tom cruise movie egypt

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• An ancient Egyptian princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension.
• Though safely entombed in a crypt deep beneath the unforgiving desert, an ancient princess, whose destiny was unjustly taken from her, is awakened in the current day bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension. — Universal Pictures
• Soldier of fortune Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) accidentally discovers the tomb of a female pharaoh of ancient Egypt named Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) during a firefight in the Middle East. But when he and a British Egyptologist (Annabelle Wallis) try to excavate the findings, the resurrected Ahmanet emerges from her sarcophagus with a plot to enslave humanity. — ahmetkozan
• Destined to rule all of Egypt, the beautiful princess Ahmanet sees her sacred birthright stolen from her instead when the pharaoh begets an heir. Eternally damned for an unholy pact with the dark Egyptian deity Set, the now-abominable servant of evil must endure an everlasting torment deep into the bowels of Mesopotamia, until opportunistic U.S. Army reconnaissance Sergeant Nick Morton inadvertently sets her free some 5,000 years later. Now, Ahmanet, the all-powerful vessel of destruction, thirsts to fulfill her destiny as tragedy befalls present-day London. Will Nick let the Mummy plunge our world into death and despair? — Nick Riganas
• London, 1157 A.D. Crusader knights bury one of their own with a jewel resting in his hands. Jump to the present day where the tombs of many other crusaders are discovered beneath London's catacombs. Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) enters the tunnels and comes across one particular tomb with hieroglyphs, leading him to realize what this means. Through flashbacks, Jekyll tells the story of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella). She was a cunning warrior who was ready to succeed her father, the Pharaoh Menehptre (Selva Rasalingam), until his second wife gave birth to a boy. Knowing that the boy would be the Pharaoh's new successor, Ahmanet made a pact with Set, the god of death, to sell her soul for a dark power. Ahmanet murders Menehptre, his wife, and their baby. She prepares to perform a ritual on her lover using a special dagger that would give Set a body of his own, but the Pharaoh's priests stopped Ahmanet and killed her lover. She was mummified alive and had her sarcophagus taken away from Egypt and down a tomb where she could never be found. We move to Mesopotamia (or Iraq) in the present day. U.S. Army Sergeant Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his buddy Corporal Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) are reconnaissance soldiers riding toward a village being overrun by insurgents. Nick wants to go down for some adventure while Vail is strongly against it. They go down there anyway and get shot at. Vail orders an airstrike to take the insurgents out. As the bombs are dropped, a hole opens in the ground, nearly sucking Nick and Vail down there. They discover Ahmanet's tomb. The guys' superior, Colonel Greenway (Courtney B. Vance), comes to the site in a helicopter and immediately berates the two for running off and doing their own thing, chasing insurgents. Moments later, an archaeologist named Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) shows up and smacks Nick for stealing a map from her after they shared a night together. After seeing the tomb, Nick, Vail, and Jenny all descend to see what is down there. Jenny notes that there are watcher statues facing inward instead of outward, and there are chains holding the sarcophagus down while submerged in mercury to weaken evil spirits. Nick shoots a chain, causing the sarcophagus to rise from its holdings. He then sees a vision of Ahmanet calling to him, thanking him for freeing her. A bunch of camel spiders begin crawling down from the walls. Vail shoots at them but he gets bitten in the neck, though Nick claims they are not poisonous. They get back to the surface and bring the sarcophagus up. Everyone rides home in a plane. Vail starts to act weird as his skin has turned grey and his eyes look discolored. He tries to cut the sarcophagus free from its holdings. Greenway approaches him to stop him, but Vail stabs him twice, killing Greenway. Vail starts moving toward Nick and the other soldiers, forcing Nick to shoot Vail dead. Nick and Jenny go into the cockpit and see a whole flock of crows flying and crashing through the windshield. The pilots are killed, and the plane starts to go down. Nick gives Jenny a parachute and pulls it so she can get out safely. The plane then crashes with everyone onboard. Nick wakes up in a body bag at a morgue in London. Standing next to him is Vail's ghost, who tells him that they are both cursed. Jenny is asked to identify the bodies of the deceased but is surprised to see Nick alive. At the crash site, rescue workers find the sarcophagus and Ahmanet's corpse. One man approaches it and is caught off-guard as Ahmanet sucks the life out of him and his partner to regenerate her body. She then uses her powers to turn them into reanimated corpse slaves. Nick and Jenny are in a pub. He goes to the bathroom and sees Vail's ghost talking to him again. He warns Nick that Ahmanet has chosen him for a reason. Nick then runs out of the pub and is cornered in an alley by a whole swarm of rats. They crawl all over him as he sees Ahmanet crawling toward him, but he is snapped out of this vision by Jenny. She tells Nick what she learned from reading the hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus. She knows about Set's dagger and the jewel that must join it to complete the ritual. Jenny tells Nick about the jewel being buried with the crusaders there in London. Nick and Jenny go to the crusaders' tombs and they uncover the jewel from the crusader's coffin. As they try to leave, they are trapped by Ahmanet and her undead slaves. Nick and Jenny fight off the undead and escape the tomb. They ride through the woods in a van and are chased by Ahmanet and the undead. An undead slave crashes through the windshield and causes the van to overturn and roll down a hill. Ahmanet tries to get Nick, but she is shot with a hook and is taken down. A whole team of men show up to rescue Nick and Jenny. The two are taken to Prodigium, a facility located beneath the Natural History Museum of London. As Nick walks through the hall, he sees a number of artifacts, including a skull with fangs (Dracula?) and a scaly forearm (Creature from the Black Lagoon??). Nick meets Jekyll, who begins to explain what he knows about Ahmanet and the forces of evil out there. Their facility is dedicated to uncovering dark forces and containing them. Ahmanet is chained up and is subdued with mercury being pumped through her body. Nick approaches her and listens to her talking about the ritual she attempted to perform on her lover. She tries to sway Nick by saying he would have complete control over death and become a living god if he joined her. Nick returns to Jekyll's office with Jenny. Jekyll appears to be undergoing a transformation and tries to prevent it using a serum, but Nick grabs the serum, demanding answers. A Prodigium agent pulls Jenny out but leaves Nick inside. Jekyll then turns into his monstrous alter ego, Edward Hyde. He and Nick fight, with Hyde nearly winning until he gets injected with the serum. Meanwhile, Ahmanet summons a camel spider to crawl into the ear of another agent so that he may break her free from her holds. Ahmanet is loose and she takes the dagger and the jewel. Nick and Jenny flee the facility as Ahmanet begins to unleash a sandstorm upon the city. Nick and Jenny run through the tunnels where they encounter more of Ahmanet's undead slaves. The two fight them again, with Nick crushing or ripping their heads off. They are pushed into the water by an undead but they destroy it. Nick and Jenny swim up for air but Ahmanet grabs Jenny and drags her underwater. Nick fights off more of the undead and tries to save Jenny, but she drowns. Nick pulls her body out of the water and is confronted by Ahmanet. He attempts to smash the jewel until Ahmanet once again tries to persuade him to join her. Nick holds the dagger out as if to give it to her, but he instead stabs himself with it, now becoming possessed by Set. He battles Ahmanet and gives her the kiss of death to suck the life out of her, reducing her back to a corpse. Nick then goes over to Jenny and brings her back to life by screaming at her to wake up. He then disappears. Jenny reunites with Jekyll as Ahmanet's body is placed back into a sarcophagus filled with mercury. Jenny wonders what will happen to Nick now that he is technically a monster. Jekyll muses that it took a monster to defeat a monster, and that there is hope for Nick so long as he retains a shred of his humanity. Somewhere in the desert, Nick has brought Vail back to life. They ride their horses off on another adventure as a sandstorm follows them.

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Rent The Mummy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Lacking the campy fun of the franchise's most recent entries and failing to deliver many monster-movie thrills, The Mummy suggests a speedy unraveling for the Dark Universe.

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Alex Kurtzman

Nick Morton

Russell Crowe

Henry Jekyll

Annabelle Wallis

Jenny Halsey

Sofia Boutella

Jake Johnson

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The Mummy (2017)

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Content Caution

In Theaters

• June 9, 2017
• Tom Cruise as Nick Morton; Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll; Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey; Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet; Jake Johnson as Chris Vail

Home Release Date

• September 12, 2017
• Alex Kurtzman

Distributor

• Universal Pictures

Movie Review

The Mummy opens in ancient Egypt as a powerful Pharaoh learns that his mistress and high priest have been fooling around behind his back. He confronts the pair, who respond by stabbing him to death. Before the guards can apprehend her, the mistress takes her own life, confident that her sorcerer/lover will resurrect her. But before the dark priest known as Imhotep can complete the task, he is seized by authorities who cut out his tongue, mummify him alive and bury him in a sarcophagus full of voracious scarabs.

Flashforward 3000 years to the 1920s. Despite the best efforts of warriors committed to keeping the hidden ruins of Hamunaptra a secret (and the mummy in his tomb), treasure seekers find the lost city of the dead, read from a book of the dead and, well, wake the dead. Needless to say, Imhotep—without his morning coffee—rises in a really bad mood and goes on a vengeful rampage against the people who interrupted his multi-millennial snooze. Led by Indiana Jones-wannabe Rick O’Connell, the group must defeat the slowly regenerating corpse before Imhotep kills them all and resurrects his forbidden love. It’s a slam-bang special effects-fest that relies less on plot than on action that piles up a considerable body count.

Positive Elements: Moments of heroism and self-sacrifice. One character’s chronic disloyalty is held in low esteem. Modest flirtation between Rick and Evelyn avoids sexual overtones or innuendoes.

Spiritual Content: When cornered by the mummy, a conniving, weaselly man rattles through a necklace full of religious icons (including a cross and the star of David), reciting a prayer to each in hopes of escaping violent death. Imhotep is able to recreate plagues that God used to punish Egypt (locusts, flies, water to blood, darkness). In a climactic ceremony, Imhotep uses incantations and other occult means—including a human sacrifice—in an attempt to restore life to his mummified lover. He summons the undead to do battle with Rick (a scene reminiscent of the sword-wielding skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts ) and is only thwarted when someone chants from another magical book.

Sexual Content: No sex, but the Pharaoh’s mistress appears in a see-through mesh top and thong bottom (basically, naked). Someone uses a crude expression for genitalia.

Violent Content: Pretty much non-stop. At times The Mummy plays like a blast-anything-that-moves video game. Numerous men die in gunfights or at the points of swords during flurries of mass brutality and war. Some are stabbed with knives. Others catch fire. Rick survives being hung from gallows, though his fall through the platform is disturbingly explicit. Hungry beetles burrow underneath people’s skin and eat them from the inside out, or swarm over bodies like a school of piranha, leaving a mess of bone and sinew. Slaves are melted by acid. Once Imhotep shakes the dust off and reenters the world, he starts sucking the life out of people in order to consume their organs and regenerate himself (one poor soul survives having his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed before Imhotep finishes him off). After a man dies in a plane crash, his body and the aircraft both sink into quicksand. Rick severs Imhotep’s arm, but the monster reaches down and reattaches the limb. The movie’s sizable body count—and high gross-out quotient—almost make it easy to overlook “unspectacular” violence including several fistfights and a scene in which the film’s heroes drive recklessly through a crowded marketplace and mow down slow-moving locals.

Crude or Profane Language: Evelyn asks Rick for a vow of honesty by prompting, “Do you swear?” He replies, “Every d— day.” Still, the language is surprisingly restrained for a PG-13 release. There’s quite a bit of mild profanity, but no s- or f-words. Christian viewers will take exception to several exclamatory uses of the Lord’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content: Occasional alcohol use is aggravated by three scenes that play drunkenness for laughs.

Other Negative Elements: Accused of being deceptive, Jonathan tells his sister, Evelyn, “I lie to everybody. What makes you so special?” Lots of emaciated corpses litter the screen. Some moments exist solely to disgust squeamish viewers, such as the scene in which a partially decayed Imhotep kisses Evelyn on the mouth, or when he eliminates the annoying scarab traveling through his neck and toward his brain by crunching down on it with his rotting teeth. Yuck.

Summary: The Mummy staggers for a number of reasons. First, it dares audiences to think of the various time-honored serials and matinee favorites it’s ripping off. For example, a scene on a burning boat seemed to be an imitation of the engulfed tavern sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark (right down to the last-minute rescue of a vital map-producing artifact from the flames). Second, The Mummy is an uneven attempt at being an action-adventure/horror/comedy/romance all wrapped up in one. It loses its bearings about halfway through when its sense of humor takes over like a class clown who just doesn’t know when to quit. It descends into silliness. Sure, there are a few funny moments and some really wild special effects (fully exploited in Universal’s thrilling theatrical trailer), but that’s about it. Once Christian families factor in lots of violence and dark, occult overtones, it becomes obvious that this film is pointless entertainment that’s especially inappropriate for the 8- to 14-year-old boys most likely to be attracted to such incoherent eye-candy.

