Author: Robert Greenberger

Let me stipulate upfront that I have never played a Lara Croft game or saw the first film adaptation of the Tomb Raider franchise. I have a passing familiarity with her thanks to the virtue of Lara being the first major adventure video game female star (where are the others?). As a result, I approached the Blu-ray release of the March Tomb Raider film, out tomorrow from Warner Home Entertainment, with an open mind.

While Angelina Jolie seemed picture perfect in her turn, the slightly smaller, more athletic Alicia Vikander has made the part her own. It helps that the film is effectively her origin story and for 118 fun minutes, we watch her go from clueless Millennial to adventurer after being told she has to claim dad’s inheritance or lose it all…now. She is 21, aimless, and seeking a purpose when life hands it to her and she decides to grab it. Then hang on to it, when she heads for the isle of Yamatai. Dad (Dominic West) leaves a message warning her off, but by then she’s invested and goes for it. I gather this script from Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons is based on the 2013 reboot of the video game franchise.

Lara Croft feels right and solid as a character, thanks in a large part to Vikander’s strong acting in any role. Unfortunately, Lord Richard Croft, rival Mathais Vogel (Walton Goggins), and other supporting roles are less well-defined, a disservice to actors involved, notably Kristin Scott Thomas and Derek Jacobi.

The movie zips along just fine and the stunts and escapades feel good, more than just an 8-bit video game come to life, but there’s also an unevenness throughout spoiling the fun.

The film comes in a variety of packages and the Blu-ray, DVD; Digital HD combo pack was reviewed. Word is the 4K UltraHD looks spectacular and since it was shot digitally, it looks pretty darn sharp in 1080p. The lossless Dolby Atmos/TrueHD 7.1 and DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio tracks are equally attractive.

The film underperformed at the box office, which is a real shame, but it may explain why we get a mere four bonus features. First up, is Tomb Raider: Uncovered (7:04) as cast and crew talk production; Croft Training (6:03), Vikander prepares and gets buff; Breaking Down the Rapids (5:33), Director Roar Uthaug leads us through the set piece; and, Lara Croft: Evolution of an Icon (9:51), a nice history of the video game that became a phenomenon with fans/experts Megan Marie and Erika Ishii giving us gushing context.

The Bridge: How the Roeblings Connected Brooklyn to New York
By Peter J. Tomasi and Sara DuVall
208 pages, $24.99, Abrams ComicArts

Once upon a time, Brooklyn was a city separate from New York, separated by a river and giving rise to vastly different cultures. Yet, people commuted from the Brooklyn shore to Manhattan Island and in the 19^th Century, a visionary engineer thought a bridge was needed to connect the two.

The feat of engineering is something worth celebrating and David McCullough did that with his 1972 The Great Bridge, which served as the source for Ken Burns America Collection: Brooklyn Bridge. But, there are other ways to tell that story and Peter Tomasi, a comics writer and editor, has been longing to tell this story for years.

Thankfully, his dream, like John Roebling’s, has become a reality. Unlike the elder Roebling, at least Tomasi is still around to see it. Tomasi is known for how his humanizes his heroes, making them relatable in ways that do not diminish their amazing accomplishments. Partnered with Sara DuVall, we get to see the people who toiled for decades to make the Bridge a reality.

As with so much of the 19^th century, the story begins with the Civil War as John’s son, Washington, experiences much. A Union soldier, he had been trained at his father’s side and more than once used his knowledge to help construct bridges for the soldiers to use. He saw much, endured much, and brought home those memories and more than few injuries.

Washington also fell in love, meeting Emily Warren at an officers’ dance. They were infatuated with one another and they formed a partnership that was stronger than the steel wire the Roeblings’ factory produced.

No sooner did Washington return from the war in 1865 than he and his father embarked on drafting plans to convince the governments of two cities that a bridge was not only necessary but also possible to build. By this point, the cold, taciturn John has ingrained a worldview and work ethic in Washington that ensured the two would work compatibly which proved fortuitous when the suborn older man died from an untreated infection.

