Just rewatched it for the first time in like a decade & a half. It perfectly blends Action, comedy & horror. Fantastic adventure film. The characters are likable. The Villain is pretty darn awesome. The action is great.
Love Brendan Fraser in this. It's just such a fun & hella entertaining watch.
I think The Mummy will hold up for a long time because it's so much darn fun. It's a great adventure story, so no matter how rusty the special effects wind up looking, the characters and the action will always seem fresh.
shareYes, absolutely. If it hinged on special effects, it would've fallen apart by now. But it doesn't, which is awesome.
shareIt's hard to imagine the effects in that movie ever looking "rusty." CGI by that point was already good enough that the film will forever look great.
But your point is noted: The story, characters and performances are all excellent and are the heart of the film. The Mummy may even be one of my Top 10 favorite movies of all time.
Interesting... to my eye, CGI often looks quite dated by the time twelve months has passed, and The Mummy's computer effects - some of them - do show their age.
For posterity, or clarity perhaps, I will note that this sort of thing doesn't bother me. Can I tell that the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts are stop-motion? Yes, absolutely; they are still a treat to watch. Because the movie is fun, I enjoy the effects.
Often, I find the only way to mitigate this effect is to use CGi to do something subtle (the ping-pong balls in Forrest Gump) or to do something deliberately unrealistic with the special effects. This avoids the uncanny valley entirely.
Again: nothing in the Mummy looks out of place or makes me enjoy the movie less. The effects are still wonderful, hold up pretty well, and the movie will be evergreen because the real bones of the story are good, even if the bandages 'round them are frayed.
I'll agree that CGI has improved in that sometimes effects today reach the level of photo-realism, whereas that wasn't quite the case in 1999. The CGI in The Mummy is clearly animation, but I still think it looks quite good, and not distracting in any way. But then again, I still think the CGI in Jurassic Park holds up pretty well also.
Honestly, I think we have reached the point where effects will not take any more great leaps. I'm not sure how they could. Take the Star Wars sequel trilogy, for instance: The movies themselves may have ultimately been disappointing but the effects were amazing, as if the objects that were brought to life in a computer were really there. So I expect a film made today to hold up well a hundred years from now.
It's great and it's certainly not distracting. Jurassic Park holds up, too.
The next great leap will be advancement in that deepfake tech stuff and we'll start seeing the estates of long-dead actors selling out likenesses for a million bucks a hit. My guess is that they'll develop "actor skins" so they can have immortal, eternally-youthful "actors" and then they'll just motion-capture them onto performers and match the "actor skin's" voice files to the inflections of a performer. That way they can argue that the "skin" is the one with the box office appeal. Whoever owns that (studios, production houses) gets the royalties. The actors themselves will get a couple hundred bucks.
Sorry, I got hyper-cynical for a second there for a minute. But, I do think that we'll see more with that kind of thing. We already see some pretty impressive stuff with the de-aging tech. Even in its relative infancy (Tron: Legacy) I thought it looked decent. The Irishman was well-done. As you pointed out, the Sequel trilogy had a great Jedi training sequence with Luke and Leia, and I thought the youth-ized Hamill and Fisher looked good.
The drawback is that this stuff still looks a bit wonky in full daylight for extended shots or close-ups. I can still see the "seams", as it were. So, I think it will get really seamless until we can't tell the difference.
I really hope you're wrong about the deep fake bullshit. First off, let me say that it's terrifying that this technology even exists. Pretty soon it's going to be difficult to know at all what is real and what is not. We won't even be able to "believe our eyes," as the old saying goes.
Second, I really don't want to see any movies with any resurrected actors. Furthermore, trust that the majority of other moviegoers are in agreement. And if that's the case, then we should have nothing to fear since we're the ones who keep Hollywood in business. Let us simply not support films that do weird shit like that by not giving them our money.
I reminded of this Audrey Hepburn commercial that came out a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB44n4ADg2Y
Poor, poor Audrey, being resurrected to advertise a candy bar. Fuck that. Fuck that shit.
I hope I'm wrong, too, but hey, there's that candy bar. I didn't watch the commercial - didn't know about it - and I don't want to give them a click. Which candy bar is it? I'd like to write the company and tell them that I don't like it. If we don't tell them, they won't know.
I think, if asked, people would agree that we don't want actors resurrected or deepfaked, and we don't want fake actors being created out of computerized wholecloth, but I also think most people will just shrug and go, "I guess this is what movies are now," and go anyway. If Disney has taught us anything over the past decade, it's that audiences are complacent as heck; it doesn't matter how pedestrian the film is, as long as it's stamped with "Star Wars", "Avengers", or "The Lion King", audiences will see it (with a couple rare exceptions). So, if they started deepfakery, I think it'll just bulldoze over before anybody can blink. Heck, if the major studios all just decide to do it, it's not like audiences will quit filmgoing cold turkey. If we did, it'd likely be the final death of cinema, anyway, which is what they want.
More and more, it's about streaming services and subscriptions. Sony doesn't want to sell you a DVD, they want you paying every month. Movie theatres take a huge chunk of change. We're moving towards more online TV, anyway. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although I do really like the theatregoing experience.
I guess, to some extent, the perfect world is almost that the major companies do streaming and indie guys release the really brilliant films like The Lighthouse and Whiplash in film theatres so every filmgoing experience is dynamite.
Go ahead and click. The channel is not official and also the ad is like 7 years old at this point.