Positive Elements

Nick Morton is Ahmanet’s official rope-looser. The mummy appreciates the gesture so much that she selects Nick as her next “beloved”—that is, the guy she’s going to kill to introduce Set to the world. And because of Ahmanet’s ability to weasel into his mind, Nick sometimes seems just fine with that. He’s described as a perfect vessel for Set, given his lack of morals and his dearth of consideration for anyone but himself.

But Jenny, the archaeologist, believes that underneath his rough exterior, Nick’s an OK guy. “I knew there was more to you than money,” she says.

No, no, sorry. That’s Princess Leia in Star Wars . (Wrong notes.) No, Jenny says, “Somewhere, fighting to get out, is a good man.” And turns out, she’s right: Nick turns from a selfish treasure-hunter into a self-sacrificing do-gooder. And he eventually shows a willingness to sacrifice pretty much everything—body, soul and spirit—for Jenny when the Egyptian chips are down.

There are a few others who’d like to prevent the end of the world, too, if possible. Dr. Henry Jekyll is especially keen to do so, even though he knows it means making some uncomfortable sacrifices himself.

Spiritual Elements

Take a load off and set a spell, while I talk about Set and spells.

Set, as mentioned, is the Egyptian god of death. (Or god of the desert, war, storms, chaos, wind, war, darkness, disorder, violence, etc., etc., depending on which source you look at.) Jekyll calls him out as evil and says that Christians call the very same guy Satan and Lucifer. But rather than follow the Christian idea that Satan and evil are already actively influencing our world, Jekyll characterizes evil as lurking just outside it, looking for a way to come in.

Set has found a way into this realm through Ahmanet, who prays to the god and performs rites in his honor, and is thus rewarded with supernatural power. Her body is magically riddled with black, unreadable glyphs, and she’s apparently granted immortality as well (though the years do take a toll on her eventually). Some animals (birds, rats, spiders) seem to do her bidding, and she has the ability to control certain minds (sometimes through spider bites). She’s also able to call on the sand itself—including, apparently, sand grains of it that have been melted into glass. But perhaps her most fearsome ability is her knack for raising folks from the dead, who subsequently serve her as her shambling, zombie-like minions.

We also learn that hundreds of years earlier, some Christian Crusaders found Ahmanet’s crypt and spirited away her magic dagger (given to her by Set), hiding the blade in the statue of an angel (called a reliquary by Jenny) and a magic gem from its pommel in a Crusader grave. We assume that the Crusaders did this because they understood Ahmenet’s nature and wanted to keep a critical source of her power away from her.

Elsewhere, presumably Islamic fighters shoot up and deface ancient artifacts, mimicking the destruction we’ve seen from ISIS fighters. We hear that pharaohs were worshiped as “living gods.” Some scenes take place in old Christian churches and tombs. There’s talk about “angering the gods.”

[ Spoiler Warning ] Nick eventually gets stabbed by Ahmanet’s magical dagger, which infects him with the spirit of Set. His human side seems to keep the Set side of him at bay while still allowing Nick to use Set’s powers, including resurrecting a couple of people close to him.

Sexual Content

Back in ancient Egypt, Ahmanet prays to Set naked: We see her nude form from the back and side in a handful of flashbacks. Even when she wears clothes back then, the robes are fairly gauzy and revealing. A lot of her skin (and sometimes bone and muscle) is visible after she’s mummified, too: When she looks like her younger self, the bandages are wrapped tightly around her in strategic areas, accentuating her figure rather than hiding it. She sometimes straddles her lovers/victims, running her hands down their chests suggestively. She both kisses and licks men.

Nick wakes up in a morgue, naked. (We see him from the side, but his genitals are obscured either by his hands or strategically placed tables.) Nick and Jenny also have a history. They banter suggestively about a the details of a one-night-stand they had in Bagdad. When Jenny accidentally reveals her midriff, Nick ogles her.

Violent Content

Ahmanet wasn’t a gentle woman even when she was just a mortal woman. We see her skirmish with others in the Egyptian desert, knocking men down painfully with poles. She holds a knife to the Pharaoh’s throat (though we don’t see her make the cut that comes next). A baby dies by her hand, too: Again, we don’t see the deed itself, but dark blood sprays tellingly across her contorted face. She’s just about to plunge a dagger into her lover when she’s caught; several darts puncture her neck, and hooks connected to cords pierce her body (though not in a particularly bloody fashion).

Once freed from her coffin, Ahmanet rejuvenates by pressing her lips to the mouths of innocents and literally sucking the life out of them. Her victims morph into mummy-like husks, which then rise and follow her. These creatures—as well as other dead bodies that Ahmanet raises—battle Nick and others. They fling themselves through car windows and swim after folks in water. They’re stubborn opponents, and even dismembering them doesn’t stop their attack. Nick sometimes thwacks off arms or heads or most of their bodies, and they still come. Nick sometimes kicks through their bodies or crushes their heads into billowing dust.

Ahmanet still rumbles, too. Blessed (cursed?) with superhuman strength, she can literally throw people around and smash massive tree limbs into splinters. At one point, she practically breaks Nick’s leg, too. (Nick, perhaps through supernatural means, seems physically fine afterwards.)

A plane crashes. Several people are either sucked out or die in the crash, and we see their bodies in a morgue later. Someone’s stabbed to death. Another man gets shot three times. Still another character, perhaps in an hallucigenic state, is attacked by writhing hordes of rats that cover his body. Someone drowns. Nick has an extended melee with another character.

Dr. Jekyll imprisons Ahmanet for a time: She’s again darted with hooks attached to cords and chained in a large room, where workers apparently inject her body with freezing mercury. “It hurts!” she complains loudly.

Soldiers shoot Ahmanet without effect. Nick and his friend Chris get pinned down during a gunfight. A sandstorm sends cars and busses flying and people scurrying for safety. Explosions go boom. Birds crash through plane windows; one leaves a bloody mark.

Crude or Profane Language

One s-word and a few other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused seven times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Jenny and Nick spend time in a pub. Nick downs shots and chases them with beer. Other folks are shown drinking beer and other alcoholic beverages.

Other Negative Elements

Nick and Chris are not archaeologists, but treasure hunters who raid ancient tombs and sell what they find there on the black market. Nick learns about Ahmanet’s tomb, actually, only after stealing a letter from Jenny.

Ahmanet vomits mercury.

On one level, you could say that The Mummy is about Nick—a wayward, moral-free treasure hunter who finds, in the end, a certain level of compassion, humanity, love and redemption. He’s asked to make sacrifices. And in time, he develops a willingness to answer that call.

And that’s all great … as far as it goes.

On another level, though—and this is really the level that counts— The Mummy is a mindless exercise in CGI wonder and PG-13 horror. It delivers action sequences strung together with just the barest thread of a plot or even reason. While it presents itself as a standard summer blockbuster (and, indeed, Universal has planned The Mummy as the first of a new franchise of classic monster reboots), it’s both surprisingly sexual and surprisingly frightening. The movie’s muddy spirituality should give many families pause, as well.

Mostly, though, this movie just felt confused . Its internal logic is inconsistent. Scenes show up for really no real reason at all—feeling about as stuffed in there as a walrus in spandex.

There’s no compelling reason why The Mummy should exist at all, really, other than to line Universal’s pockets. Sure, the same could be said for lots of would-be blockbusters, but most still want to tell a reasonably good, or at least sensible, story. You’ll find precious little sense in this flick. Perhaps it should’ve been kept under wraps.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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A brief history of The Mummy , from Ancient Egypt to Tom Cruise

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

In The Mummy (in theaters Friday), Sofia Boutella’s revenant Egyptian princess battles a cursed Tom Cruise. Here’s a look back at the history of movie mummies, from South America to Cairo to an East Texas retirement home.

5050 BC: CHILEAN CREATION

Ancient societies across the world practiced mummification. The oldest known mummies hail from the Chinchorro culture, in modern-day Chile and Peru.

3500 BC: PYRAMID SCHEME

Egyptian embalmers developed the mummy look, cloaking their dead in cloth. In 2660 B.C., King Djoser built himself the first pyramid. (The builder’s name? Imhotep.)

1827: SCI-FI DEBUT

Jane Webb was only 19 when she invented the concept of a reanimated pharoah in her protofeminist sci-fi adventure The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century.

1881: RAMESSES II

The deceased god-king never came to life after his body was discovered. But when his remains were later flown to France, he was issued a passport. Spooky!

1922: KING TUT CURSE

When some of Howard Carter’s compatriots died after he discovered the boy king’s tomb, newspapers pushed the idea of a curse. See? We always had fake news!

1932: MOVIE TIME

Frankenstein star Boris Karloff played Imhotep in the first Mummy movie, and became a cinematic classic: eyelids cracking open, wrapped arms, unfolding cloth.

1942: CHANEY CHANGE

When Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man ) took over the franchise, his three (terrible) films cemented the character’s essential arc: “Shuffling Dead seeks Attractive Companion.”

1955: SILLY STRING

Sixteen years after the Three Stooges spoof We Want Our Mummy , Universal pitted their own funnymen, Abbott and Costello, against the monster.

1958: A RUN FOR THE BORDER

The Aztec Mummy was a rip-off, but the Mexican undead warrior had unique adventures in The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy and 1964’s Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy.

1959: HAMMER TIME

Peter Cushing is the archaeologist. Christopher Lee is the enshrouded. In the best scene of Hammer Film’s garish Mummy remake, the horror legends try to shoot, stab, and strangle each other.

1971: GHOULISH GIRL

Two-time Bond girl Valerie Leon plays an ancient Egyptian queen and a lookalike modern Londoner in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb . She’s kinda cinema’s first female mummy.

1999: IMHOTEP RETURNS

The swaggeringly goofy Brendan Fraser trilogy gets a bad rap, but thank The Mummy Returns for Dwayne “Scorpion King” Johnson’s film career.

2002: BUBBA HO-TEP

Bruce Campbell plays Elvis and Ossie Davis is JFK, and they fight the cowboy-hatwearing mummy who’s tormenting their nursing home. Who says there are no new ideas?

2012: REANIMATED

The kid-friendly monster movie Hotel Transylvania features a mummy named Murray, but also features a bride of Frankenstein voiced by Fran Drescher. Spin-off, please!

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By now you’ve probably read a number of scathing reviews of “The Mummy,” Universal’s inaugural entry in a possibly grievously ill-advised “Dark Universe” franchise, wherein the legendary studio intends to reboot its most Famous Monsters of Filmland. Perhaps I’m becoming jaded in my old age, but I was more amused than appalled.

Don’t get me wrong. “The Mummy,” directed (if that’s what you want to call it; I honestly think the better term here is “ostensibly overseen on behalf of the studio executives”) by Alex Kurtzman from a script by David Koepp , Christopher McQuarrie , and Dylan Kussman , has plenty to get irritated about. I got sand in my synapses during an early scene in which Tom Cruise , as a looter named Nick Morton (oh, “Mort,” I get it now), and his sidekick, played by Jake Johnson , casually slaughter a bunch of “Iraqi insurgents” trying to track down a mysterious treasure. Oh, sure, filmmakers, by all means use a tragic and unnecessary war that’s still yielding horrific consequences for the world as the backdrop for your stupid horror movie plot machinations, no problem here.

And, of course, there’s the movie’s very old-school sexism. "The Mummy" has two female characters: One is corrupt albeit not unattractive ancient Egyptian royal Ahmanet, who, once freed from her tomb in the present day, is the incarnation of all evil and stuff. (She is played by Sofia Boutella , whose filmography testifies that she’s accustomed to being ill-used in motion pictures). The other is faux-archeologist/genuine anti-evil secret agent Jenny ( Annabelle Wallis ) who’s mainly around to be rescued by Nick, and whose surface venality suggests that his business card describes him as a “lovable rogue.”

So yes, should one choose to take offense, one certainly may. But I have to be honest—speaking of venality, I found something almost admirable about the film’s cheek. It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced. At its opening, remnants of a past civilization are discovered while workmen are tunneling underground for a new subway route. That’s from “Quatermass and the Pit,” aka “Five Million Miles to Earth.” As many other reviewers have noted, once Jake Johnson’s character buys in and is reborn as a wisecracking undead sidekick warning Nick about how he’s been cursed by incarnation-of-evil Ahmanet, it’s “American Werewolf in London” time, albeit with PG-13-rated special effects rather than the side of ketchup-dipped corned beef that fell from Griffin Dunne ’s face in the earlier movie. What else? A woman whose kiss drains the life force out of those who receive it, from the wacky space-vampire movie “Lifeforce”? Check. A brain-draining insect in the ear from “Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan”? Check. Spavined slapstick undead assaulters out of “ Evil Dead ”? Check. Underwater fights with the undead out of Lucio Fulci ’s “Zombie”? Check. (These too are toned down considerably from the source material.) Someone saying “Plans?” with the precise intonation Sir Ralph Richardson used in “ Tales from the Crypt ”? Also check. Don’t even get me started on the, um, appropriation of a famous line from the Universal monster movie “ Bride of Frankenstein .” But that’s life, and that movie literally IS Universal’s property.

