THE MUMMY – A LOVE STORY IN CAIROS
“& then there was light”
And the underground chamber fills with bright sunlight bouncing on rustic mirrors. If this scene had been made in our 3d times, you would be standing in a chamber of secrets hidden underneath the beautiful sand. Dreamers still feel the rush in this 2d Egypt. This rush proves its worth.
“Americans!”
Beautiful because the director, Stephen Sommers hides the blood. A muscled half-naked mummy who says thank you to the girl with human emotion, a cowboy who never looks tan despite baking in the desert sun & a highly educated librarian team up to offer a serving of mills & boons. The viewers are able to ignore the fact that the villain is trying to kill the girl when he tries to kiss her in a mode of worship. This is not a creation, it is a recreation. A desert & camels version of the original, ‘The Mummy’.
This feature fiction does not feel old. Not least because the mummy is not wrapped in bandages but also because the visual effects of 2018 don’t outdate the magic done by Alex Laurant.
They carefully avoid anything fluid because humans have a tendency to connect fluids with gore. Alex kept the balance by not tipping off the movie to a horror genre. Its characters funny, the hero not outright courageous but somewhere in between, kept the audience from pointing out obvious historical mistakes. The movie progresses with the physical development of Imhotep, a skeleton to a skeleton with muscle & sinew, let there be a human body bit by bit.
You can see through the mummy, vital parts are missing. This is where it deviates from the norm, from other movies like Dracula or The Invisible Man. The grossness threshold is limited to a minimum by keeping the mummy dry & dusty.
(Dracula 1992)
They were riding on a dangling threshold to accurately match the final Imhotep with the skeleton but the risk eventually paid off.
WHY IMHOTEP STANDS OUT IN MEMORY?
Once you trust your director, you can fly. In Indian cinema, directors like Raj Kapoor could get a timeless movie out of first-time actors because they got physical directions to the T (Ram Teri Ganga Maili). Stephen gave Arnold Vosloo acute description, got him to behave like a physical mummy then his actions were matched with the animated mummy. Credit due to a beautiful marriage between makeup & computer effects. Watching him grow in a 2d theatre, you are scared but you are not, horrified. Because there is a cowboy-librarian love story to tend to.
The Mummy also had a love story.
Unlike other villains running after power in the afterlife.
Who are the minions of the mummy? The bugs. I hate the bugs. A major pie of the descendants of the homo-sapiens live in fear of the creepy crawly, evidence: sale of HIT (famous insect killing spray brand in India)
Nothing works for a skeptic, same goes for this film. But movie-making is all about imagination. And imagination is the single mother who time & again gives birth to new discoveries. But she is a single mother. She is ignored.
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