The difference in Washington, much as it separates Tomasi from many of his comic book peers, is the touch of humanity. Over the years between construction (1869) and opening (1883), Roebling goes out of his way to ensure the men’s safety, shortening work hours, having an on-site doctor, etc. His loyalty to the men is inspiring as is his relationship with Emily. She comes into her own as his cheerleader, champion, and ultimately surrogate when he is too ill to leave their home.

With 208 pages to work with, DuVall paces things nicely and her art, simple and clear, helped by Rob Leigh’s strong lettering and nice palette from colorists Gabriel Eltaeb and John Kalisz. They help us see the depths men had to dig before hitting bedrock, the physical and emotional toll the work took, as well as the political shenanigans that almost derailed the project in its final phase.

Overall, this is a masterful use of the graphic novel format to tell an important story in a compelling way. Highly recommended for readers of all ages.

In the 1950s, Batman was transformed into a variety of beings or wore a colorful assortment of costumes to goose sales. Thankfully, that silliness was retired with the New Look and wasn’t resurrected until the Elseworlds what if stories of the 1990s. That same approach has now crept from the page to the screen with Batman Ninja, out now on DVD from Warner Home Entertainment.

This anime-style adventure comes from director Junpei Mizusaki, (producer of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure), working from a script by Kazuki Nakashima (Kill La Kill, Gurren Lagann) and character designs from Takashi Okazaki (Afro Samurai). As a result, it comes with a strong pedigree for the creative approach.

Rather than a posit an ancient Japan that needed a protector styled in the form of a bat, this gonzo story actually takes the heroes and villains of Gotham City and transports them into the past. It’s weird, wild, wacky and not at all to my taste so your mileage will almost certainly vary.

We have the Dark Knight (Kōichi Yamadera/Roger Craig Smith) sent to feudal Japan without his high-tech gadgets and has to go back to the basics to save the locals from the Joker (Wataru Takagi/Tony Hale), Catwoman (Ai Kakuma/Grey Griffin), Harley Quinn (Rie Kugimiya/Tara Strong), Two-Face (Toshiyuki Morikawa/Eric Bauza), Gorilla Grodd (Takehito Koyasu/Fred Tatasciore), Deathstroke (Junichi Suwabe/Fred Tatasciore), Penguin (Chō/Tom Kenny), Bane (Kenta Miyake), and Poison Ivy (Atsuko Tanaka/Tara Strong). Also transported are Alfred (Hōchū Ōtsuka/Adam Croasdell), Nightwing (Daisuke Ono/Adam Croasdell), Robin (Yuki Kaji/Yuri Lowenthal), Red Robin (Kengo Kawanishi/Will Friedle), and Red Hood (Akira Ishida/Yuri Lowenthal). Along the way, he finds new allies and becomes a ronin of sorts, a masterless samurai out to protect the innocent from the wicked, fulfilling a prophecy about a foreign bat ninja coming to save them.

I guess

 the creators thought they were getting one shot at this project and therefore threw in every trope you could ask for, making it feel weirdly familiar but also oddly humdrum. The most interesting turn comes when villains lose their memories and acclimatize to their surroundings. There’s also a nice twist with Grodd.

Produced in Japan, the Blu-ray release offers up both the original Japanese vocal cast and an English audio track. Visually, it is an amazing piece of animation, mixing traditional drawings with 3-D virtual realities so you’ve not quite seen a Batman animated feature like this before.

The Blu-ray comes with a handful of useful features delving into this project’s background. We start with East/West Batman (10:00) where Mike Carlin (Creative Director Animation, DC Entertainment), Ames Kirshen (VP Interactive & Animation DC Entertainment), Eric S. Garcia (Producer, English Screenwriter), Leo Chu (Producer, English Screenwriter), and Junpei (Director),  Mizusaki, Nakashima, and Okazak take turns discussing the challenges with bringing an American super-hero to Japanese storytelling.