There have been a lot of crocodile tears already shed about the fact that The Mighty Tom Cruise has allowed himself to be used in such dreck, and also that Russell Crowe has been compelled to continue to sink into a form of self-parody by appearing as the head of Jenny’s anti-evil agency, a character named Dr. Henry Jekyll, and yeah, it’s the same guy. Or some iteration of the same guy. As it happens, Dr. Jekyll was never one of the Universal Studios monsters, but the character IS in the public domain, so I guess the corporate overlords of the Dark Universe figured “what the you-know-what.” 

Anyway, I cannot feel too aggrieved for either star. As Richard Harris and Richard Burton found out for themselves many years before Crowe came along, there comes a time in the career of every loose-cannon macho actor where the any-port-in-a-financial-year-storm approach to career management is all for the best. As for Cruise, he is known for his try-anything-once sense of cinematic adventure, and he does like his franchises. The Morton character is admittedly more of a callow nothingburger than any he’s played. And given how the movie ends I’m a little disappointed that he wasn’t named Larry Talbot. But who knows, maybe he’ll be obliged to change it for the next installment. Which I am looking forward to, out of nothing but base curiosity.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

The Mummy (2017)

Rated PG-13 for violence, action and scary images, and for some suggestive content and partial nudity.

110 minutes

Tom Cruise as Nick Morton

Sofia Boutella as Princess Ahmanet / The Mummy

Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey

Jake Johnson as Sgt. Vail

Courtney B. Vance as Colonel Gideon Forster

Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll

• Alex Kurtzman

Writer (screen story by)

• Jon Spaihts
• Jenny Lumet
• David Koepp
• Christopher McQuarrie
• Dylan Kussman

Cinematographer

• Ben Seresin
• Paul Hirsch
• Gina Hirsch
• Andrew Mondshein

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Film Review: Tom Cruise in ‘The Mummy’

Tom Cruise fights an Egyptian demon, which takes up residence inside him, in a monster reboot that's too busy to be much fun.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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No one over the age of 10 ever confused them with good movies, but the “Mummy” franchise that kicked off in 1999 had a joyously sinister and farfetched eye-candy pizzazz. Basically, these were movies that pelted you with CGI — scuttling scarabs, swarms of skeletons in moldy rags — and mixed the cheesy/awesome visual onslaught with a handful of actors (Brendan Fraser, Dwayne Johnson) who seemed just as lightweight at the FX. So “ The Mummy ,” starring Tom Cruise , raises a key aesthetic question: How, exactly, do you reboot empty-calorie creature-feature superficiality?

The new “Mummy,” you may be surprised to hear, doesn’t have a whole lot of show-stopping visual flimflam up its sleeve. Instead, it’s built around a chancy big trick. I’ll herald this with a major spoiler alert (if you don’t want to know what happens in “The Mummy,” please stop reading), though it’s really the essential premise of the movie. Cruise, who is cast as Nick Morton, a freelance raider of artifacts he sells on the black market, isn’t just fighting evil — his character gets inhabited by evil. He is taken over by the spirit of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an ancient Egyptian princess who murdered her father, the Pharaoh, and his infant son, all so that she could lay claim to the throne. For her crime, she was mummified and buried alive. (Yes, she’s pissed off.)

The way her spirit merges with Nick’s remains a little vague, since it’s not as if Cruise turns into a frothing bad guy. He deals with the fact that he’s got evil inside him by treating it in a highly practical and energized fashion — as a problem to be solved. He’s Tom Cruise, dammit, and he’s not just going to stand by! He’s going to attack the issue. He’s going to fight it, debate it, stare it down, put it in its place, kick its ass, out-think it and out-run it, out-punch it and out-underwater-swim it.

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All of which turns out to be a lot less fun than the stupid zappy “Mummy” movies of the ’00s. It’s not as if this one is all that smart, what with a plot that somehow squashes together the First Dynasty of Egypt, the Crusades, and the looting of Iraqi antiquities. Yet it does seem to be trying for something, and so, if you’re a Cruise fan (as I very much am), you roll with it. The flashes of Egyptian backstory are photographed (by Ben Seresin) with a yummy desert glow, and the Algerian actress Sofia Boutella, in black bangs and vertical rows of tattooed facial hieroglyphs, makes Ahmanet exotic in all the right ways, like something out of a Rihanna video. Then she shows up in contemporary London, along with Nick and Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), the comely archeologist who Nick slept with and whose life he saved. Ahmanet is now a mottled, gray-skinned mummy who gains energy by putting civilians in a lip-lock and literally sucking the life out of them, which reduces them to skeletal zombies who exist to do her bidding.

It’s here that you begin to divine the film’s basic strategy: It will grab ideas, motifs, and effects from almost any genre and jam them together, palming off its grab-bag quality as “originality.” Scene for scene, “The Mummy” has been competently staged by director Alex Kurtzman, who has one previous feature to his credit (the minor 2012 Chris Pine heart-tugger “People Like Us”) and has never made a special-effects film before. He knows how to visualize a spectacular plane crash, or how to play up the Dagger of Set — a mystical weapon of death that needs a giant ruby to complete it — so that it doesn’t seem as chintzy as something out of a “National Treasure” movie (which is basically what it is). Yet competence isn’t the same thing as style or vision. “The Mummy” is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.

Russell Crowe , cultivating an air of pompous malevolence, shows up in the opening scene, but it isn’t until later that we learn he’s playing Dr. Henry Jekyll — yes, that Henry Jekyll. Jekyll, it turns out, has to keep injecting his damaged hand with a regimen of drugs to avoid turning into Mr. Hyde, but watching all this the audience may be thinking: Whose bright idea was it to mix “The Mummy” with an entirely different formative horror story, as if the two could be cross-bred like some Famous Monsters of Filmland version of the Justice League?

The answer wouldn’t matter if “The Mummy” had the courage of its convictions…or the fun of its nonsense. But it falls right into a nether zone in between. The problem at its heart is that the reality of what the movie is — a Tom Cruise vehicle — is at war with the material. The actor, at 54, is still playing that old Cruise trope, the selfish cocky semi-scoundrel who has to grow up. Will Nick give in to Ahmanet, the malevolent temptress in her Bettie Page Egyptian hair? Or will he stay true to Jenny, the brainy angel of light? The trouble is that Cruise, at least in a high-powered potboiler like this one, is so devoted to maintaining his image as a clear and wholesome hero that his flirtation with the dark side is almost entirely theoretical. As Universal’s new “Dark Universe” (of which “The Mummy” is the first installment) unfolds, I wouldn’t hold my breath over which side is going to win, or how many more films it will take to play that out. It’s not just that there isn’t enough at stake (though there isn’t). It’s that the movie doesn’t seem to know how little at stake there is.

Reviewed at Regal E-Walk, New York, June 6, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 107 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Dark Universe, Perfect World Pictures in association with Secret Hideout, Conspiracy Factory, Sean Daniel Company production. Producers: Alex Kurtzman, Chris Morgan, Sean Daniel, Sarah Bradshaw. Executive producers: Jeb Brody, Robert Orci.
• Crew: Director: Alex Kurtzman. Screenplay: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman. Camera (color, widescreen): Ben Seresin. Editors: Gina Hirsch, Paul Hirsch, Andrew Mondshein.
• With: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Simon Atherton, Stephen Thompson.

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Review: ‘The Mummy,’ With Tom Cruise, Deserves a Quick Burial

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By A.O. Scott

• June 7, 2017

You’ve no doubt been told that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. If I followed that rule, I’d be unemployed. But still. There’s no great joy in accentuating the negative. So I will say this in favor of “The Mummy”: It is 110 minutes long. That is about 20 minutes shorter than “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” about which I had some unkind things to say a couple of weeks ago. Simple math will tell you how much better this movie is than that one. If you have no choice but to see it — a circumstance I have trouble imagining — you can start in on your drinking that much sooner.

“The Mummy” begins with a supposed Egyptian proverb to the effect that “we” never really die; “we” assume new forms and keep right on living. I’m not an Egyptologist, but it seems just as likely that those words were lifted from a movie-studio strategy memo. Universal, lacking a mighty superhero franchise, has gone into its intellectual-property files, which are full of venerable monsters, and created a commercial agglomeration it calls the Dark Universe . “The Mummy” is the first of a slew — a swarm? a pestilence? — of features reviving those old creatures, including the one from the Black Lagoon. We can also look forward to new visits from Frankenstein’s monster and his bride, the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, among others.

It sounds like fun. The “Mummy” reboot from 1999 , directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess. Mr. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a jaunty military daredevil with a sideline in antiquities theft and a nutty sidekick (Jake Johnson). When a caper goes wrong, the two call in an airstrike on an Iraqi village — I guess that’s something people are doing for kicks nowadays — and a mysterious tomb is unearthed. Luckily, an archaeologist, Dr. Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), is on hand to explain what it’s all about and also to affirm Nick’s heterosexuality.

Long story short: An ancient evil has been unleashed upon the world. Its agent is a long-buried pharaoh’s daughter, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who is covered with mysterious tattoos and convinced that Nick is her secret lover, or the god of death, or both. She gets inside his head, which is awkward both because he’s kind of sweet on Jenny and because it’s such an empty place. Ahmanet also has a retinue of zombielike minions at her disposal, who rampage through England on their way to a meeting with Russell Crowe.

Mr. Crowe plays another fixture in the Dark Universe, a label that strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. Dim Universe would be more accurate, with respect both to the murky, ugly images and to the intellectual capacities of the script, written and conceived by a bunch of people who are capable of better. The old black-and-white Universal horror movies were a mixed bag, but they had some imagination. They could be creepy or campy, weird or lyrical. “The Mummy” gestures — or flails — in a number of directions but settles into the dreary 21st-century action-blockbuster template. There’s chasing and fighting, punctuated by bouts of breathless explaining and a few one-liners that an archaeologist of the future might tentatively decode as jokes.

There is a vague notion that Nick is struggling with dueling impulses toward good and evil, acting out his version of the Jekyll-Hyde predicament. A more interesting movie might have involved a similar struggle within Ahmanet, but a more interesting movie was not on anybody’s mind.

It will be argued that this one was made not for the critics but for the fans. Which is no doubt true. Every con game is played with suckers in mind.

The Mummy Rated PG-13. There’s a naked Egyptian in there somewhere. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

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The Mummy (2017)

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The Mummy  is a 2017 American action-adventure film directed by  Alex Kurtzman  and written by  David Koepp ,  Christopher McQuarrie  and  Dylan Kussman , with a story by Kurtzman,  Jon Spaihts  and  Jenny Lumet . It is a reboot of  The Mummy franchise and the first installment in the Dark Universe film series. The film stars  Tom Cruise , Annabelle Wallis , Sofia Boutella , Jake Johnson , Courtney B. Vance and Russell Crowe .

The Mummy  premiered at the  State Theatre in Sydney , Australia  on May 22, 2017, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 9, 2017, in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D. It received negative reviews from critics and has grossed $345 million worldwide.

• 3.1 Filming
• 5.1 Box office
• 5.2 Critical response
• 6 Dark Universe
• 7 Video Game

In 1127 A.D., a group of English crusader knights capture a large ruby from ancient Egypt  and bury it within the tomb of one of their number.

In present-day London , a Crossrail construction crew discover the knights' tomb and a mysterious man is authorized to investigate the uncovered findings inside the site. In a flashback, the hieroglyphics on a circular mural in the tomb, which date back to the New Kingdom era, tell the story of the ruthless Princess Ahmanet .

She was first in line to succeed her father Pharaoh  Menehptre only to be stripped of her birthright when his second wife gave birth to a son. Determined to claim the throne for herself, Ahmanet sold her soul to the Egyptian god  Set , who gave her a special dagger to transfer his spirit into a corporeal form. After murdering her family, Ahmanet attempted to sacrifice her lover to give Set physical form, but her father's priests slew him and mummified Ahmanet, sentencing her to be buried alive for eternity inside a sarcophagus surrounded by mercury so that her monstrous form will not escape the tomb.

In present-day  Iraq , soldier-of-fortune Nick Morton and his partner Chris Vail accidentally discover the tomb of Ahmanet after staging an airstrike on an insurgent stronghold. Jenny Halsey , an archaeologist who had a one-night stand with Nick, arrives and investigates the tomb, correctly concluding that it is a prison. After extracting Ahmanet's sarcophagus from a pool of mercury, Nick's superior, Colonel Greenway , places the sarcophagus on a transport plane, headed to England .

During the flight, Vail becomes possessed by Ahmanet's power after being bitten by a camel spider while inside the tomb. After attempting to open the sarcophagus, he stabs Greenway and attacks the group before Nick is forced to shoot him dead. A huge murder of crows then assaults the plane, causing it to crash and kill everyone on board except for Jenny, who is parachuted off the plane by Nick.

Nick awakens a day later in a morgue in Oxford and learns from Vail's ghost that he has been cursed by Ahmanet, who seeks to use him as a replacement vessel for Set. Ahmanet's mummy escapes from the sarcophagus and begins feeding on rescue workers to regenerate her decomposed body. Turning the workers into zombie minions, she lures Nick and Jenny into a trap, forcing the two to fight off the minions as they unsuccessfully try to escape. Ahmanet also recovers the blade of the Dagger of Set from a reliquary in a nearby church.

