Tomb Raider Film Poster Analysis

Tomb Raider is a film about a video game adventurer, Lara Croft, who comes to life in a movie where she races against time and villains to recover powerful, ancient artifacts. I chose this poster to analyze because it is a film with a female lead playing a heroic, action figure part, which is very similar to the lead in our film trailer. This means we can take ideas and conventions from posters like this and add them into ours.

The first obvious part of this poster that stands out is the picture of the female lead. She is wearing tight clothing with short shorts and has an endearing gaze on her face, with a large pout. This immediately brings sex appeal to the poster and gives away one possible side to her that the audience may want to see in the film. The fact she is holding a gun in her right hand shows the other side to this character, which is hard and suggests an action genre.

What I thought was unusual about this poster is that the actresses name is not mentioned on the poster. This may be because the actress is already very well known, or because they want to keep some mystery to the poster. The font of the title looks like it would be from a video game so it fits in with the rest of the poster. There is also some kind of ancient symbol in the background which could give away some more of the narrative but it still manages to keep some mystery to the poster.

Although there are references to people who contributed to the film at the bottom of the poster, like most posters include, the release date is bolder and stands out in the middle and underneath the references. This is because audiences will find this information important and making it stand out means audiences don't have to look for long to find it.

Overall, this poster uses typical conventions of an action poster, with dark colouring and the inclusion of a gun. But it also uses conventions from film posters with female leads, with the standard sexy and hard looking main character.