Shinjuku Incident," and roles opposite Chinese superstars Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, and Zhang Ziyi.

Yet in his native America, where Wu appears this weekend opposite Alicia Vikander in video game adaptation "Tomb Raider," audiences are still learning his name, in spite of the fact that he's four times as Google-searched as his Swedish Oscar-winning costar.

"Not a lot of people know about the 20 years I spent in Hong Kong. To a lot of people I'm just this new actor, but I've been around for a long time," he said with a chuckle on a brief press stop in Los Angeles.


Daniel Wu as Lu Ren, a newly created character for the "Tomb Raider" reboot. (Warner Bros.)

He'd had roles in the recent disaster pic "Geostorm," "Warcraft" (a motion-capture turn as a CG orc), and the little-seen sci-fi "Europa Report." But here, Wu is still best known for starring as the fierce warrior Sunny on the popular AMC series "Into the Badlands," the martial arts-steampunk hybrid now entering its third season, which he also produces.

Wu was already a huge star overseas when he and Fung linked up with show runners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and fellow executive producers Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg on "Badlands," which he was initially only going to produce. Well into their search for an Asian lead who could speak fluent English and perform martial arts action, producers turned to the perfect candidate already in their ranks: Wu.

"He took some convincing!" said Gough. "What I love about the show is people watch it, even executives watching dailies, and they're like, 'He's amazing!' And I say, 'Guys — he's the Brad Pitt of China.' He's a movie star. He's been doing this for years. Of course he's amazing!"

The movie star charisma honed over two decades as a leading man can't help but seep out in "Tomb Raider," in which he plays Lu Ren, a Hong Kong boat captain whose habit of drinking away his sorrows is interrupted when Vikander's scrappy Lara Croft arrives on his ship in search of her missing father.

"Lu Ren is a character that we created for this film — he is someone who has gone through similar experiences to Lara and goes on the journey with her because he too has questions that need to be answered," said director Roar Uthaug via email. "I wanted to find an actor who could stand up to the punishing physical stuff but also could warm audiences. Daniel is just so **** charismatic.

"Directors want to find actors that audiences can connect with and I believe this is just as important in an action movie," added Uthaug, whose previous film "The Wave" combined large scale action with human stakes. "I put the characters through all this stuff, and none of it really matters unless we care about them. And I think the audience will really care about Daniel."

"It was this very intimate story packaged as a big action movie," said Wu of the "Tomb Raider" script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons. "Honestly speaking, I was thinking [my character] was going to be a flat, stereotypical, 2D character who just kind of helps [Croft] along the way, but he ended up being a really three-dimensional character."

Embarking on a dangerous mission together in search of their missing fathers, Lara and Lu Ren forge a bond while surviving treacherous seas and sinister villains. "I think his father was always in and out of his life, so when he walked out he just thought he disappeared, had finally walked out… and good riddance. But people in denial really want to know the truth, and eventually that's what motivates him to go on this dangerous journey with Lara."

As a bonus "Tomb Raider" was partly shot in South Africa, where Wu and his wife, actress and model Lisa S., own a home. Stepping onto a realistic boating village set recreating the Hong Kong he knew with startling accuracy added something unexpectedly personal to the experience.

"It made me miss Hong Kong," he smiled. "It made me want to go back and get something to eat!"

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[GeneChing]

I didn’t see people like me on American screens, or if I did they were bad representations ...

DANIEL WU


Daniel Wu grew up in California before becoming a major movie star in Hong Kong and China. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It was devouring the films of Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan as a child in the San Francisco East Bay, where he watched Grandmaster Tat Mau Wong host "Kung Fu Theater" on local TV every weekend, that first sparked his lifelong interest in martial arts.

"I distinctly remember when I was 7, my grandfather took me to the Great Star Theater in Chinatown. He said, 'You want to see real wushu, real kung fu?' We went to see 'Shaolin Temple' together, which was Jet Li's first movie."

Wu, like many Asian Americans and youth from communities underrepresented in Hollywood, found inspiration and cultural connection in the movies. A few years later, he began training in earnest, developing the skills and adopting the discipline that would later come to be valuable assets in his own career.

"I didn't see people like me on American screens, or if I did they were bad representations of Asians like Long Duk Dong in 'Sixteen Candles' or David Carradine in yellowface on 'Kung Fu.' When I saw Jet Li and Jackie and all these cool guys doing cool stuff onscreen, I actively searched it out."

Wu first arrived in Hong Kong an outsider who spoke Shanghai dialect Chinese at home but only rusty American-accented Cantonese. But he knew the city from the movies. He describes his first "Wong Kar-Wai moment" when, late one night, he found himself caught in a rainstorm eating dumplings inside a 7-11.

