Otaku no Culture

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

After looking at the second The Mummy trailer multiple times in the past few weeks since its release, I still can not shake the feeling I have seen this story before. I’m not as excited as the first trailer has led me to believe.

While I plan to see how this reboot helmed by director Alex Kurtzman and written by Jon Spaihts and Christopher McQuarrie pans out, I am setting the bar low because of what I have seen in past and present products about bringing dead Egyptians back to life. King Tut must be rolling in his grave; A film about his haunted tomb sounds like a better idea than where the creators are going with this film. At the same time, I’m left wondering if all the studio producers wanted is to take the best from what Stephen Sommers created from his trilogy and make simple creative changes to make this reboot seem original. After reading the fourth issue of Hammer Comic’s The Mummy, I’m finding I’m liking their story better. At least cults and hungry devourers from the afterlife are involved than a secret agenda which Dr Jekyll (played by Russell Crowe) no doubt harbours.

Much like Rick O’Connell, Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) is a soldier fighting in a war, and after a building gets blown up, he stumbles across a tomb (actually, a prison) which he makes the mistake of disturbing. He may also have a past that connects him to the Mummy (Sofia Boutella). Jenny (Annabelle Wallis) is just as smart as Evie and has knowledge of Ancient Egypt’s lines of pharaonic successors. As revealed in the first trailer, birds come crashing upon the transport plane carrying the sarcophagus, and as for whether the corpse was awake to summon them, that’s a detail not revealed. Maybe someone has read from a book to awaken The Mummy and to cause the carrier to crash. Everyone should be dead, except for Morton, and Jenny provides all the back story that’s needed to get people interested in this film up to speed.

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Tags: Alex Kurtzman, Ancient Egypt, Christopher McQuarrie, Jon Spaihts, Movie Trailer, The Mummy, Universal Monsters, Universal Pictures