After seeing the trailer to this movie for few times in the last couple of weeks, my wife and I were pretty excited to see it once it premiered. However, as she had a food tasting event on the premiere day on Wednesday, we were only able to saw this movie yesterday. To my surprise, the studio was not fully occupied till the very front seats which was rather unusual to my opinion for such a major movie and starring Tom Cruise nonetheless (we watched this one in Lotte Avenue btw). Anyway, let us catch on with the movie now.
Brief Story Line
The movie started with some background story of princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella - Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond etc) of ancient Egypt who was being punished and buried alive in a sarcophagus due to her cooperation with the evil god Set. Before she could do the final touch of ensuring Set could enter into a human body, she was already captured and mummified.
In the present day, Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his good friend Vail (Jake Johnson - Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Let's Be Cops etc) were doing some digging in Iraq to look for hidden treasures. They accidentally found the location of the buried Ahmanet and went inside together with a researcher named Jenny (Annabelle Wallis - Annabelle, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword etc) who seemed to know a lot about the ancient Egypt history. Jenny realized that the sarcophagus was a very important discovery while Nick and Vail tried to steal some precious stones and gold.
As the location was in danger of attack from the Iraqi forces, the US army led by Colonel Greenway (Courtney B. Vance - Terminator Genisys, The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story etc) immediately brought the whole team out of Iraq by plane. They brought Ahmanet's sarcophagus together with them. Now this is where the story became a lot more intense as there was something really dangerous about the sarcophagus and of course Ahmanet's power seemed to be getting stronger.
Meanwhile, it would be revealed later that Jenny was actually going to Iraq to find Ahmanet's buried location. She was working for an organization led by the mysterious Henry (Russel Crowe - Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind and many more).
So what was the intention of Henry's organization for acquiring Ahmanet's sarcophagus? How would Nick and friends be able to survive from Ahmanet's powerful attacks? Find them all in this thrilling adventure movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Well, this movie was not really what I expected. When I read that they are doing a reboot of the popular Mummy movies (which I totally loved the first one and enjoyed the second one), I was truly excited. I know that Brendan Fraser might not be the best option of doing the movie again, and I was of course psyched by the fact it would be played by Tom Cruise who was still in prime condition to play action movie. But it appeared that the movie became totally something different. Yes, there was still the occasional attacks by swarm of small creatures like in the original movie, or also the attack by a powerful Mummy, but this one felt too much altered.
After reading some more information of the movie, I realized that this was supposed to be the start of something called Dark Universe where they would share with monsters in other universe in the future such as Dracula, Frankenstein and others. Now the thing with creating this as a shared universe is that it made the movie felt like a completely different movie than the original Mummy. I for one felt that the introduction towards the universe was a little bit too much emphasized. As we were hoping for a movie focusing on the Mummy, the part of the universe became a less pleasant surprise. My personal opinion is that it would probably be a lot better had it been done the way the shared universe was introduced in Kong: Skull Island, which was done in the post credit scene and hence the focus of the movie was still about King Kong.
Do not get me wrong though, the movie did provide us a lot of entertaining and intense scenes. My wife literally screamed in some scenes that gave us shocking moments. My personal favorite was actually during the scene of Nick and Jenny in the car being chased in the woods and the scenes prior to that. What I do not like was once again the trailer of the movie revealed too much information, even the surprising scenes were shown as well which totally reduced the element of surprise when we see the actual movie. There was only 1 fact that indeed surprised me in the middle of the movie, but the rest of them were already revealed in the trailer. Another thing, this movie did not have any post credit scene at all despite my hope there would be one. I guess whatever they wanted to highlight, in future movies were already mentioned before the end credit scene.
Coming to other aspects of the movie, the special effects of the mummy was great, the CGI was cool, the sound effects were nice (I saw this in studio with Auro 11.1 system). Jenny's character in here seemed to be too stiff and felt like a person with no expression and unfortunately did not seem to have believable chemistry with Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was pretty good in the action scenes and also quite charming (though I still think Brendan Fraser was more suitable in this role). Sofia Boutella was pretty convincing as Ahmanet, Russel Crowe was cool as ever and my personal favorite character was Vail who provided the much needed humor.
So all in all, if you are looking for an entertaining action adventure movie, this one was a good choice. But if you are hoping for a real movie about Mummy, then it would be best to watch the original 1999 version. Oh ya, you also need to keep an open mind if you want to enjoy this movie, especially about the Dark Universe. And if you have not watched the trailer to the movie at all, then please do not do it so you can enjoy the movie better.
Happy watching!
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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