"I was eating microwaved xiaolongbao waiting for the rain to stop, and I thought, 'This is a real Hong Kong experience.' It reminded me of 'Chungking Express,' and I was like, 'I'm here now, in Hong Kong,'" he said.

Wu, who now splits his time living in Oakland with his family, expresses a firm belief that fate lead him to this point in his life and career — or, at least, a belief in the opportunities that fate presents, at which point one must make their own luck.

How else could one explain how at a chance meeting, only a few weeks after filming that first movie role, Wu was introduced by a friend to his longtime idol Jackie Chan and within days was signed to a management deal with Chan's company?

"The biggest dream I ever had as a martial artist in the Bay Area was, 'I hope one day I can be a stunt guy in a Jackie Chan movie and have him kick me down a flight of stairs,'" said Wu, grinning. "That's all I ever wanted."

Perhaps it all had to happen exactly that way, anyway. Stardom in Hollywood hardly seemed an option for any Asian American actors when he first started out.

Years ago, as his career took off in Hong Kong and then China, shifting to the mainland as the film industry there exploded, Wu returned home to take meetings, hoping to land acting roles stateside. But the doors remained closed, even to a homegrown Asian star with dramatic acting chops and a sizable international following.

"I came out to Hollywood to see if there was any interest — and there wasn't, so I just gave up," Wu said. "I went back. I would take meetings and nothing would come of it. Quite frankly speaking, nothing came of it until recently, in the last few years, when there's been such a focus on the Chinese box office."

He continued, finding the balance in that hard lesson. "It sucks that it was money that motivated that move, but at the same time it's a good opportunity for everybody. You started to see more Chinese actors appear in Hollywood movies. I could see that that was about to happen, and then it happened."

He did bigger roles in small films such as "Europa Report" and small roles in bigger films such as RZA's "Man with the Iron Fist" ("I did it just because of RZA — I was a huge fan of Wu Tang Clan.") then landed a succession of higher profile gigs including "Badlands." "It was this slow progression of people starting to know who I was and then being educated on my influence back in Asia, and realizing, 'Oh, he speaks perfect English — that's a major plus.'"

In a world where we’re trying to expand what a leading man looks like ... I keep telling people, ‘He’s done it in Asia. You guys are late to the party.'

"INTO THE BADLANDS" SHOWRUNNER ALFRED GOUGH

Daniel Wu in season three of AMC's "Into the Badlands" (Aidan Monaghan/AMC)

He directed a film once, 2006's "The Heavenly Kings," which caused a stir when it was revealed to be a mockumentary satire of the Hong Kong pop music industry, for which he formed a fake boy band with fellow actors. But directing requires too much dedicated time for Wu right now, at a busy new juncture in his career.

Preparing to head back to Ireland to finish filming and producing an even more ambitious season of "Into the Badlands" — and set to do a second season of Chinese reality show "Dream House," in which he brings modern architecture to rural villages across China — he pondered his future in Hollywood.

"My favorite genre of filmmaking is crime drama, which I did a lot of in Hong Kong," he said. "One thing we can't do in China is heist movies because people doing bad things can't get away with them; the censorship you have to deal with is the challenge of working in Asia. But I would love to do an 'Italian Job' type heist film… or a comedy."

"He's got the charisma, he's got the chops, and he just really is the full package," said Gough. "And in a world where we're trying to expand what a leading man looks like in movies — you look at 'Black Panther' and movies like that — I keep telling people, 'You don't understand. He's done it in Asia. You guys are late to the party.'"

Wu laughs at the irony of having had to travel all the way across the world just to have a career at home. But San Francisco-born Bruce Lee did it too, so he's in good company.

"I think the difference now is the audience is different," he mused. "The audience is more diverse now not just culturally, but the white kids growing up today are eating Asian food. When I was growing up white kids were like, 'Hey, what are you eating?' And that was only 20 years ago."

Studio executives just have to take cues from today's culture-crossing youth and start thinking that way. "Once an opportunity is presented, we run with it — but at the same time it's [the people in charge] that have to give us those opportunities."

jen.yamato@latimes.com

@jenyamato

THREADS:
Tomb Raider 2018
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[GeneChing]

They Don't Know Kung Fu: Why Asian Actors are Ditching Martial Arts
How blockbusters are ditching racist stereotypes.
By Eric Francisco on April 17, 2018

Asian movie stars have been stereotyped as kung fu masters for ages, but there’s a quiet revolution underway in Hollywood that might see them finally leave kung fu behind. All one has to do is look at two recent blockbusters.