At the last second, unknown soldiers appear and subdue Ahmanet. Their leader, Dr. Henry Jekyll , explains that Jenny is an agent of Prodigium , a secret society dedicated to hunting supernatural threats whose base is under the  Natural History Museum of London and contains such objects as a webbed hand and a human skull with fangs . He confirms that Nick was cursed when he unlocked Ahmanet's tomb and reveals his intention to complete her ritual and allow Set to possess Nick in order to destroy Set and end his evil forever.

Meanwhile, Ahmanet summons another spider to possess a Prodigium technician and frees herself from captivity, wreaking havoc, death and destruction in the process. Jekyll succumbs to his own dark impulses and transforms into  Edward Hyde , his murderous and psychotic alternate personality; when Nick rebuffs Hyde's offer of an alliance between them, Hyde attacks and nearly kills Nick before Nick manages to stop him with the serum Jekyll uses to suppress his evil side. Nick and Jenny then escape from Prodigium while Ahmanet steals back the dagger, summons an army of deceased English crusaders to serve her and creates a massive sandstorm that ravages London. The undead knights slaughter the Prodigium soldiers in the tomb, allowing Ahmanet to recover the ruby and set it in the dagger's pommel, granting her all she needs to free Set.

Guided by Vail, Nick and Jenny flee into the London Underground tunnels under London but are attacked by Ahmanet's minions. Ahmanet captures Jenny and drowns her, hoping to break her hold over Nick. Nick puts up a fight, but gives up and lets himself embrace Ahmanet, using it as a ruse to steal the dagger and stab himself. His body is possessed by Set, who proceeds to join Ahmanet to uphold his end of the bargain until he sees Jenny's dead body, at which point Nick regains control and uses Set's powers to overpower and suck the life out of Ahmanet, turning her back into a shriveled mummy.

Nick harnesses Set's powers to resurrect Jenny, saying goodbye before becoming overwhelmed by Set's power and disappearing. Soon, Jenny regroups with Dr. Jekyll, and they discuss if Nick, now fused with Set, will succumb to Set's influence. Ahmanet's corpse is lowered into a locked pool of mercury within the Prodigium base for safekeeping. Later on in the desert, Nick resurrects Vail and the two set out on an adventure.

• Tom Cruise  as Nick Morton A U.S. military ex-officer, who unintentionally unearths the tomb of Princess Ahmanet, unleashing an unspeakable evil. Nick becomes haunted, fused with and possessed by Set after Ahmanet puts a curse on him.
• Annabelle Wallis  as Jenny Halsey A feisty, kind, stubborn and intelligent archeologist who has a past with Nick. She secretly works for the monster-hunting organization known as Prodigium .
• Sofia Boutella  as Princess Ahmanet . She is loosely based on an amalgamation of the ancient Egyptian goddess,  Amunet and  Imhotep  from the previous  Mummy  films. Once in line to be the queen of Ancient Egypt, Ahmanet murdered her father and his family in order to resurrect Set, an act for which she was cursed for all eternity and buried alive, until she is accidentally freed as the titular Mummy.
• Jake Johnson  as Corporal Chris Vail Nick's friend and closest ally.
• Courtney B. Vance  as Colonel Greenway Nick and Chris's superior officer.
• Russell Crowe  as Dr. Henry Jekyll . A brilliant scientist who leads Prodigium, an organization dedicated to locating, containing, and when necessary, destroying monsters. Due to a failed experiment intended to purge his soul of darkness, he must regularly inject himself with a serum to prevent himself from transforming into his evil and monstrous alter-ego, Mr. Edward Hyde .
• Marwan Kenzari  as Malik Jekyll's chief of security and a member of the Prodigium
• Javier Botet  as  Set . The ancient Egyptian god of deserts, storms, darkness and violence, who aids Princess Ahmanet in her quest to rule Egypt . Set has a connection with Nick Morton, as the latter is intended to be the human vessel for his resurrection.
• Selva Rasalingam  as King Menehptre , a pharaoh who is Ahmanet's father.

Production [ ]

Universal Pictures first announced plans for a modern-day reboot of  The Mummy  franchise in 2012. The project went through multiple directors, with  Len Wiseman  leaving the project in 2013 and a second director,  Andrés Muschietti , in 2014.

Tom Cruise began talks about playing the lead in November 2015, with Sofia Boutella beginning talks that December. Kurtzman cast Boutella after seeing and being impressed by her largely mute performance in  Kingsman: The Secret Service . Kurtzman noted that "if you look at her eyes, and this is what I got from watching  Kingsman , there's a whole performance going on here. And in not saying anything but conveying that much to me, I thought oh my god, no matter how much prosthetics we put on her, no matter how much CG we put on her face, if I see this, she's going to convey something very emotional to me". Other casting news was announced between March and May, with Russell Crowe joining during the latter month. Shortly after the film opened  Variety  reported that Cruise had excessive control over the film and firm control of nearly every aspect of production and post-production, including re-writing the script and editing to his specifications, telling Kurtzman how to direct on set, and enlarging his role while downplaying Boutella's. Universal contractually guaranteed Cruise control of most aspects of the project, from script approval to post-production decisions.

Filming [ ]

Principal photography on the film began on April 3, 2016, in  Oxford , United Kingdom  and also took place in  Surrey . Filming on the movie wrapped on July 17, 2016, in London. Production then moved to Namibia for two weeks, with principal photography on the film being completed on August 13, 2016.

Release [ ]

Initially scheduled for a 2016 release, the film was released in the United States and Canada on June 9, 2017, with international roll out beginning the same day. The film was screened in various formats, such as 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D.

On December 20, 2016, IMAX released a trailer with the wrong audio track attached; this unintentionally prompted the creation of memes and video montages featuring the mistakenly included audio track, which was missing most of the sound effects and instead featured Tom Cruise's grunts and screams. IMAX reacted by taking down the trailer and issuing DMCA takedown notices in an attempt to stop it from spreading.

Following the  2017 Manchester Arena bombing  on May 22, Universal cancelled the film's U.K. premiere, which had been scheduled to take place in London on June 1.

Reception [ ]

Box office [ ].

The Mummy  has grossed $80.2 million in the United States and Canada and $329 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $409.2 million, against a production budget of $125 million (with an additional $150 million spent on advertising). The film had a worldwide opening of $172.4 million, the biggest global debut of Tom Cruise's career.

In North America, the film was released alongside  It Comes at Night  and  Megan Leavey  and was originally projected to gross $35–40 million from 4,034 theaters in its opening weekend. However, after making $12 million on its first day (including $2.66 million from Thursday night previews), weekend projections were lowered to $30 million. It ended up debuting to $31.7 million, marking the lowest of the  Mummy  franchise and finishing second at the box office behind  Wonder Woman  ($58.2 million in its second week). Deadline.com  attributed the film's underperformance to poor critic and audience reactions, as well as "blockbuster fatigue". In its second weekend the film made $14.5 million (dropping 54.2%), finishing 4th at the box office. The same week, Deadline reported that the film is expected to lose Universal around $95 million. It was pulled from 827 theaters in its third week and made $5.8 million, dropping another 60% and finishing 6th at the box office.

Outside North America, the film opened in 63 overseas territories, with China, the UK, Mexico, Germany, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Russia receiving the film the same day as in North America and was projected to debut to $125–135 million. [49]  It opened on June 6, 2017, in South Korea and grossed $6.6 million on its first day, the biggest-ever debut for both Tom Cruise and Universal in the country. It ended up having a foreign debut of $140.7 million, the biggest of Cruise's career. In its opening weekend the film made $52.4 million in China, $7.4 million in Russia, $4.9 million in Mexico and $4.2 million in the United Kingdom.

Critical response [ ]

The Mummy  received negative reviews, with criticism aimed at its incoherent narrative and shoehorned plot points setting up the Dark Universe. On review aggregator  Rotten Tomatoes , the film has an approval rating of 15% based on 225 reviews, with an average rating of 4.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Lacking the campy fun of the franchise's most recent entries and failing to deliver many monster-movie thrills,  The Mummy  suggests a speedy unraveling for the Dark Universe". On  Metacritic , which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score of 34 out of 100, based on 44 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". On  CinemaScore , audiences gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Vince Mancini of  Uproxx  gave the film a negative review, writing: "If you like incomprehensible collections of things that vaguely resemble other things you might've enjoyed in the past,  The Mummy  is the movie for you". IndieWire 's David Ehrlich gave the film a D-, calling it the worst film of Cruise's career and criticizing its lack of originality, saying: "It's one thing to excavate the iconography of old Hollywood, it's another to exploit it. This isn't filmmaking, it's tomb-raiding".

Owen Gleiberman  of  Variety  wrote: "The problem at its heart is that the reality of what the movie is—a Tom Cruise vehicle—is at war with the material. The actor, at 54, is still playing that old Cruise trope, the selfish cocky semi-scoundrel who has to grow up. ... The trouble is that Cruise, at least in a high-powered potboiler like this one, is so devoted to maintaining his image as a clear and wholesome hero that his flirtation with the dark side is almost entirely theoretical". Writing for  Rolling Stone ,  Peter Travers  gave the film one star out of four, saying: "How meh is  The Mummy ? Let me count the ways. For all the huffing and puffing and digital desperation from overworked computers, this reboot lands onscreen with a resounding thud".

Glen Kenny of  RogerEbert.com  gave the film 1.5/4 stars, writing: I found something almost admirable about the film's cheek. It's amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.  Entertainment Weekly 's Chis Nashawaty wrote that the film "feels derivative and unnecessary and like it was written by committee".

In BBC World News Culture, Nicholas Barber calls the film "a mish-mash of wildly varying tones and plot strands, from its convoluted beginning to its shameless non-end. Tom Cruise's new film barely qualifies as a film at all. None of it makes sense. The film delivers all the chases, explosions, zombies and ghosts you could ask for, and there are a few amusing lines and creepy moments, but, between the headache-inducing flashbacks and hallucinations, the narrative would be easier to follow if it were written in hieroglyphics".

In June 2017, a BBC World News article summarized the largely negative analysis of leading film critics and Peter Bradshaw of  T The Guardian  wrote that the film "has some nice moments but is basically a mess. The plot sags like an aeon-old decaying limb, a jumble of ideas and scenes from what look like different screenplay drafts".  Empire  film magazine was more positive, with Dan Jolin awarding the film three stars. "It's running and jumping grin-flashing business as usual for Cruise, once more on safe character territory as an Ethan Hunt-esque action protagonist who couples up with a much younger woman, while another woman chases after him," he wrote. "And if the next installment-teasing conclusion is anything to go by, Cruise seemed to have enough fun making this that he may just return for more".

Dark Universe [ ]

Main article:  Universal Monsters & Dark Universe

On May 22, 2017, Universal Pictures announced that its series of films reviving the studio's long-running Universal Monsters film series would be known as Dark Universe, and that Bill Condon will direct the second installment,  Bride of Frankenstein , to be released on February 14, 2019. In November 2016, Kurtzman stated that the studio has ideas for various rebooted versions of "their monsters", and that he helped the studios' production team with creating updated designs for each of the characters. Each of these individual monsters were stated to be the focus of stand-alone installments first, before any crossovers would occur, with Kurtzman stating: "There might be reasons for this character and that character to come together, because the story tells us that's what the story wants. The story is what drives the choice. And if down the line, there's a big reason to bring them together, then great. But I promise, we're not starting there". In March 2017, producer Chris Morgan revealed that the studio is in the process of deciding the chronological order of each of the films, and when they will be released. The 2014 film  Dracula Untold , starring Luke Evans as the titular character, was originally considered to be the first film in the Dark Universe; however, since the film's release the connection to Dark Universe was downplayed and  the Mummy  was re-positioned as the first film in the series.

Video Game [ ]

A video game adaptation titled The Mummy: Demastered was developed by WayForward Technologies and released in October 2017. It is a pixel art side scrolling "Metroid-vania" style game", Reception for the game was considerably more positive than the movie.

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Nile Scribes

Your Portal to Ancient Egypt

An Egyptological Review of ‘The Mummy’

The Mummy , released last month (June , 2017) in the USA and Canada, is the latest in the long-established franchise that started in 1932. Tom Cruise stars in the latest reboot playing the charming boy-scoundrel Nick Morton who, while stationed in Iraq, seizes the opportunity to hunt for antiquities.

For this review, the Nile Scribes do what Egyptologists do best: talk about ancient Egypt. All too often, films like this one become the only interaction the general public has with ancient Egypt, something even more true since the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, when international tourism to Egypt has been at an all time low.

Unfortunately, we only get to see the ancient Egyptians in brief flashbacks: princess Ahmanet with her father the king, and a couple quick glimpses into the royal palace. Historians have rolled their eyes at the ethnically inaccurate casting of ancient Egyptians since the beginning of filmmaking, including such decisions as Yul Brynner as Ramesses II, Sigorney Weaver as Queen Tuya, and Gerard Butler as the god Seth. The original mummy in the 1932 film, Boris Karloff, was a British actor.

