Rock, paper, scissors. Anything beat a pair of locusts?
It strives for nothing more than an evening’s light entertainment, and The Mummy (1999) achieves it and, perhaps, a bit beyond. No doubt inspired by the legendary Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) in its romantic archaeological facet, it concerns a woman, Evy, and her somewhat dissolute brother, Jonathan, both half-Egyptian, who stumble across some clues as to the lost Egyptian city of Hamunaptra, where the wealth of Egypt was reputedly stored, and the most evil dead buried.
How evil? The illicit lover of the mistress of the Pharaoh, 3000 years ago, was cursed with the mightiest curse, and buried there. But this is a curious curse, for if he’s ever released, his loss becomes his gain: he will become a plague upon mankind.
Evy and Jonathan need a guide, and find one in a man who has gone and returned, O’Connell. They find him literally at the end of his rope, the hangman’s noose strangling him as they bargain for his life. His redemption, for crimes unspecified, binds him to them and to ourselves, for in that bid for redemption we can all see ourselves.
There’s little point in recounting the plot, except to highlight one key difference between this story and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. While both dabble in matters divine and having to do with the afterlife, they are unlike in how the divine comes out. There is no doubt that, in the latter story, the divine remains the undefeated, even unchallenged, champion of reality. The evil faced by Indiana Jones & Co is complete and profound, yet it’s also completely human. When the divine is sufficiently annoyed by evil, it reaches out and squashes it.
But the eponymous antagonist of The Mummy, cursed as he is, has also made the transition from the mundane transgressions of humanity to enter the pantheon of the divine, and even if it’s one of the most uncomfortable transitions one can imagine (think of having your flesh stripped from your still breathing body by scarab beetles), upon his release he begins to assume the status of a God, an evil, crabby God who has missed his woman for 3000 years, and wants another stab at bringing her back from her own version of Hell.
But this transforms the story from scuttling about until the divine reaches down and executes a classic deus ex machina to the more assertive and aggressive Doing battle with a god. In a way, much like Ghostbusters (1984), it’s an announcement that the era of Gods is coming to an end, that human needs and goals are assuming a primacy. But by the same token, the mysterious ways of the Gods, their subtlety, perhaps in our interests, perhaps in pursuit of goals beyond our foggy comprehension, recede into the background. Sometimes mankind’s direct approach to life is less effective than that of the Gods’.
Even if all those Gods are imaginary.
Bah. Sit back and enjoy the movie. Good acting & chemistry between characters, good special effects, all that rot. I’m just having fun, shootin’ the breeze here.
