The Mummy (1999)

This is one of those movies I can watch pretty much whenever. It never slows down too much, the cast seems to be having fun with it. Watching Brendan Fraser try to intimidate undead warriors by screaming at them, only to have them scream back is pretty funny. 

Fraser plays O'Connell as this mixture of bravado and weary panic. He's like a louder Indiana Jones, in that he has that same, "Oh hell, I don't want to deal with this," attitude, but he's louder about it. Less able to appear unfazed. Sometimes he grasps how deep they are in this with Imhotep running around stealing people's organs, and other times he's overly confident bullets will solve everything (he is from the U.S. after all). Although even that you can tell is an act at times, either for himself or the others. I mean, what else is he going to do?

Fraser and Rachel Weisz seem to have good chemistry. The scenes where Evelyn is really excited about something, and O'Connell's just watching her in amusement are cute. There's a mutual respect that builds as they get a chance to know each other. She's a bit naive, but not oblivious to danger once she encounters it. He might have been to Hamunaptra before, but he respects her knowledge on the subject. When she tells him they don't need to fight with the Americans over a statue, he goes along with it, even if he doesn't know what she's figured out. She grasps soon enough that he knows about fighting, and tends to follow his lead.

Alex and I agreed that some times, the CGI is pretty good for 1999. I would say when it's not dealing with people (or revived corpses). The sandstorm effects, the masses of flesh-eating scarabs, that stuff looks pretty good. Other things, they were probably better off sticking with practical effects. Like when the one guy loses his eyes, the CGI of his empty sockets looks, as Alex put it, "like he's got a couple of buttholes on his face." The next time we see his face, his eye lids are shut are there's just a lot of red staining around there. The less CGI they have to use on Imhotep, the better. When he first starts moving around his reminds me of that skeleton knight from the MediEvil game on the Playstation 1, except he still has some flesh.

I feel like it's not a great depiction of Egyptians, or maybe Middle Eastern folk in general. The buffoonish warden of the prison, for example, especially with all Jonathan's remarks about his smell. (Although in that book about the British gunboat on the Tigris in World War the captain also complained in his journal about the locals lack of bathing. So maybe that's just a typical ignorant Westerner response? It's a desert, they have more critical needs for water.)

On the other hand, the Ardeth and Dr. Terrence Bey characters are both competent and calm under the fire. They do their best to adapt to the increasingly dire circumstances. Neither one of them is exactly pleased with O'Connell or Evelyn, but they recognize they'll need help to stop this, so set aside being pissed at these idiots to save the world.

Plus, the entire problem is caused by British and Americans deciding they just have to go busting into another culture's history to take it for themselves. Despite repeated warnings, and even some violence, they just kept going ahead until they unleash a mummy. And once things do go wrong, their responses are largely a) run, or b) get drunk.