Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 110
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Popular Culture Review
I wanted to do a big roaring romantic adventure movie set in
the 1920s, says Sommers, and the whole thing had to be in
Egypt. I love the original, but why try to remake it? Why copy
it? I wanted to do something different. I wanted to have action
and adventure and romance. If you’re on a trek for lost treasure
in Egypt in the 1920s, and you stumble onto a mummy - it just
seemed like an opportunity for a romantic adventure, with
characters I really cared about and wanted to pull through. (1314)
Sommers and crew went to great lengths to insure accuracy regarding the
characters’ clothing, indigenous architecture for the era, and other “little touches”
in the set dressing. The Mummy also makes excellent use of computer-generated
special effects, incorporating them in a way that does not call attention to the effects
but, rather, incorporates them as part of an overall scene that would not work without
special effects magic. This is best shown during the various stages of regeneration
Imhotep goes through after being brought back to life. Unlike Freund’s suggestive
scene in which we only see Karloff’s leg trailing the tatters of his wrappings,
Sommers gives us a mummy that has been eaten to the bone by scarab beetles
thrown into the coffin just before the lid is closed. This Imhotep is cursed to provide
food for the scarabs while dying a slow death. To meet the requirements of the
curse upon him, Vosloo’s Imhotep must regenerate himself by assimilating organs
from those who opened his tomb. The ensuing scenes in which Imhotep “grocery
shops” for his new body parts is a tour deforce of the computer-generated imagist’s
art as Imhotep progresses from skeleton to fleshed-out man.
The film’s CGI work also enhances the title’s signature graphic that
impresses Imhotep’s facial likeness on the desert’s sandy surface, as well as in the
sandstorm he has called forth to slow down a hunting party that is after him..
While these shots have something of a “look at that” quality to them, the surrounding
action is so fast-paced, and the effects are so logically established, that their presence
melts into the narrative’s flow smoothly.
Sommers’ plotline also offers up yet another example of what Carrol Fry
has coined “Primal Screams” — story traits that exemplify the writings of both
socio- and psychobiologists’ studies of human behavior and human nature. Fry
tells us, “[s]urely one of the most primal of instincts must be fear of the predator,
an ‘other’ who would consume us” (6). Referring to stories such as Dracula, The
Thing, The Relic, Alien, and Deep Blue Sea as titles which fit into this template.
Fry identifies film and fiction that portray a predator/prey relationship as a type
that is “perennially interesting to readers and viewers” (6). In particular, many of
these stories feature a group of adventurers who must both fend off the “other”