Then there’s Batman: Made in Japan (15:00) which goes further into the traditional Japanese storytelling elements while focusing on Okazaki.

Of course, there’s New York Comic Con Presents Batman Ninja (40:00).

Much has been made of the budget allotted to the big screen adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time and how Director Ava DuVernay was a woman tackling something so massive. That’s a lot of press and pressure on a risky venture considering the novel may be beloved but not in the public consciousness. Thankfully, there have been other hits and misses to take attention away from the fact that this entertaining effectively flopped.

The movie, out today on Blu-ray from Walt Disney Home Entertainment, is a solid if flawed adaptation, that somehow missed the magical touch to enthrall younger viewers. As a result, the film is hovering near the $100 million domestic gross with prognosticators estimating it will lose the studio at least that much.

And that’s a shame because it deserves to be seen. The movie is colorful, visual treat that fully realizes L’Engle’s worlds, from typical suburban America to otherworldly Camazotz. The color saturation works with the look and feel, especially when the fairy tale trio of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) respond to Meg Murry’s (Storm Reid) plea for help in finding her father, Dr. Alexander Murry (Chris Pine), who disappeared four years earlier.

Meg is very much an idiosyncratic adolescent, unfashionably iconoclastic with unruly curly hair making her the object of derision by the cool kids led by her next-door neighbor Veronica (Rowan Blanchard). All she has is her sad mother Dr. Kate Murry (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), who just happens to be an undersized genius. (The movie leaves out his ability to read her mind as well as their twin siblings Sandy and Dennys.)

The Wallaces are portrayed as capable physicists, working in tandem, but Alexander has been most vocal about his theories on folding space, traveling from point to point through a tesseract (which has nothing to do with Marvel’s Cosmic Cube). One night, his theory becomes reality but he vanishes without a trace.

Now, four years have passed and Meg continues to sulk and act out until she’s visited by Mrs. Whatsit (who in the novel is a new neighbor, here she’s effectively Glinda the Good Witch). She’s come to help and the others arrive soon after because apparently Alexander is in the clutches of the It, an elemental force of evil that is spreading its tendrils across the universe, threatening Earth. We see a nice montage of the seven deadly sins visiting the supporting cast, adding some complexity to their cliché roles.

Meg and Charles Wallace, accompanied by Meg’s friend Calvin (Levi Miller), have to go save dad and we’re off across the galaxy that will forever change the children in the eternal struggle between good and evil.

It’s an engrossing story that sands down the novel’s details and hones in on the action. We see the power of not only love, but the need for self-confidence, and perseverance. If anything, the film suffers from big ideals and not a lot of character development so everyone, even the trio of supernatural beings, feel like models of archetypes than fully realized characters. The screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell fails the stellar assortment of performers, notably Kaling. Storm Reid is a welcome new performer as Meg.

The high def transfer, thankfully, captures all the color and spectacle making for pleasant home viewing. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 lossless soundtrack is adequate but pales compared with the visuals.

Perhaps because the film failed to explode into a hit, the extras are more perfunctory than magical. We have A Journey Through Time (30:28), the behind-the-scenes story; Deleted Scenes (9:36 ), totaling four moments with optional DuVernay commentary; Audio Commentary: DuVernay, First Assistant Director Michael Moore, Visual Effects Supervisor Richard McBride, Screenwriter Jennifer Lee, Producer Jim Whitaker, Film Editor Spencer Averick, and Production Designer Naomi Shohan, offering interesting insights but little new; Music Videos: “I Believe” by DJ Khaled and Demi Lovato (3:46) and “Warrior” by Chloe X Halle (4:02); and finally, a handful of Bloopers (1:36). (Bellamy Young has one scene and I kept expecting to see more from the actor, making me wonder why she took the part.)

The Cardboard Kingdom
By Chad Sell
282 pages, $12/99/$20.99, Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

All too often the Young Adult graphic novels crossing my desk live in worlds of fantasy and science fiction, borrowing heavily from what has come before, resulting in a colorful sameness to so many. As a result, The Cardboard Kingdom is a breath of fresh air.

