May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the computers of ILM

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 1999)

Okay, so it wasn't a horror movie. GOOD. Why would anyone want to inspire horror? Lust, pity, fear, joy, excitement, fascination, anxiety ... I can see the point of arousing THOSE psychological states, but what's so great about nausea and repulsion? Horror, indeed.
I must admit `The Mummy' doesn't arouse much lust, pity, fear, et cetera, either; moreover, it's stupid, which is more of a problem when the early scenes promise a minimal level of intelligence that the rest of the film fails to deliver. (I have little patience with the turn-off-your-brain-and-enjoy crowd. Anyone who would voluntarily turn off his brain deserves the consequences, including not remembering to turn it on again afterwards.)
How stupid is it? Well ... The desert between Hamunaptra and Cairo is crossed several times, sometimes with camels, sometimes without - and, of course, Sommers forgets which side of the desert he left the camels on. Hamunaptra was built so that the Pharaoh, by pulling a lever, could pull the entire city underground. But why is the lever smack bang in the MIDDLE of the city? What good was it to anyone there?
And so on.
All the same, I recommend it. It's not as stupid as it looks. Before the mummy awakes it's reasonably consistent, reasonably well written, and, most importantly in this kind of desert-fermented cheese, it looks and feels good. There's sand, there's Egyptian stuff all over the place, there's burnished gold, there's high priests ... it all satisfies a deep human need. We don't see nearly enough of the paraphernalia of the Ancient World on the screen. Even Rome went out of fashion decades ago. (Why, I wonder?) So all in all I'm glad `The Mummy' exists. It's not the best of its kind, but at least it's there. And it's not just the content of the imagery. The sunny wide-screen photography really is first class.
That is, until some fool steps in and plasters computer-generated images over the top. By Thoth they look awful. A computer-generated plague of flies is no improvement at all on sprinkling pepper over the negatives; the decaying mummies themselves seem to be knitted out of a kind of featureless grey wool; the scarabs look like they escaped from `Toy Story'; and that quicksilver (or whatever it was) is such a hoary and ineffective old computer effect that a group of friends can spend an entertaining couple of hours compiling a list of all the movies that feature it. What is it with these computer-generated effects? Are directors these days even ALLOWED to make movies without them? Is there a law I don't know about?
Grump, grump, grump. Anyway, even taking THIS into account, I enjoyed the movie. I liked it so very much that I wish I could have respected it as well.