Daniel Wu in 'Tomb Raider'

“In Tomb Raider, Daniel Wu stars opposite Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft. He’s a drunk, roughneck captain named Lu Ren leading Lara through dangerous waters.”


Lily Ji on the set of 'Pacific Rim: Uprising".

In the ensemble of Pacific Rim Uprising, Lily Ji is Mei Lin Gao, the eldest in a cadet squad of monster fighters. She is “definitely not a stereotypical Asian character,” Ji said in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “All I would hear growing up was laundry owner, prostitute, tai chi player. I was like, man. Can we just do more? We’re all different. I’m so glad [Mei Lin] is not that. She’s not typically sexy. She has brains, she’s driven, she’s interesting. I wanted to bring independence.”

Neither of these Asian actors are kung fu fighters. Instead, they are characters, however long or short their screen time. For Wu, this was an intentional choice, because he actually does know kung fu. While working on Tomb Raider, Wu avoided using his knowledge of wushu kung fu in his portrayal of Ren.

“He’s grittier, different than anything I’ve done in Asia,” Wu tells Inverse. “When we got there [to the set] the action coordinator was like, ‘You wanna do any kung fu?’ I said, ‘No, no.’ The character is not that. He may be a bar room brawler, been in a few fights, but he is not a martial artist.”

Wu puts it another way: “It would be kind of racially insensitive to assume he’s a martial artist.”

Proficiency with kung fu wasn’t always considered a racist stereotype, but for a long time, it has been. In the early Twenties, [[[Sessue Hayakawa was one of Hollywood’s first — and highest-paid — heartthrobs, in movies like The Cheat (1915) and The Temple of Dusk (1918).

But his career came to a halt when “talkies” made Hayakawa’s accent obvious, which was poorly timed with rising anti-Asian prejudice in the United State in the United State in the United State in the United States. From then on, Asian characters became sidekicks, servants, or mustached villains. Many times, they weren’t even Asian actors; check out Academy Award winner Marlon Brando as “Sakini” in 1956’s The Teahouse of the August Moon and gaze in horror.

Then, Bruce Lee came out of nowhere, in 1966’s The Green Hornet on TV. A human wrecking ball who demolished stereotypes with his fists, Bruce Lee became an icon revered after his untimely death in 1973. But just as the star of Enter the Dragon broke stereotypes in portraying a physically imposing Asian male, he left behind new ones, too. “Kung Fu Masters” became a new archetype for the still-rare instances of Asian characters in American pop culture.


Sessue Hayakawa 1918
Sessue Hayakawa, in the July 1918 issue of Moving Picture World. In his heyday, Hayakawa was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors and a celebrated sex symbol who embodied an image of exotic masculinity rarely seen today.

Historically, heroic Asian characters like Lu Ren have been martial artists, such as Jet Li in The Expendables, Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels, Lee Byung-hun in G.I. Joe, Louis Ozawa Changchien in Predators, Jay Chou as Kato in The Green Hornet (a role made famous by Bruce Lee). The list goes on. For non-Asian actors, it’s never a concern if their characters know martial arts or not. But for Wu’s Lu Ren, it’s almost revelatory, as a small but significant step in diverse representation: that an Asian character can kick ass without kung fu.

“Yeah, it’s a bit [of a] stereotype,” Chinese actress Lily Ji tells Inverse. “I hope Hollywood can show Asian characters in different aspects apart from martial arts masters. We obviously can do more.”

As Mei Lin Gao, Ji pilots the war machine (called “Jaegers”), Saber Athena. To prepare for the role, Ji trained extensively in martial arts, but only to physically acquaint herself to the punch and kick movements of a rock ‘em, sock ‘em robot. It’s a gray area, but generally speaking, Mei Lin Gao is no “kung fu girl.”

“She’s definitely not passive or awkward. I really hate that they portray us as passive. I didn’t want her to be like that,” she says. “I portrayed her as this proactive, determined, ‘Strive for better’ type. She’s also [like], ‘If you boys can do this, I can do this too.’”

Wu and Ji know their presence in their films came from “conscious efforts” to encourage Chinese box office revenue. In concert with the rise of a middle class, economists predict China will eclipse the United States as the largest movie market in the world, if it isn’t already already. In 2017, Hollywood films like The Fate of the Furious, Kong: Skull Island, and Transformers: The Last Knight made up 46 percent out of $8.6 billion grossed in mainland China. Hollywood is doing all it can to encourage Chinese ticket buyers, not the least of which includes featuring more Chinese characters. But results have been mixed. Most Asians still occupy the background as set extras, and few get to help save the day. An exclusive scene shot for China, in 2013’s Iron Man 3 where Tony Stark is saved by Chinese doctors, was criticized by native audiences as an obvious effort at pandering.