For this retelling, princess Ahmanet is played by Sofia Boutella, an Algerian-French actress, and her father King Menhepetre is played by Selva Rasalingam, a British actor of partly Tamil descent (of South India and Sri Lanka). These casting decisions are perhaps the most ethnically accurate for ancient Egyptians in the mummy franchise, to date.

Our mummy antagonist is the Egyptian princess Ahmanet, the first female mummy of the franchise. Her name means “the hidden one” and is obviously in homage to the name of the goddess Amunet, consort of the god Amun. There were no doubt numerous historical Amunets but our villain does not appear to be based on a known person. Her father, King Menehptre, whose name might mean “the established one is the steering oar of Re,” is also not a historical person, but his name might be a phonetic conglomeration of the throne and birth names of Men tuhotep Neb hepetre (II), pharaoh of the Eleventh Dynasty and founder of the Middle Kingdom.

The source of the “mummy’s curse,” and Ahmanet’s powers, is the Egyptian god Seth, the god of chaos and disorder, deserts and desert animals, foreigners and foreign lands. Through Seth, she is endowed with tattooed symbols (that are oddly not Egyptian hieroglyphs) and a number of fearsome powers. She controls swarms of rats, birds, and camel spiders (a non-venomous arachnid that lives in desert biomes like Iraq); drains the life out of living persons with a kiss; and raises an army of undead crusaders with a single command in ancient Egyptian ( weben , meaning “to rise”). While Seth does not actually make a physical appearance, he is represented as the god of death throughout. The Egyptians would have understood him as the negative counterpart to Osiris, whom he killed only for Osiris to return as god of the underworld. An equation as god of death, though, reflects more Western attitudes with connections to Lucifer or Satan. 

Fact-checking the Ancient Egyptian elements

The legendary dagger of Seth with a ruby on its hilt is central to Ahmanet’s plans. In the story, Crusaders stole the dagger and took it to England; the ruby was buried with a crusader and the dagger was hidden away in a mediaeval reliquary. Rubies, not native to Egypt, did not come into use in Egypt until the Roman period (or over 1,500 years after the plot of the film), when the stone was imported from as far away as India. Egyptians did believe, however, that materials had symbolic properties and could have positive or negative connotations. 

The movie begins with a (fictional) quote from the “Prayer of Resurrection”:

“Death is the doorway to new life. We live today. We shall live again. In many forms shall we return.”

Many examples of prayers inscribed by individuals on stelae or ostraka (sherds of broken pots) were often directed toward a specific deity and survive from ancient Egypt, but the writers of The Mummy have not used an authentic example of such prayers.

Despite this, quite a bit of the film’s dialogue is spoken in the ancient Egyptian language, which means that Ahmanet’s lines were translated from English into Egyptian for the film (we scanned the credits for the Egyptologist(s) who consulted on the film, but either they have not been credited or we missed them ). Egyptologists take much of their understanding of the language’s pronunciation from Coptic, the last phase of the Egyptian language and a language still used liturgically today in Coptic churches. Students of Egyptology learn to read the signs aloud, but our pronunciation varies from school to school based our tutelage.

Pro-tip : they’re called hiero glyphs not hiero glyphics. ‘Hieroglyphic’ is an adjective, while ‘hieroglyph’ is a noun that means “sacred carvings” in Greek. Shame on our fictional film archaeologist for the mix up.

Our first glimpse of ancient Egypt in the film is a bizarre (and very un-Egyptian) wall carving of hieroglyphs discovered in the crusaders’ catacombs. While we only get a brief look, a cartouche of King Unas (last king of the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom) is visible in the hieroglyphs, if you’re quick enough to try and read them. Unfortunately his cameo is entirely arbitrary – we learn later that our mummy Ahmanet was a New Kingdom princess during her lifetime. Confusingly, Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), the film’s “archaeologist for hire,” dates the New Kingdom (1,550-1,069 BC) to 5,000 years ago, or around 3,000 BC, a period that most Egyptologists ascribe to the Early Dynastic period.

However, Ahmanet’s story does seem to be a nod to Hatshepsut, famous Queen-turned-King of the New Kingdom who became co-regent with her stepson Thutmose III, when her husband, Thutmose II, died. Hatshepsut’s solution was more cunning than Ahmanet’s, who simply makes a pact with the god Seth for eternal life and power. She promises to aid Seth in his desire to rule with her in human form and then kills her father, his queen, and the newborn prince. (After a few years of ruling alongside her stepson, Hatshepsut declared herself king, even changing her image to that of a man’s.)

Curiously, in the very beginning of the film, Egyptian priests pour mercury into Ahmanet’s  coffin and lower it into a “ritual well” filled with mercury (the archaeologist explains that the Egyptians believed the material wards off evil). Ancient Egyptians, of course, never did use the commodity in this capacity; however, red mercuric sulphide (Cinnabar) is present in Egypt and was used to create a bright red pigment, or mixed with other metals as a compound (especially gold and silver) as early as the 5th century BC.

Ahmanet’s Cruel Fate

As punishment for murdering her father, princess Ahmanet is mummified alive and taken far away from Egypt to be buried outside the pharaonic lands. The ancient Egyptians believed that the foreign lands were under the tutelage of the deity, Seth, another (unseen) antagonist of the film. While there isn’t any evidence of an ancient Egyptian royal burial outside of Egypt, the filmmakers’ adoption of this idea finds corroboration in Egyptian attitudes to being buried abroad in Egyptian literature. In the well-known Story of Sinuhe, the protagonist laments the possibility of dying outside of Egypt and feels redeemed, when Pharaoh welcomes him back to pharaonic lands to be buried here. 

The location of her burial under an Iraqi village seems striking. Egyptian tombs are normally located on the west bank of the Nile (as Egyptians believed that the entrance to the underworld is found at the place where the sun sets) in close proximity to the river’s floodplain. The village is not located near a body of water – a fact perhaps emphasising her wrongdoing and offence of the gods. The tomb’s entrance and a monumental face, uncovered after an airstrike on the town, marked the location of a huge underground cavern. The face wears a  nemes -headdress (a sign of royalty) and evokes a loud scream. The style and overall carving of the face does adopt some Egyptomanian aspects, though like Ahmanet’s coffin it could have used more Egyptian influences.

At the bottom of the cavern a shaft was filled with mercury and was encircled by four statues of Anubis, their faces pointing toward the centre. This is obviously a way for the deity to ‘guard’ over the tomb, ensuring the evil stays contained. Egyptian tombs are famous for their many books of the afterlife that are inscribed on the walls: a normal burial would encourage the deceased to be born again through these texts. Ahmanet’s burial lacks these texts entirely, instead, she is watched by the protective gaze  of Anubis.

Portraying the Middle East

The opening sequence is a chilling look into how a colonial power asserts its quest for antiquities in far off lands. The overall sentiment of the opening is a disrespectfully light-hearted portrayal of the destruction and looting currently happening in the war-torn landscape of Iraq (Iraqi forces are poised to liberate Mosul from the Daesh (ISIS) this month). Nick and his partner Chris Veil (Jake Johnson) possess a map that tells them a cache of treasures is to be found in a northern Iraqi village, appropriately named Haram, or “forbidden” in Arabic. As they run into the insurgents almost immediately after entering the village, they do not toy for long with the threat of the insurgents and call in an air-strike. The village is flattened, the insurgents leave, and the protagonists are at last in peace to claim the spoils and pillage Ahmanet’s tomb, declaring that they are not looters but “liberators of antiquities.”

The carelessness of our protagonists in approaching members of a different culture is enough to bring chills to the spine of the modern archaeologist. The field has long struggled with the ever-changing regulations of the countries we work in; archaeologists were once allowed to export their finds back to their respective countries with only minor limitations. The film, perhaps unintentionally, gives a nod of approval to the many antiquities dealers or professional looters who combed through Egypt and the Middle East over the last few centuries, filling the coffers of many modern museums in the process. The situation is not helped with the stereotypical portrayal of  sand dunes, village terrorists, and endless, seizable treasures – all elements we associate with the Middle East. The scenes were not even filmed in the Middle East, but within continental Africa in Namibia.

The Archaeology

The discovery of the ruby from Seth’s dagger’s by a construction crew in London who were digging railway tunnels gives viewers a realistic, if somewhat embellished, glimpse at one way antiquities and archaeological sites are commonly discovered in the modern era. Construction projects in all parts of the globe often reveal secrets of the past that have long been buried, especially in cities that have been continuously inhabited for centuries. Only months ago an aqueduct dating to the 3rd century BC was discovered in Rome during construction of a metro line.

Our biggest disappointment was just how little Egypt features in the film at all, which takes place entirely in Iraq and the UK (and filmed in the UK and Namibia). Moviegoers get a couple quick glimpses of a computer-generated Giza plateau, and a typical Hollywood-ified ancient royal palace in flashbacks of Ahmanet’s life, but otherwise, our Egyptian mummy finds herself in a C-130, medieval churches and catacombs, and the Natural History Museum in London (although wouldn’t the British Museum have been a more fitting place for her to wind up?).

If you’re looking for a heavy dose of ancient Egypt in your life this week, you might want to look elsewhere. But if you always wanted to see an Egyptian mummy command an army of zombie crusaders while Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde attempts to rid the world of supernatural evil, this is your film.

Did you see the movie? What did you think?

Our rating:

Interested in other Egyptological reviews of The Mummy ? Check these out:

• “ The Mummy reviewed by an Egyptologist: ‘Tom Cruise’s Late Egyptian is passable’”
• “A review of ‘The Mummy’: sex, death and inaccuracy”
• Relief of Mentuhotep II from his tomb and mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, Thebes (11 th Dynasty) [07.230.2, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] – LINK
• Looking toward the burial chamber within the Pyramid of Unas at Saqqara (5th Dynasty) [ WikiMedia ]
• An Osiride column from the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut from Deir el-Bahari (18th Dynasty) – [authors’ photo]
• The mummy gallery within the British Museum in London – [authors’ photo]
• Image from ‘The Mummy’ trailer posted on the Website of the  Washington Post – LINK

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Fantastic. Both educational and entertaining. A great blog I’ll share with many. Makes one wish Hollywood writers would do some research before attempting fiction. Perhaps it would even improve their plot.

Great piece, and very informative. Thank you. Keep it up!

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The Mummy review – Tom Cruise returns in poorly bandaged corpse reviver

Framed as more of a superhero origin movie than ancient curse mystery, a messy plot unravels fast

B e afraid, for here it is … again … emerging waxily from the darkness. This disturbing figure must surely be thousands of years old by now, a princeling worshipped as a god but entombed in his own riches and status; remarkably well preserved. It is Tom Cruise, who is back to launch a big summer reboot of The Mummy, that classic chiller about the revived corpse from ancient Egypt, from which the tomb door was last prised off in a trilogy of films between 1999 and 2008 with the lantern-jawed and rather forgotten Brendan Fraser in the lead. And before that, of course, there were classic versions with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee both variously getting the all-over St John Ambulance treatment.

Traditionally, The Mummy is a scary movie (though unserious) about taboo and transgression, based on the made-up pop myth about the mummy’s “curse” – which has no basis in the history of ancient Egypt, but is a cheeky colonialist invention, which recasts local objection to our tomb-looting as something supernatural, malign and irrational.

Yet that is not what this Mummy is about. It brings in the usual element of sub-Spielberg gung-ho capers, but essentially sees The Mummy as a superhero origin movie; or possibly supervillain; or Batmanishly both. The supporting characters are clearly there to be brought back as superhero-repertory characters for any putative Mummy franchise, including one who may well be inspired by Two-Face from The Dark Knight.

This has some nice moments but is basically a mess, with various borrowings, including some mummified bits from An American Werewolf in London. The plot sags like an aeon-old decaying limb: a jumble of ideas and scenes from what look like different screenplay drafts. There are two separate ancient “tomb-sites” which have to be busted open: one in London and one in Iraq. (The London one, on the site of the Crossrail excavation, contains the remains of medieval knights identified as “crusaders” who have in their dead Brit mitts various strategically important jewels they have taken from Egyptians: who were subsequently buried in what is now Iraq. Erm, Egyptians in Iraq? Go figure. Perhaps it’s because they are evil and had to be taken out of the country, like CIA rendition of terror suspects.)

The Cruisemeister himself is left high and dry by plot lurches that trigger his boggle-eyed, WTF expression. In one scene, he is nude so we can see what undeniably great shape he’s in. The flabby, shapeless film itself doesn’t have his muscle-tone.

Cruise plays Nick Morton, an adorable rascal in the Iraqi warzone who goes around in a TE Lawrence headdress stealing antiquities to sell; well, it’s that or let them be destroyed. He’s helped by his exasperated buddy Chris (Jake Johnson), while Nick has already seduced beautiful expert Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) who in spite of herself is entranced by Nick’s distinctive cherubic handsomeness. Then they blunder across the extraordinary tomb of evil Egyptian sorceress Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) who has some kind of weirdo mind-meld experience with Nick. Her creepy spirit accompanies him back home where she is intent on getting that precious jewel to unlock her full power. Nick’s plane crashes, giving him the opportunity for some Mission: Impossible-type midair acrobatics, those gorgeous chops pulling some serious Gs.

