I hated mid-week schooldays, especially Wednesdays, and especially in June when the rain usually used to start pouring in earnest. 8 am to 2 pm school hours, killing another couple hours at mum's work till she gets off, then going home to a tedious session of tuition classes and then bed, only to get up the next morning and start it all over again. I was barely eight and already tired of that shit. And when that eight-year-old kid trotted for the first time into the cinema he always caught glances of on the hot, crowded bus rides from home to school and back, to see the film named The Mummy, he didn't really know for what he was in for.
It was the contained but grand exposition of the Mummy's origin. It was the simple and elegant time-lapse from one age to the other where who Rick O'Connell was perfectly encapsulated. It was the clumsily determined Evelyn and her clumsily cunning brother. It was the thrill of the adventure, the horror of the creature, the humanity of the characters, the campiness and the simplicity of the story, the exhilaration found in the balance of it all combined. It was the sum of all these parts, and then some more. It was the best cinematic experience of my life.
There's this quote in the Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige, where a character who's a magician obsessed with perfecting his craft explains the reason behind his drive: it is in essence to "make them wonder". Stephen Sommers achieved that with me that evening, and I think I've been, unknowingly or not, trying to find that high again since then whenever I make my getaway to the cinema or to the front of my TV. Of course I'd never get that. I mean, the nostalgia alone would undermine anything I try to compare it to in that sense, but then there's also a kind of magic in The Mummy that I could rarely find in other movies. It spoiled me when it comes to movies you watch for sheer entertainment.
Anyways, I was watching Jungle Cruise earlier and felt that the sense of wonder and joy they desperately tried to give the audience fell just out of grasp, then of course inevitably thought of The Mummy and started writing this shit. That's it.
TL;DR - I love "The Mummy"(1999)
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/ov2d7k/i_probably_fucked_up_when_i_saw_the_mummy1999_for/
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