Bruce Lee, though a cinematic icon deserving of his status, also left behind "martial artist" as a character stereotype for Asian characters.


Daniel Wu (left) willingly did not choose martial arts as a character trait in his role as "Lu Ren" in 2018's 'Tomb Raider.'


Lil Ji, in 'Pacific Rim: Uprising.'

“We have the biggest box office at the moment, so I think people [are] really trying to get in,” Ji tells Inverse. Both sides of the Pacific “are trying to figure out how to do this but maintain our identity and our stories.”

There will be more characters like Lu Ren, Mei Lin, and Rose in 2018’s Hollywood action movies: Queens rapper Awkwafina will star in the female-led Ocean’s Eleven reboot Ocean’s Eight in June; Randall Park will play FBI Agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp this July; Korean actress Claudia Kim will be in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald; and Ludi Lin will play Murk, a merman/army general, in the DC superhero film Aquaman this December. This is the small but emerging class of Asian characters that, somehow, are allowed to be more than the “kung fu man/woman” in their respective ensembles.

“It’s very early,” Ji adds, before offering up a solution: Create characters, not set dressing.

“I remember [working on] Transformers 4, that was my first one after graduation. It was kind of stereotyped,” she says. “Few [Chinese] symbols in [the background], nothing to do with the story. I think humanity and stories are the most important thing for the success of a film. Focus on story and the essence of human beings. That would be the thing to do.”

While Hollywood studios have a financial incentive to attract Asian audiences, it will take more than just casting Asian actors in supporting bits. “It does come from financial interest in creating a bigger audience for China,” Wu says. “But I think it’s a good opportunity, and really run with it and create a three dimensional character for an Asian character that we haven’t really seen on the big screen. In America, at least.”

Photos via YouTube.com/Movieclips, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros., Wikimedia / Nesnad
Written by Eric Francisco

I get this, particularly from Daniel because we talked about this, but I wouldn't call Asians doing Kung Fu racist anymore than African Americans doing hip hop racist or Mexicans playing mariachi music racist. It's tricky because if that's all they are seen as doing, it is stereotyping, but when culture becomes racist, this gets rather murky.

THREAD
Tomb Raider 2018
Pacific Rim: Uprising

[GeneChing]

MGM & Warner Bros Starts Climb Toward ‘Tomb Raider 2,’ Amy Jump To Write Script
By Mike Fleming Jr
Co-Editor-in-Chief, Film
@DeadlineMike
April 12, 2019 9:22am


Warner Bros

EXCLUSIVE: Get ready for another Tomb Raider with Alicia Vikander. MGM and Warner Bros have hired Amy Jump to write the script for the sequel. Sources said Vikander liked what she was in Jump’s scripting.

She is best known for her collaborations with director and partner Ben Wheatley, who co-wrote several of them. That includes Free Fire, the action drama that starred Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy and Armie Hammer. Her other credits include the Wheatley-directed Kill List, A Field In England, Sightseers, and High-Rise. The films are cult favorites in the UK. She broadens the pool of female action writers, who are now in high demand. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons wrote the first installment. Warner Bros released the first film.

Directed by Roar Uthaug, Tomb Raider grossed $274 million worldwide, turning the Oscar-winning Swedish actress Vikander into an action heroine after a string of prestige pics and sci-fi like Ex Machina. Graham King’s GK Films is back as producer after an exhilarating run with Bohemian Rhapsody. Elizabeth Cantillon also is producing.

WME and Independent Talent Group rep Jump.

I wonder if Daniel Wu's character will return. I just saw Daniel last week, and we did chat a little about his role in Tomb Raider, but it was before this announcement was made.

[GeneChing]

Whether or not Daniel gets a recurring role in the sequel, I feel obligated to start a new thread for TR2, poaching the post above off the TM2018 thread.

Ben Wheatley Set To Direct Alicia Vikander In ‘Tomb Raider’ Sequel; MGM Sets Release Date
By Mike Fleming Jr
September 4, 2019 8:08am


Warner Bros.

EXCLUSIVE: Ben Wheatley has been set to direct MGM’s Tomb Raider sequel, with the studio setting a release date of March 19, 2021. Alicia Vikander is reprising her role as the lissome, treasure-hunting action heroine Lara Croft. Amy Jump is writing the sequel script and Graham King is producing through his GK Films banner, and Elizabeth Cantillon.


Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

Wheatley directed the films Kill List and Free Fire, and he is in post production on Rebecca for Working Title Films.

Directed by Roar Uthaug, last year’s first film grossed $275 million worldwide. Production on the sequel will begin early next year.

Wheatley is repped by WME, Independent Talent UK, and Ziffren Brittenham.