Cartoonist Chad Sell has assembled a team of writers — Jay Fuller, David DeMeo, Katie Schenkel, Kris Moore, Molly Muldoon, Vid Alliger, Manuel Betancourt, Michael Cole, Cloud Jacobs, and Barbara Perez Marquez – to visit a multicultural neighborhood filled with imagination. The boys and girls like to play make-believe games but do so taking ordinary cardboard boxes and turning them into costumes, props, weapons, and the like to aid in their games. Consider it early cosplay training.

This vividly illustrated series of vignettes and short stories has a nice blend of Caucasian, African-American, Indian, and Latin American playing together and as with all friendships; there are strains, fights, and tentative steps at making up. Also unlike so many other YA works, the parents are not all supportive or all clueless, there’s a similar mixture of types, which adds an important dimension to the stories.

Sell’s artwork is clear, his storytelling strong and we see the children as they truly are and as they imagine themselves. Often, there are several silent pages where the writers let the visuals do the heavy lifting. While these are all short works, easily read in batches, there is a continuity throughout the long summer so you can follow a progression.

We watch the children experiment with being heroes, villains, and monsters along with rivalries and unexpected alliances. There’s Jack who wants to be a sorceress and while mom is okay with her son in a gown, but disapproves of his character’s meanness. Miguel and Nate seem to really like one another but struggle with those feelings while playing their traditional male roles. Amanda’s dad speaks little English and represents his Latin home’s conservative values setting up some at-home conflict. Then there’s Sikha, the oldest in the group, is left looking after her brother Vijay, because their single mom works long hours.

Everything builds up to the last all-out campaign before school begins, leaving the readers satisfied with their summer vacation to this imaginative and worthy neighborhood. This is aimed at 9-12 year olds and is highly recommended.

5 Worlds: The Cobalt Prince
By Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, Boya Sun
Random House Books for Young Readers, 256 pages, $20.99/12.99

The interesting test for a book in a series is just how accessible it is for a new reader to jump in. In the case of the second installment in 5 Worlds, The Cobalt Prince, the answer is a total failure. There is nothing provided the curious reader as to what has transpired before so we meet a new world and new characters almost immediately plunge into a dizzying flashback.

Across the 256 colorful pages, things slowly begin to make sense as some evil entity called the Mimic manipulates people to obtain the missing arm of a Queen’s statue that will imbue it with unimaginable power. It falls to two sisters, apparently mutants in their world, to prevent unspeakable horrors from happening.

There’s something about Sand Dancing and colorful sands on moons that need to be moved so planets can become suns (apparently, the laws of physics do not apply to this solar system).

There’s a lot of running, dancing, and shouting about saving the Five Worlds from extinction and after lighting one in the first volume, Oona Lee feels the pressure to light the remaining four in time beginning on the moon of Toki. Separated from her older sister Jessa, who is also blue-skinned, Oona feels alone and isolated and way too young to be asked to save the universe.

Someone named An Tzu is dying, but since he’s tertiary to the story, we don’t care until maybe the ending. Exactly who this Jax Amboy is remains vague.

Considering there are five creators and, presumably, an editor involved, one would hope for some clarity to the worldbuilding, the characters, and the stakes. Instead, there’s precious little provided considering the number of pages available. We get some sense that there are themes about racism and the dangers of blindly accepting other people’s truths as your own, but you’d have to look hard to follow them.

The art team needed some direction as it is hard to differentiate races as well as what’s going on panel to panel, page to page. The dancing, in particular, should have been redrawn from top to bottom to emphasize its magical properties. The vaguely Asian art style and bright colors make this feel imitative of other works rather than something original that can stand on its own.

Apparently, this is well-regarded and has sold well enough that a third volume has been promised although rather than continuing the story, it will tell a supporting character’s story, putting the crisis on hold.

It’s a shame that so many of these critical YA graphic novels get showered with love while failing to live up to the critical components of competent storytelling.