painful attempt

The Mum­my.

It’s Universal’s des­per­ate and painful at­tempt at set­ting up their own fran­chise by dig­ging up old mon­ster films. They’ve tried it be­fore.

It is bor­ing yet at least watch­able – but the studio’s in­ten­tion be­hind the whole idea makes me dis­like the film more than it de­serves. It’s so bla­tant that it felt like a long ad­ver­tise­ment. It even says “The Dark Uni­verse” in the open­ing, of which The Mum­my is go­ing to be the of­fi­cial start. Let’s see how em­bar­rass­ing it’s go­ing to be in a few years.

The movie care­ful­ly ex­plains every­thing ver­bal­ly in­clud­ing the sto­ry and Tom Cruise’s char­ac­ter (e.g. his love in­ter­est says to him that he has a bad habit but has a good heart, so that the au­di­ence un­der­stands it), so there is not an ounce of sub­tle­ty. The film is writ­ten to make sure every­one, es­pe­cial­ly non-Eng­lish speak­ers, un­der­stands what is go­ing on.

And Tom Cruise, who would be com­plete­ly buried if this was his first film. He is ter­ri­bly mis­cast for the sake of for­eign box of­fice suc­cess. He is a gen­uine­ly hate­ful char­ac­ter who force­ful­ly turns good at the last mo­ment be­cause the script says so.

Also mak­ing a mum­my film that takes place in the mod­ern era seems ter­ri­bly in­sen­si­tive. Tom Cruise char­ac­ter fights against Is­lam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists who de­stroy his­tor­i­cal ob­jects, so that he can sell those at the black mar­ket. He also works for the US Army and calls an airstrike to de­stroy the op­po­si­tion. And the rea­son why mum­my as hor­ror char­ac­ter ex­ists (past generation’s mis­un­der­stand­ing of Egypt­ian bur­ial cul­ture in­spired them to cre­ate a mon­ster) is in­her­ent­ly in­sen­si­tive, so it is prob­a­bly bet­ter to set it up in a sim­i­lar time frame, which the pre­vi­ous Mum­my fran­chise did with Bren­dan Fras­er.

De­spite the ob­vi­ous mar­ket­ing ploy by Uni­ver­sal, this movie was made by a big stu­dio with fair amount of bud­get; the pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty is sol­id which makes the film watch­able, so it at least de­serves a 5. It’s fine, but I rec­om­mend you avoid it. Or if you’re like me and you en­joy watch­ing bad films and dis­cussing why they did­n’t work, then I rec­om­mend it.

And as a side note, I of­ten look at how much de­tail films try to get right. The Mum­my rates pret­ty low here too. There’s a se­cret or­gan­i­sa­tion in Lon­don which is di­rect­ly un­der­neath the South­bank Cen­tre, but once you go up­stairs, it’s the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Mu­se­um in South Kens­ing­ton. From there, the main duo runs away from the mum­my, at least to Ox­ford Cir­cus, on foot. How the stu­dio thought they could get away with such a bla­tant in­con­sis­ten­cy in one of the most fa­mous cities is baf­fling. To be fair, this doesn’t nor­mal­ly hap­pen in more Britain-fo­cused films such as 007.
 
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2017 Toshi Oma­gari. The sign (above) says ‘Live­stock gate,’ it seems.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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