The Mummy (1999)

“You heard the man no mortal weapons can kill the creature.”

“Then we’ll have to find some immortal one.”

“There goes that ‘we’ again.”

            We all have those movies in our lives that we count as classic and cherished family memories. In my family we have several but one that is oddly very near and dear to us is The Mummy from 1999. I was eleven and a half years old. I remember going to see this in the theaters. It was my first “scary” movie in the theaters. My youngest brother would not be born for another few weeks when this was released. He is actually the reason why this movie holds so many good memories for all of us because as he got a little older he would watch The Mummy on repeat almost every single day! He got into The Mummy when he was around two because of The Mummy Returns. He had all the toys that came out for the second movie. My entire family teases my brother to this day (he will be sixteen soon!) about his love of the movie and how he would watch it constantly.

            In a cheesy sentimental way I am dedicating this write up of The Mummy to my brother… and I am doing so because he will never read this!

            The story begins back in Ancient Egyptian times. A high priest named Imhotep is caught messing around with the queen Anck Su Namun. For his treachery Imhotep is condemned to the worst punishment: he has his eyes and tongue ripped out and then buried alive. Imhotep and his priests are placed in Hamunaptra for all eternity.

            Thousands of years later in the 1930s the French Foreign Legion is fighting an Egyptian force called the Medjai for control of the ancient desert site of Hamunaptra. Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) is an American fighting for the French Legion. He gets far into the ancient. He is standing in one particular spot when all the sudden he hears a voice speaking in Egyptian and then the sand kicks up around him as if on the attack. Rick runs away and a face is revealed in the sand.

            In the city of Cairo is the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. A young scholarly English woman named Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) work as a librarian. She desperately wants to join a professional group of scholars but keeps getting rejected despite the fact that her father was a very famous explorer. Her brother Jonathan (Jon Hannah) comes to the library one day to show her an object that he supposedly found on a dig. Evelyn reads the ancient Egyptian text on the object and says he may have found something. She presses a button a piece of papyrus comes out. She believes it is the location to Hamunaptra. When they take it to her boss he dismisses Hamunaptra as a legend to amuse tourists and burns off a part of the map. Jonathan then reveals to his sister that he lied and stole it off a guy who is in jail.

            The guy stole the object from turns out to be Rick O’Connell. When Evelyn and Jonathan go to the jail to see Rick, they find out he is about to be hanged for some kind of crime. Rick is a mess of a man and very rude. He tells Evelyn that he knows the location of Hamunaptra by heart since he was fighting for it and if she wants to go there he has to get her out. Evelyn manages to bribe the jailer and Rick is set free.

            On the same boat as Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan is a group of American men who are also traveling to Hamunaptra. While Evelyn wants to go to the ancient city for scholarly reasons the Americans want to go purely to find treasure to become rich off of. Rick knows there is only one other person who knows the location of Hamunaptra and that person is a little weasel of a man named Beni that he had fought with in the French Legion. That night the boat is burned up by the Medjai who are trying to keep both groups from continuing on to the ancient city.

            Despite the setback on the boat both groups manage to make it to Hamunaptra. They almost kill each other fighting for spaces to explore and dig. Evelyn finds another place to go further under the ground. In their exploration Evelyn, Rick and Jonathan find the sarcophagus of Imhotep. They see he was alive when he was buried from the scratch marks inside the coffin and Evelyn reads that he suffered the worst of all ancient Egyptian curses. The Americans, in the meantime, have found The Book of the Dead and canopic jars with ancient body parts inside. That night Rick steals The Book of the Dead from the Americans. She reads on the surface under the night sky while below under the sand in his tomb the mummy of Imhotep comes back to life.

            Now Imhotep’s mummy is looking for the canopic jars the Americans stole and taking their lives in order to regenerate. It is now up to Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan to stop Imhotep from gaining power and destroying Egypt.

            I fucking love The Mummy so much! It is so cheesy and silly and I love it the more I watch it. When I was little I was totally obsessed with Ancient Egypt. I was that weird kid that loved history with an insane passion and Ancient Egypt was where that insane passion went towards. The Mummy was like my dream. I wanted to be like Evelyn Carnahan who was an awesome female Ancient Egyptian Scholar and I still would love to be like her! My history loving heart will never fade I have a degree in Art History and museum studies for crying out loud! The story and adventure is also a lot of fun and entertaining. There are so many great scenes and lines I cannot even say what my favorite scenes and lines are. As I mentioned, I have great memories attached to The Mummy from going to see it in theaters when it was released to watching it all the time with my little brother. Maybe he will read this review one day and appreciate how happy the memories of him watching The Mummy over and over again when he was small makes me feel. That would be nice.

             If you have not seen The Mummy… what have you been doing with your life for the past fourteen years?! It is like one of those movies you have to watch. It is such a silly entertaining movie you will have so much fun watching.