Russell Crowe lumbers on at one stage, amply filling a three-piece suit, playing an archaeological expert and connoisseur of secret burial sites, who has some sinister connection with government agencies. Unlike Nick, he has no Indiana Jones-type heroism, and that formal attire of his signals that he does not have Nick’s kind of heroic looseness. He is a figure to be mistrusted, although when he reveals his name and his destiny, he is just a distraction – and silly.

In the end, having encouraged us to cheer for Tom Cruise as an all-around hero , the film tries to have it both ways and confer upon him some of the sepulchral glamour of evil, and he almost has something Lestat -ish or vampiric about him. Yet the film really won’t make up its mind. It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.

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The mummy behind the scenes video explores the film's many locations.

Ahead of The Mummy's release, Universal Pictures offers a new behind-the-scenes video showing the movie's scale and many filming locations.

From ancient Egypt and the deserts of Namibia, to France and modern-day London, shooting #TheMummy was a global adventure. Watch now. pic.twitter.com/xgd9xhp54X — #TheMummy (@themummy) May 30, 2017

Universal Pictures has released a new, behind-the-scenes featurette showcasing the scale of The Mummy as well as the locations featured in the film. It has been five years since the studio first announced plans to release a modern-day reboot of The Mummy franchise. Instead of taking place in the early 20th century -- as the previous Mummy films did -- the new movie, directed by Star Trek series writer Alex Kurtzman, is set in the present-day, with only flashbacks to the past.

The Mummy stars Tom Cruise as cursed mercenary Nick Morton, who unwittingly discovers the tomb that holds Princess Ahmanet/The Mummy, played by Sofia Boutella ( Kingsman: The Secret Service ). She presumably becomes the impetus for unleashing the world of gods and monsters, as Russell Crowe's Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde) so eloquently says in the trailers. The film also stars Annabelle Wallis ( King Arthur: Legend of the Sword ) as Jenny Halsey, Jake Johnson ( New Girl ) as Sergeant Chris Vail, and Courtney B. Vance ( American Crime Story ) as Colonel Greenway, among several others.

Ahead of The Mummy 's release next week, Universal Pictures has unveiled a new featurette that emphasizes the sheer scale of the film as well as the locations that audiences will see on screen. The cast and crew filmed all over the world -- from Namibia to France to London -- and the featurette shows the dedication the production crew took to build as many practical sets as possible, as well as filming a major sequence in a Zero G plane.

Universal's most recent attempt at rebooting one of their iconic monsters was with Gary Shore's Dracula Untold in 2014. It was originally pegged as being the launch pad for the Universal Pictures' Monsters universe -- a shared universe that incorporates films based on their iconic Universal Monsters from the Hollywood's golden age -- though those plans were eventually scrapped. Instead, the upcoming Mummy reboot will kick off the studio's recently announced Dark Universe .

The next chapter in Universal's Dark Universe hits theaters in two years, with Bill Condon's Bride of Frankenstein , starring Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's monster. Soon thereafter, Johnny Depp will headline his own monster film as the Invisible Man. It's unclear what role Crowe, Cruise, and Boutella will have post- The Mummy , but it seems likely that the studio would eventually like to see these characters come together in an ensemble film sometime in the future. Of course, these plans presumably hinge on The Mummy 's success, both critically and commercially .

Next:  15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Universal Monster Movies

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Here are some ways to make a mummy that Tom Cruise doesn't cover in The Mummy

Different cultures made mummies in different ways, with different reasons.

By Rachel Becker

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The latest cinematic iteration of The Mummy takes off when antiquities thief Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) unearths an ancient Egyptian tomb — in Iraq . Ignoring the portents of impending doom (and the fact that stealing antiquities is illegal and also wrong), Morton and his Army buddies unearth a sarcophagus. Inside lies the mummy Ahmanet, an undead pharaoh’s daughter who was mummified alive and is royally pissed off about it. She comes back to life, psychically imprints on Morton, and wreaks havoc on London.

Unlike werewolves or vampires, mummies are creature-feature mainstays that actually do have real-world counterparts. That’s why archaeologist David Hurst Thomas , co-curator of the Mummies exhibit on display at the American Museum of Natural History, has been getting a lot of movie-inspired questions lately. “It really opens the door to talk about this stuff,” Thomas says.

“Mummies are known from every continent of the world except Antarctica.”

The number one question he’s getting isn’t about whether a mummy could remain undead and entombed for millennia, or even whether any ancient Egyptian tombs have been found in modern-day Iraq. “The question is — as if authenticity is going to be an issue in a Tom Cruise movie — ‘How realistic is that, to have a female mummy?’” Thomas says. “None of the classic mummy movies are about women.” The truth is, that’s one of the more realistic parts of the movie. More than half the mummies in Thomas’ Mummies exhibit are female. In ancient Egypt, mummification wasn’t limited to men. (Lead roles in Hollywood blockbusters are an entirely different story .)

But were ancient Egyptian princesses ever mummified alive? “I don’t know of any case like that,” Thomas says. Still, he adds, there are a lot of ways to mummify a body — and that body doesn’t always have to be dead when the process starts. “Mummies are known from every continent of the world except Antarctica,” he says. “And they have really very different roles in different belief systems.” So we rounded up a few highlights:

Egyptian mummies

Mummification in ancient Egypt started by accident. The heat and dry climate sucked the moisture out of corpses, making them much less appealing to the microbes that typically drive decay . It’s why beef jerky doesn’t spoil as quickly as a juicy steak.

Around 3000 BCE , the ancient Egyptians became much more intentional about preserving their dead — kicking off the early days of mummification. By 1550 BCE , anyone who could pay for a better body in the afterlife shelled out to become a mummy after they died.  

The embalming process went something like this : first, embalmers removed the deceased’s brain with a hooked instrument inserted through the nose. They also removed the internal organs — except the heart — through a small incision in the body’s left side. These were preserved separately and stored in ornate jars. Then, the body was washed with water and probably wine, and packed inside and out with a kind of salt called natron. The salt sucked the water out of the body for about 40 days, leaving the skin shriveled like a raisin. Oils were rubbed on the body to revitalize it before it was covered with a kind of tree sap , wrapped in linen and magical amulets, and buried.  

“In Egypt, it’s all about looking good for the afterlife,” Thomas says. “And from the top to the bottom of Egyptian society, that becomes the goal.”

South American mummies

Thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians were wrapping corpses in linen, people in South America were mummifying their dead in an altogether different way. Between 7020 BCE and 1110 BCE , fishing communities collectively known as the Chinchorro people lived and died along the coast from southern Peru to northern Chile.

The Chinchorro people had a couple of different ways to preserve a cadaver — possibly as part of a belief system that used mummification to stay connected with the dead . But the Black Mummies — which get their name from the black manganese paint that covered the cadaver — were the standouts , physical anthropologist Bernardo T. Arriaza wrote.

The person preparing a Black Mummy first had to dismember and decapitate the body, and remove its internal organs. The skin, which was preserved separately, “was peeled away from the body and reattached later, like taking off and putting on a sock,” Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato wrote for National Geographic . To dry out the torso, the mortician stuffed the abdomen with hot ashes or coals.

Once the abdomen was dry and the bones were clean, the whole body had to be put back together again , as if it were lying down on its back. Cords tied the bones together, and sticks threaded up through the hips and rib cage, before passing into the skull like body-length splints. The hollow insides were stuffed with grass, ashes, dirt, and animal hair. Then the body was coated with ash, and the skin was carefully stretched back over the top. The last step was to paint the body with a black paste made out of the mineral manganese, which also gave shape to the deceased’s facial features.

  Self-made mummies

Another question Thomas gets from museumgoers is: can you mummify yourself? “And the answer is, you sure can!” he says. Monks in especially ascetic sects of buddhism attempted self-mummification for different ideological reasons, but the end goal was to die of starvation and remain preserved for eternity.

There weren’t many who managed it. There are different numbers floating around , but according to researcher Kiyohiko Sakurai writing in a 1998 textbook, only 15 self-mummified bodies still remain in Japan. The earliest dates to the 14th century, and the latest to the turn of the 20th. The reason there are so few is probably in part because Japan’s humid climate was much less conducive to mummification than the dry and salty deserts of Egypt, or the west coast of South America. 

“You’re just basically starving yourself and getting rid all of the fat in your body.”

The process was also, no surprise, unpleasant, and deadly. “It starts out with this really nasty 1,000-day diet where you’re just basically starving yourself and getting rid all of the fat in your body,” Thomas explains. The trick to self-mummification was to go low-carb. Monks cut rice, barley, corn, millet, and beans from their diet, and substituted pine bark, grass roots, and nuts for three years or more . The starvation diet altered the body’s composition “to one that was strongly resistant to decomposition,” Sakurai wrote .

When he was close to death, the monk would enter an underground tomb to be buried alive . Three years later, other monks would exhume the body and dry it over candle flames. If the mummification was successful, the mummy was re-dressed in monk’s robes, and arranged in a seated position to be worshipped.

Accidental mummies

As the ancient Egyptians learned, mummies can be made by accident, too. “The whole thing is just to somehow interrupt the natural biological process of decay, which means stopping bacteria,” Thomas says. That can happen in extremely arid, frozen, or soggy places.

Desert mummies span the globe, from caves in Nevada to ancient Egypt to the Taklamakan desert in China . Famous ice mummies include Otzi the iceman , the freeze-dried mummy of a Copper Age man who was murdered in the Alps and frozen in a glacier 5,300 years ago. There’s also the Llullaillaco Maiden , a 13-year-old girl who died of exposure as an Incan child sacrifice on an icy peak in the Andes. 

Drying and freezing make some intuitive sense as preservation techniques — after all, it’s how we preserve our food. But it’s also possible to preserve a body in water, like the bog bodies discovered in Northern Europe. The low-oxygen, swampy, acidic environs of certain bogs essentially pickle the bodies — sometimes dissolving the bones, but leaving the skin and hair intact. 

“So there are mummy stories all over the world,” Thomas says. Still, “It's the Egyptian ones that really rule the stage.” Here’s hoping that the next Mummy movie casts a bog body for the starring role — and yes, women could become bog bodies , too.

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More from this stream The Mummy: all the trailers, updates, and commentary for Universal's resurrection of the classic film

The mummy would have been so much better if tom cruise were the villain, how many cinematic universes can universal cinematically universe after dark universe, a universe of expectations keeps the mummy from being a fun creature-feature, universal names its marvel-inspired monster movies dark universe.

An ancient Egyptian princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension. Show more

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The Mummy flopped because it ignores everything that fascinates us about mummies

Mummies have historically embodied a range of cultural conflicts. But the new Mummy just wanted to shag Tom Cruise.

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The 1932 film The Mummy is an unlikely progenitor of one of the major summer movie revivals of 2017. An eerie, surreal film, it’s part of Universal’s proud lineup of monster movies — but even for its day it was unique, focused more on atmosphere and character development than on traditional horror scares. In fact, its titular monster is barely shown as a mummy at all.

So how did this unlikely film spawn a beloved 1999 reboot and a disastrous new revival that serves as the rocky kickoff for an entire slate of new films in Universal's upcoming “Dark Universe” ?

The answer lies at a strange crossroads, between humanity’s fear of the unknown, the war between science and religion, and our love of adventure. It's there that the mummy in pop culture resides — and the lack of attention to this heritage may be at the root of the new film’s critical and commercial failure.

Mummies have long been cultural mainstays, but not always for the greatest of reasons

Mummies — the preserved bodies of ancient Egyptians — have been a cultural fascination since the early 19th century, when interest in archaeological excavations of Egyptian tombs swept across Europe.

“There’s been interest in mummies since the 18th and 19th century, when English travelers went to Egypt and took mummies like souvenirs,” Vicky Almansa, an Egyptologist at Brown University, told me in a phone interview.

The European interest in Egypt was sparked by an odd episode in history: the year Napoleon spent invading the country . Napoleon’s initial 1798 attempt, which was spurred partly by the desire to block English trading routes and partly by his fascination with the region, was mostly successful — or it was until British Adm. Horatio Nelson obliterated the French navy on the Nile and essentially left Napoleon stranded in Cairo.

But while Napoleon’s Middle Eastern campaign was failing, the scientists he brought with him to Egypt were beginning to explore the region and unearth countless finds — including the Rosetta stone — which they took from burial sites and sent back to French and later British museums.

In 1822, France formed the first official study of Egyptology, and the European fascination with Egypt — dubbed “Egyptomania” — kicked into high gear. Mummies in particular were all the rage: The 1851 London World’s Fair included an Egyptian bazaar, and 350,000 entrants to the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition saw an exhibit in which a mummy transformed into Pharaoh’s daughter and back again; societies and lecturers would host “unwrapping parties” in Victorian England in which mummified corpses were dramatically revealed to the public.