I don't think that studios will go through the trouble and expense of deepfaking dead actors if they realize we don't want that shit. After all, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just film people who are actually alive. It's not like the deepfake process would save them money or effort.
Regarding the cinema experience, I personally want theaters to stick around forever, and furthermore, I am a huge fan of physical media. Just today I ordered The Mummy on 4K Blu-Ray because of this thread. Streaming is convenient but I don't want the ability to actually own a movie to ever be taken away and I also love having discs that are packed full of special features.
I'm less worried about them resurrecting dead actors (although I find that repellent and gauche - saving only if the actor themselves agreed to something before shuffling off this mortal coil) and more disturbed by the notion that they might just start trying to make new "actors" from raw data. Squaresoft talked about wanting to do basically that with Aki Ross in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Of course, that CG looks super-dated now and the movie flopped, so... but they were still talking about "virtual actors".
You are definitely right insofar as if they can't make money doing it, they won't.
It's cheaper to film a living actor unless they're Tom Cruise or Robert Downey Jr.
I, too, love cinemas. I'd go every day if I had the time, money, and of course if they were open (the times we live in...) And I'm definitely going down with the physical media ship. One of the reasons I love the idea of DVDs is because they can't alter 'em. I think we'll see a world soon where original edits of (certain) films will become all but impossible to find. Star Wars is the best example of this, but they're editing out content from Disney films (stuff that's racist - I get why they're doing it) or replacing guns with walkie-talkies in E.T. That's not necessarily a big deal, but I just like the idea of having my favourite films and then always being able to watch them and share them with other people.
The movies are magical, and maybe this is just some old fogey nostalgia, "In my day!" B.S., but those experiences are great. The lights go dim and you've got your popcorn and away you go into this amazing experience. For that reason, I don't think movie houses will ever completely go away, even if they are reduced to a very small number. It's the same reason vinyl doesn't die. There's something intangibly delicious about that experience. They can't replicate it, so the format sticks around.
It's one of my favorites. It's amazing how rewatchable and fun this movie is.
shareIt's super quotable, rewatchable & just a fun watch all round. No matter which era you watch it in.
shareIt kills me that Stephen Sommers hasn't gotten more work since what was it, the first GI Joe movie? I thought he was underrated.
shareHad no idea. I honestly just assumed he had a huge career after The Mummy 1 & 2.
But looking at his IMDB, looks like he just fell off
Don't overlook Van Helsing in 2004. I didn't think it was a great film--I'd only call it "fairly enjoyable"--but it was a big movie. I'm not sure what the budget was but it made $300 million worldwide.
shareI don't get the hate for Van Helsing. It's a genuinely fun film. Had no idea it was so lowly rated.
shareLike I said, I enjoyed the movie, but I definitely didn't enjoy it like I did The Mummy.
It's like Van Helsing = fun Saturday matinee. It's a movie I watched once, enjoyed well enough, but may not ever watch again. But The Mummy = stone cold classic adventure film. I've probably seen it twenty times, and in fact, after finding your thread earlier today I went and ordered The Mummy on 4K Blu-Ray. (I have previously owned it on VHS, DVD and regular Blu-Ray.)
Oh yeah, definitely not on the same level. Van Helsing a fun watch but it's got a very weak script & some not so great performances.
The Mummy is the perfect action adventure film. With the right amount of humor.
It's one of the best adventure films of all time. Personally, I regard it as equal to the Indiana Jones franchise.
The story is so much fun and the look, feel and mood of the movie is perfect. This is one of those movies where I wish I could crawl through the screen and live inside the world it creates -- going on adventures with Rick O'Connell in exotic lands, rubbing shoulders with interesting characters and wooing pretty young ladies.
The Mummy is easily one of my most-rewatched films of all time, and in fact 1999 was overall a great year for movies. 1999 also gave us films like The Matrix, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, The Green Mile and the highly underrated The Insider, as well as some good B-movie fun with movies like Deep Blue Sea and Boondock Saints.
It's a damn shame that the sequels couldn't live up to the original. Sadly, I think they fail pretty badly at attempting to do so. But at least we'll always have the first film.
I remember rewatching it with a friend of mine & he turned to me and was like, this film could legit be released today as is and it would still be as amazing.
It's so freaking timeless. And as I said in one of my comments above, they did NOT rely too much on CGI. So, it has aged amazingly.
Absolutely. And if it were released today it would be better than 99% of what Hollywood has been putting out for the past decade. It's almost as if they have forgotten how to make movies like this, you know, old school classic adventure films. In fact, I'd say the only film of the genre that's come anywhere close to being as good is National Treasure, which is still a step down from The Mummy. Even The Mummy's sequels were quite disappointing.
I primarily watch movies for escapism. I'm looking to be whisked away on a fun adventure for two hours and forget about my real world problems, and The Mummy is a true A-lister at providing this experience.
I honestly can't remember the last time I watched a genuinely good adventure film.
I think the last one was The first Pirates of the Caribbean film. That was a good film. Again, just like The Mummy, the sequels weren't as good.
But that was almost 2 decades ago.
I always enjoy this movie.
shareNaaah, I thought it was complete crap, WORTHLESS BEYOND BELIEF!
I mean, the weird mummy chick with two splitting pupils in each eye was just a CGI gimmick, and Tom Cruise was being a hammy asshole, as per usual, and the less said about Russell Cro-
Oh, wrong Mummy movie. Sorry.
THIS Mummy movie is pure AWESOMENESS! Brendan Fraser's most memorable role, I think!
You had me in the first half. 😅
share