O diretor Roar Uthaug disse que queria tornar Lara Croft um personagem mais plausível, fazendo coisas mais realistas para que o público se relacionasse melhor com ela (sua experiência pode variar), que incluía efeitos práticos, e não CGI, sempre que possível. >
De sua entrevista com o Screenrant 1 :
... I think that's a good way to get the audience engaged in a movie like this, to make them believe that this is actually happening, this is a real girl living in East London, has a real life there, and she is taking on this great big adventure, but it's throughout it you feel that there's a reality to it and she's . . .her experience of rings true and I think that’s something that was important....
I think it's like in any movie, you have to care about the characters, if you don't care about the people that this is all happening to, then you’ve lost. So, I think the most important thing was to make your audience root for Lara, believe that she's a real girl, and I think then you send her out on this big adventure, but then you have to . . . or at least I think we have to keep a kind of grounded approach to all of it so it doesn't feel camp or tongue in cheek and that it feels real and that it feels . . . when she stumbles and falls, she gets hurt and she just bruised but then she picks herself up, she keeps fighting.
De sua entrevista com ActionFigureJunkies.com :
We wanted some reality here. We didn’t want her to be the effortless champion. She needs to be real. We see her as a bike messenger and doing simple jobs the way a normal person would. That was a key part of what we wanted to do with her. She couldn’t just be this unstoppable heroine. We had to feel for her and root for her, and that means she had to have this reality.