The origins of Egyptomania are significant because they connect cultural interest in Egypt to colonialism, conquest, and the consequences of tampering in the wrong domain — themes that have been associated with cultural depictions of Egypt for nearly two centuries. The mummy was the most prominent nexus of this fixation, in no small part because taking mummies from tombs was literal grave robbing.

“The ancient Egyptians didn’t want the mummy to come back to life,” Egyptologist Federico Zangani told me. “The body of the mummy had to be preserved in order for the deceased to attain eternal life.”

Almansa added that “taking the body out of the tomb, not even offering him food that he’d need to survive the afterlife, would be seen as some kind of sacrilege against the deceased.”

This sacrilege manifested itself in the many rumored curses that were popularly believed to be attached to the excavation of such finds — and which in some cases were actually written in tombs as warnings. Various real-life Victorian adventurers were believed to be impacted by the mummy’s curse. In 1901’s The Romance of the Mummy , Théophile Gautier ascribed to the mummy a supernatural knowledge of its disturbed afterlife: “The clear, fixed glance, gazing out of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect; the body seemed to behold with disdainful surprise the living beings that moved around it.“

In other words, the mummy wasn’t just an artifact; it bore the cultural anxieties incumbent upon the spoils of colonialism. Nineteenth-century scientists could sell mummies across Europe with impunity, but in fiction there would be consequences for the cultural ravaging of their tombs, and the mummy would have its day.

Because of its unique role within colonialism, the mummy in fiction has a tremendous amount of agency

Because the mummy was a primary focus of the British public’s fascination with Egyptian culture throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the emerging genre literature of the era — specifically adventure narratives and weird fiction — began to feature mummies. In these stories, the duality of the mummy played a major role: It was a dead corpse that could also enact vengeance upon the living, through supernatural reincarnation or ghastly curses. This framework for viewing the mummy essentially hasn’t changed since, and continues to inform today’s horror tropes about mummies.

The mummy was a prominent part of popular British adventure narratives at the turn of the 20th century. Writers like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented the exotic “lost world” genre of pulp fiction, wrote mummy narratives, like Conan Doyle’s short story “The Ring of Thoth.” This is the pulp tradition that ultimately led to Indiana Jones and his brand of adventurous archaeologists and treasure hunters.

At the same time, the mummy in turn-of-the-century literature coincided with the rise of weird fiction with exotic occult overtones. Writers like Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft would frequently write about terrifying mystical encounters in faraway or unknown lands, and the mummy came to be a conduit for both the dread and the inspiration of these moments. In Blackwood’s “Nemesis of Fire,” the mummy is almost a portal to the universe: “time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.”

Compared with other exotic horror tropes of the time period, like the monkey’s paw and any number of similar “cursed” artifacts, the mummy often exercised an unusual degree of agency and a will of its own. Early “curse” stories, including Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 “Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse,” tended to involve a female mummy coming back to life in order to revenge herself upon the person who had stolen her from the tomb and parted her from her lover in the afterlife. (If this plot sounds familiar, it should — vengeful female mummies play a role in all of the Universal Mummy films, including the new one .)

Each of these tropes catered to the West’s growing interest in spiritualism and occultism, but they also, again, dealt with cultural anxiety surrounding the West’s role in colonialism. Edward Said famously argued in Orientalism that US and European writers othered Asia and the Middle East by portraying it as bizarre, regressive, and innately opaque and impossible to understand — all characteristics that recur throughout weird fiction and 20th-century horror. In these narratives, the mummy’s agency serves to justify the West’s fascination with the mummy and ancient Egypt while bearing out Westerners’ fears of the supernatural terror the mummy brings with it.

These are all traits that recur again and again throughout the most famous modern depiction of mummies: Universal’s movie franchise.

The Mummy was an unlikely entry into Universal’s monster mythos from the beginning

By 1932, when Universal produced The Mummy , starring Boris Karloff, the studio was already enjoying a full decade of success from the days of its early silent monster films starring Lon Chaney, and Karloff was in the midst of megastardom thanks to his turn in Frankenstein for Universal the year before. These early horror films typically relied heavily on strong ensemble casts, and a prominent star such as Chaney or Bela Lugosi in the title role, and many of them went on to have sequels like Bride of Frankenstein .

The original 1932 Mummy differed from the typical monster fare of the time (and it would soon be followed by the even weirder The Black Cat in 1934). The plot is essentially a slow-paced cat-and-mouse chase between Boris Karloff and a group of wary Westerners rather than a fast-paced thriller full of terrifying monster moments. And the story is rooted in actual Egyptian mythology, with Karloff’s character, Imhotep, named after a historical Egyptian figure and his ancient bride named after King Tutankhamun’s real princess. Tut’s tomb had been excavated in 1922, and audiences were still familiar with the details.

“Finding King Tut’s tomb would have had a huge impact on the popularity of mummies because that was an international event,” Egyptologist Christian Casey told me.

Notably, the core plot of The Mummy involves a rare trope for horror films of the day: a reciprocated love story between Imhotep and his lady love. But what makes The Mummy really stand out among its monster movie brethren is that there are almost no “shock” moments. Instead, a creeping atmospheric tension builds through plenty of expressionist cinematography until we finally, and only briefly, see Karloff in his full “mummified” form. The film overall was far more romance than horror, and more melodrama than thriller — a genre-hybrid formula that Universal would return to for its unexpected 1999 hit.

Though the 1932 Mummy was unusual in the pantheon of Universal films, it was quite typical in its presentation of the tropes associated with fictional mummies. The discomfort surrounding Western appropriation of ancient Egyptian artifacts is on display; the plot kicks off with archaeologists ignoring warnings about tampering with an ancient Egyptian scroll, with dire results. The portrayal of Karloff’s sinister Egyptian is steeped in Orientalism, reflected in our scientist heroes’ accompanying fear and mistrust of his true motives. The war between Eastern occultism and Western science is another major theme, as is the mummy’s obsession with his reincarnated bride and his dual existence as an evil but civilized scholar and a reanimated corpse .

Universal’s subsequent follow-ups to The Mummy ( The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Curse, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, et al.) weren’t direct sequels, but rather new stories with no connection to the 1932 original except their reliance on the well-established tropes of the genre.

The 1999 film The Mummy resurrected this tradition with a new story using elements taken from the 1932 original. The film, starring Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser , was an unexpected cultural phenomenon, merging the mummy’s adventure and horror roots into a new Indiana Jones–esque hybrid: It was a screwball comedy, an action adventure, and a horror movie — a modern pulp narrative that audiences loved. Not only was the film a surprise hit, grossing nearly $500 million worldwide, but it also became a pop culture mainstay.

Despite receiving criticism for its Orientalist portrayal of the Middle East and its stereotyped portrayal of Arabic characters, The Mummy has remained popular among geeks, and in particular feminists, who praise it for its spirited heroine . Weisz’s character Evy, in addition to being an homage to Katharine Hepburn’s scatterbrained but sexy scholar in Bringing Up Baby , is allowed to be smart, adventurous, feisty, fun, and competent — and she even gets to drive the plot. This all means a lot to a lot of people — particularly on Tumblr , where love for the film and its 2001 sequel has remained strong.

What causes the mummy to rise from its cultural tomb?

So why is a Mummy reboot happening in 2017? There’s a simple, obvious reason: Universal, seeking to compete with other studios with major ongoing film worlds in development, is creating its “Dark Universe” and starting with its most financially successful horror franchise to date. (Though technically, the plan to kick off this universe dates back to 2014’s lackluster Dracula Untold .)

The subject of The Mummy also speaks to contemporary concerns in a moment when the Middle East is a constant subject of international conversation. At one point in the new film, bullets from Iraqi insurgents “ shred apart some of the local antiquities.” The idea of the titular mummy continues to justify Western interest in the preservation of Egyptian culture while also serving as a vehicle for the prurient othering and Orientalism that’s still at work in the way many US viewers discuss the Middle East.

The idea of the mummy also focuses debate around mysticism and science, pitting religious beliefs in the idea of souls and the afterlife against scientific inquiry and exploration. This, too, is a conflict that feels all too trenchant in the current cultural moment.

But of course, the allure of the mummy in pop culture could also boil down to horror fans’ ever-ravenous desire for scary supernatural objects — and that’s something the new film apparently didn’t tap into enough for fans and critics, one of whom noted that “The Mummy, Princess Ahmanet … is a supporting character in her own movie.”

This is a wasted opportunity for a franchise that began in full awareness that the mummy was the nexus of a host of cultural anxieties and contradictions, the kind that easily generate horror. The titular mummy in the 1999 film was also a supporting character in his own film, but the obsession between the mummy and his reincarnated bride remained the scary driving force of the plot. In the new film, the mummy mostly just wants Tom Cruise, and as Vox’s own Todd VanDerWerff points out , Tom Cruise is just too Tom Cruise-y to imbue that connection with any of the usual sociocultural overtones.

Another complicating factor in the mummy’s place in pop culture circa 2017: Modern mummies are handled differently in contemporary culture than they were during the Egyptomania era that birthed our current cultural perceptions of the fictional mummy. Almansa points out that museums now debate the ethics of displaying human remains in exhibits, and mummies are almost never unwrapped for study anymore.

Yet “the scary image of this dead body plus the curses that we actually find in tombs” continue to make mummies a recurring interest for horror fans — or at least they do when the story understands what makes mummies interesting to horror fans.

And it’s not just horror fans who understand and embrace the mummy’s ongoing cultural relevance; Casey also noted that Egyptologists tend to universally love the Mummy films — perhaps more than they love actual mummies.

“They are just dried-out corpses,” he said. “They’re pretty gross.”

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10 Valid Reasons Fans Didn’t Like 2017’s The Mummy Remake

The 2017 Tom Cruise film, The Mummy, was panned by critics, but fans have some legitimate beefs with the reboot as well

Released in 1999, The Mummy , starring Brendan Fraser, found the right mix of action, danger, and humor to be one of the most entertaining monster movie remakes ever. After two sequels, there was a fourth movie planned, but Universal Pictures canceled it to focus on a reboot. That movie ended up being the 2017 Tom Cruise Dark Universe The Mummy , which was panned across the board and hated by fans.

With a budget of $195 million and a box office take of $410 million, the 2017 film technically made money but was still considered a failure by the studio. The reason is quite simple and that's because it was dreadful from the story to the execution. As the Brendan Fraser remake is being re-released to celebrate its 25th anniversary , fans can relive a truly fun movie, while confirming their valid dislike for the Tom Cruise reboot.

10 The Mummy Story Was Preposterous

10 best mummy movies, ranked.

• The Mummy story was conceived by Jon Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet
• The screenplay was written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman

For the 2017 The Mummy reboot, any number of previous Mummy film stories could have been recycled with an update, and it would have been fine. Even a new plot would have worked if it at least had the basic elements of a Mummy story. This movie, however, was far away from a classic tale and so far-fetched that it lost the audience in the first act.

People have no problem believing that a 5,000-year-old Mummy could come back to life and run amok, but the reboot had such an absurd premise that it lost the temporary suspension of disbelief. Everything from the Mummy's unlikely tomb in Iraq to the impossible set of circumstances that led to its discovery had fans disbelieving all the events of the film.

9 There Was A Distinct Lack Of Egypt In A Mummy Movie

• The Mummy was filmed at Pinewood Studios and Shepperton Studios in England
• Location shooting was in Oxford, London, and Namibia

10 Weirdest Versions of Classic Movie Monsters, Ranked

Making a movie about an Egyptian mummy should, at the very least, have something to do with Egypt, but the 2017 reboot avoided the country altogether. The tomb of Ahmanet, the mummy, was located in Iraq, 1,000 miles from Egypt, and then everything shifted to London, England. The only time audiences get to see Egypt is at the end when the heroes go there to set up a sequel that is never going to happen.

It is possible, and sometimes even important, to update a classic monster tale with a contemporary setting. Dracula can be in New Orleans, like in Renfield , without seeming out of place, and Godzilla can crush San Francisco as he did in the 2014 remake, with no cause for concern. A mummy movie, on the other hand, deals with ancient Egyptian history and mythology, so it must take place, or at least originate, in Egypt.

8 None Of The Characters Were Particularly Likable

• The Mummy starred Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, and Sofia Boutella
• Courtney B. Vance, Russell Crowe, Marwan Kenzari, and Javier Botet had supporting roles

Chances are that if a movie has a poorly-written script, it will also have weak characters and The Mummy didn't beat those odds. From heroes to villains, every character in the 2017 movie was flat, lacking any kind of interesting aspects or dynamics. Even worse, these one-dimensional characters were all forced and fairly annoying, making for an overall cast that was hard to like.

Tom Cruise, as the protagonist Nick Morton, was supposed to be a gallant, heroic type, but came off as arrogant and reckless, which made him hard to root for. This was a struggle that persisted throughout the movie, not just with Cruise's character, but with the entire cast. Fans just couldn't connect with them. This created a situation in which there was no real peril because the audience didn't care if anyone got hurt or died.

7 The Mummy Tried To Be Too Many Things

• The Mummy was directed by Alex Kurtzman
• Kurtzman's only other film directing credit is the 2012 drama People Like Us

The 2017 reboot tried to be an action flick, a buddy comedy, and a horror film simultaneously and failed in every regard. As an action movie, it came off like Mission Impossible with a mummy, which is as unappealing as it sounds. The humor was embarrassingly bad, and the horror elements were weak. It's not that it is impossible to blend these genres, but The Mummy couldn't find a way.

The 1999 Brendan Fraser remake found the perfect balance of adventure, laughs, and scares and so did the 2004 Hugh Jackman action horror Van Helsing . Those two movies, however, had good scripts, engaging stories, and likable characters, which made combining styles easy and seamless. The 2017 movie could have worked if it was good at something, but it was bad at everything.

6 The Mummy Wasn't Scary

• The Mummy was distributed by Universal Pictures
• It was released on June 9, 2017 worldwide

10 Funniest Horror Movie Parodies

The Mummy was a horror movie without scares, but the title character was also far from terrifying. Sofia Boutella, who was great in Kingsman: The Secret Service , Atomic Blonde, and Rebel Moon was not a very frightening mummy, though probably not her fault. The story, direction, and design conspired to make a mummy that didn't deliver the chills.

Even though the 1999 remake was a light-hearted family-friendly movie, Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep was sufficiently scary. In the original 1932 film, Borris Karloff as Imhotep, induced panic, and even the absurd mummy from Bubba Hotep was a little freaky. Rule number one for a horror movie is to have a scary antagonist, but the 2017 reboot chose to ignore that.

5 It Insulted The Audience's Intelligence

• The Mummy earned $410 million at the box office
• Only $80.2 of that take was from the U.S. market

One of the biggest turnoffs in the 2017 reboot was the complete disregard for the audience's intelligence by including downright stupid things. It started in the beginning when Nick and Chris called in an airstrike that took less than a minute to arrive and then just so happened to open up a hole into an ancient Egyptian tomb in the middle of Iraq. Then, as insurgents are closing in, U.S. soldiers, fighting a war, fly directly to England.

The plane crashes, but Tom Cruise's character survives without a scratch because Ahmanet has a mummy crush on him, with no explanation for how he became supernaturally enabled. Hours after a U.S. military plane crashed in London, only two British police officers were sent to investigate, and much of the wreckage was still on fire. The inherent dumbness of the movie underestimated the intelligence of the audience.

4 It Was A Mockery Of The Genre

• The original The Mummy came out in 1932
• Universal has made 10 mummy movies and 5 Scorpion King spin-offs

Successful remakes have an affinity for the source material and great horrors respect the genre, but the 2017 reboot had nothing but disdain for all of that. It essentially thumbed its nose at the Mummy legacy, which, if it had been a spoof or parody would have worked, but because it was trying to be a serious movie, it came off as mockery. The movie had an undeserved sense of self-importance that was irksome to fans.

It was also lazy and derivative, stealing ideas from other films and executing them poorly. The biggest example of this is the character Chris, who dies and comes back as a wise-cracking disfigured ghost who warns Nick that he has been cursed. That had already been done in An American Werewolf in London and with way more entertainment value.

3 Tom Cruise Was Wrong For This Movie

• Tom Cruise has starred in 45 movies
• Only 2 of those movies were horror-related

Tom Cruise usually plays a hotshot who doesn't play by the rules but gets results in almost every movie, which is fine for Top Gun or Days of Thunder . In a horror movie, on the other hand, it's quite distracting, and actually, that's what his presence in this movie was. Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the world , and casting him in The Mummy drew all the attention away from the story, as flawed as it was.

Much in the same way that Cruise sucked all the creepy eroticism out of Lestat in An Interview with a Vampire , his mega-star status drained any horror credibility the film might have had. In all fairness, there isn't an actor alive who could have stepped into this role and made the film any better, because the story, character, and dialog were so profoundly bad, but Cruise certainly didn't help things.

2 It Killed Any Hope For The Dark Universe

10 movies that put a bizarre spin on classic monsters.

• The first attempt at the dark Universe was Dracula Untold in 2014
• At least 7 movies were canceled when the Dark Universe died

In theory, a shared universe of films with the classic Universal Monsters is very appealing. While the studio had floundered in launching the Dark Universe, there was hope among fans that they'd eventually get it right and create something deviously entertaining. All of those hopes were crushed with the lackluster 2017 The Mummy reboot, which effectively killed off the Dark Universe.

There was an entire slate of potentially interesting moves lined up, including Angelina Jolie as the Bride of Frankenstein , Johnny Depp as The Invisible Man , and Channing Tatum as Van Helsing. This horror franchise was ready to go, but then The Mummy ended up being such a stinker that Universal canceled the whole thing.

1 It Was Utterly Forgettable

• The Mummy was nominated for 8 Golden Raspberry Awards
• Under-performing again, it only won one

The worst thing a work of art can do is to elicit indifference. Love it or hate it, a great work of art conjures emotions and strong feelings for or against it. The ultimate failure of the 2017 reboot is that it didn't leave a lasting impression on the audience. There were no stand-out scenes or performances, it didn't permeate popular culture, nor did it build a dedicated fan base.

Most people who saw the movie would be hard-pressed to recall anything that happened in it because it left no lasting impression. The movie was bad, but it wasn't so awful that it became a cult hit, which would have been redeeming for it. Rather, it was 110 minutes of group-think, corporate movie-making that was unimportant and completely forgettable.

An ancient Egyptian princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension.

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Middle East crisis — explained

The conflict between Israel and Palestinians — and other groups in the Middle East — goes back decades. These stories provide context for current developments and the history that led up to them.

Israel shoots down missiles and drones after Iran launches unprecedented attack

Becky Sullivan

Israeli Iron Dome air defense systems launch to intercept missiles fired from Iran, in central Israel on Sunday. Tomer Neuberg/AP hide caption

Israeli Iron Dome air defense systems launch to intercept missiles fired from Iran, in central Israel on Sunday.

Booms and air raid sirens sounded across Israel and the occupied West Bank early Sunday morning, after Iran launched dozens of drones and missiles toward Israel, in an attack that marked a major escalation of conflict in the Middle East.

In Washington, President Joe Biden said U.S. forces had helped Israel down "nearly all" the drones and missiles, and pledged to convene allies to develop a unified response.

Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Iran fired more than 300 projectiles at Israel overnight, 99% of which were shot down, the "vast majority". Officials reported minor damage to a military base in southern Israel and one injury to a 10-year-old child, who was reported to be in critical condition.

"We will do everything we need, everything, to defend the state of Israel," Hagari said. He added that some of the launches came from Iraq and Yemen.

How Iran and Israel became archenemies

The Israeli War Cabinet planned to meet at lunchtime. In a statement Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. does "not seek escalation" of the conflict.

G7 leaders are meeting on Sunday afternoon to coordinate on a diplomatic response to Iran's attack, and engage with officials across the Middle East. The United Nations Security Council is is also set to meet, after Israel requested the council condemn Iran's attack, and designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Iran had vowed to retaliate after an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month killed seven Iranian military officials . It is the first time that Iran has launched an attack on Israel from Iranian soil, Israeli officials said.

U.S. forces in the region were active in shooting down drones, a U.S. defense official said. And interceptions by Israel's anti-missile defense system lit up the skies over populous areas including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The Israeli emergency medical service Magen David Adom reported that a 10-year-old child had been struck in the head by shrapnel in the area of Arad, a town near the southwestern edge of the Dead Sea. Paramedics also treated about 20 people who suffered from anxiety or minor injuries experienced while seeking shelter, the service said.

Saturday's attack, which was first announced by Israeli officials around 4 p.m. ET, was staged in waves and took hours to reach Israel, officials said.

In a statement broadcast on Iranian state television, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps described the attack as a "large-scale military operation" against multiple targets inside Israel.

In a post on the social media site X, Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations wrote that the attack was a direct response to the strike on the consulate and that "the matter can be deemed concluded."

Iranian commandos seize an Israeli-linked container ship near Strait of Hormuz

Following Tehran's overnight drone and missile attack on Sunday, Iran warned Israel of a larger attack on its territory should it retaliate, adding that Washington has been warned not to back Israeli military action.

"Our response will be much larger than tonight's military action if Israel retaliates against Iran," armed forces chief of staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri told state TV, adding that Tehran warned Washington that any backing of Israeli retaliation would result in U.S. bases being targeted.

The U.S. military was directly involved in the response, a senior U.S. defense official said. "In accordance with our ironclad commitment to Israel's security, U.S. forces in the region continue to shoot down Iranian-launched drones targeting Israel. Our forces remain postured to provide additional defensive support and to protect U.S. forces operating in the region," the official said.

Israelis were urged to take shelter

This video grab from AFPTV taken on Sunday shows explosions lighting up Jerusalem's sky during an Iranian attack on Israel. AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This video grab from AFPTV taken on Sunday shows explosions lighting up Jerusalem's sky during an Iranian attack on Israel.

Officials in Israel had explicitly urged residents of Nevatim, Dimona and Eilat — three cities in Israel's Negev desert region — and people in the northern occupied Golan Heights to take shelter. A major Israeli air base is located near Nevatim, and an Israeli nuclear research facility is located in Dimona.

Airspace over Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon was closed late Saturday, while some airlines announced the cancellation of some flights and the re-routing of others due to the attacks. Israel and Jordan reopened their airspace on Sunday morning.

Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group, said that it had staged its own attack by launching dozens of rockets toward an Israeli military base in the Golan early Sunday.

In a Saturday night address to Israelis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country was ready for "any scenario, both defensively and offensively."

"We have determined a clear principle: Whoever harms us, we will harm them. We will defend ourselves against any threat and will do so level-headedly and with determination," Netanyahu said.

After striking throughout the Middle East, Iran's proxies now become the targets

President Biden monitored the attack from the Situation Room alongside top defense and diplomatic officials. In anticipation of the attack, he had cut short a trip to Delaware in order to return to the White House.

Afterward, he spoke with Netanyahu and said Israel had "demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks – sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel."

"At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week" the president said. "Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles."

Iran blames Israel for an earlier attack on its consulate

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks on March 1 in Tehran, Iran. Iran vowed to respond after an attack on an Iranian consulate in Syria. Majid Saeedi/Getty Images hide caption

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks on March 1 in Tehran, Iran. Iran vowed to respond after an attack on an Iranian consulate in Syria.

The attack on Israel comes four days after Iran's leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed retaliation for an April 1 strike on an Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Iran said the strike killed seven members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two generals, and it blamed Israel for the attack. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being behind the attack, though the Pentagon said Israel was responsible.

By Saturday, as anticipation had grown over a possible retaliation, Israeli officials warned residents living in communities near Gaza and the Lebanon border to limit the size of gatherings and to work indoors or within reach of a shelter. Schools across Israel were closed through Monday.

Iranian officials accuse Israel of a deadly attack on Iran's consulate in Syria

U.S. defense officials told NPR Saturday that the U.S. military had moved assets around the region in anticipation of an attack, including aircraft, and had shored up defensive positions for forces in the region. The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, Gen. Michael Kurilla, arrived in Israel Thursday to coordinate with the Israeli military.

In a post on Telegram on Sunday, Hamas expressed support for Iran's attack, calling it a "natural right" and a deserved response to the Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria this month. The militant group called on Arab and Islamic nations to continue their backing in its fight against Israel, according to the Washington Post.

Also on Sunday, a statement by Israel's intelligence agency Mossad announced that Hamas had rejected the latest hostage deal outline, which would have led to a six week pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas. They blamed the lapse in negotiations directly on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

The attack is a large escalation of hostilities in the region

The strike and retaliation represent an escalation of conflict in the region that many officials worldwide had expressed worry about ever since the outbreak of war between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas on Oct. 7, the day Hamas led an attack on Israel that left some 1,200 people dead.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Saturday that he condemned Iran's attack and was "deeply alarmed about the very real danger of a devastating region-wide escalation."

Egypt's foreign affairs ministry called Iran's attack a "dangerous escalation" and in a Saturday night statement urged "the exercise of the utmost restraint to spare the region and its people further factors of instability and tension." Jordan's Prime Minister said on Sunday any escalation in the region would lead to "dangerous paths", while United Arab Emirates foreign ministry called for the exercise of the utmost restraint to avoid dangerous repercussions.

Iran has long supplied Hamas with funds and weapons . The White House has not directly linked Iran to the Oct. 7 attack.

In the six months since Oct. 7, Israel has bombarded Gaza and conducted a devastating ground invasion that has left much of the territory in ruins and more than 33,000 Palestinians dead, according to Palestinian health officials.

The last time Iran launched a similar attack was in 2020 , when it fired ballistic missiles at the Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, wounding dozens of U.S. troops, in retaliation for the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad.

Additional reporting by NPR's Daniel Estrin and NPR's Carrie Kahn in Tel Aviv, NPR's Tom Bowman in Washington, D.C., and NPR's Jane Arraf in Amman. Alon Avital and Itay Stern contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.