Mummy Film Download

[Nadal Braymiller]

The Mummy is a 1999 American action-adventure film written and directed by Stephen Sommers, starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and Arnold Vosloo in the title role as the reanimated mummy. It is a remake of the 1932 film of the same name. The film follows adventurer Rick O'Connell as he travels to Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, with librarian Evelyn Carnahan and her older brother Jonathan, where they accidentally awaken Imhotep, a cursed high priest with supernatural powers.

Development took years, with multiple screenplays and directors attached. In 1997, Sommers successfully pitched his version of a more adventurous and romantic take on the source material. Filming took place in Morocco and the United Kingdom; the crew endured dehydration, sandstorms and snakes shooting on location in the Sahara Desert. Industrial Light & Magic provided many of the visual effects, blending live-action footage and computer-generated imagery to create the titular monster. Jerry Goldsmith provided the orchestral score.

In Thebes, Egypt, 1290 BC, high priest Imhotep has an affair with Anck-su-namun, the mistress and future bride of Pharaoh Seti I. They kill the Pharaoh, after he discovers their relationship. Imhotep flees, while Anck-su-namun kills herself. Believing he can resurrect her, Imhotep and his priests steal her corpse and travel to Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead. The resurrection ritual is stopped by Pharaoh's bodyguards, the Medjai. Imhotep's priests are mummified alive, while Imhotep himself is tortured, cursed and buried alive with flesh-eating scarabs at the feet of a statue of the god Anubis. The Medjai are sworn to prevent Imhotep's return.

Rick guides Evelyn and her party to the city, encountering a band of American treasure hunters led by Rick's cowardly acquaintance Beni Gabor. Despite being warned to leave by Ardeth Bay, leader of the Medjai, the two expeditions continue their excavations. A flesh-eating scarab hatches from a decorative shell embedded in an artifact Warden Hassan is looting and burrows inside his body, killing him. Meanwhile, several diggers working with the Americans are killed by triggering a cloud of pressurized salt acid during the excavation. Evelyn searches for the Book of Amun-Ra, made of pure gold. Instead of finding it, she stumbles upon Imhotep's remains. The team of Americans, meanwhile, discover the black Book of the Dead, accompanied by canopic jars carrying Anck-su-namun's preserved organs.

At night, Evelyn reads from the Book of the Dead aloud, accidentally awakening the mummified Imhotep, who seems to briefly confuse Evelyn with Anck-su-namun. The expeditions flee back to Cairo, and Imhotep follows them with the help of Beni, who has agreed to serve him. He regenerates his full strength and human form by killing the members of the American expedition and brings the Ten Plagues back to Egypt. Meanwhile, Evelyn learns that Terence is also working with the Medjai.

Rick, Evelyn, Jonathan, and Terence meet Ardeth at the museum, who hypothesizes that Imhotep wants to resurrect Anck-su-namun by sacrificing Evelyn. She believes that if the Book of the Dead brought Imhotep back to life, the Book of Amun-Ra can kill him again and deduces the book's whereabouts in Hamunaptra. Imhotep corners the group with an army of slaves. Evelyn agrees to accompany him if he spares the rest of the group. Although Imhotep does not honor his word, Rick and the others fight their way to safety, with Terence sacrificing himself to ensure their escape.

Rick, Jonathan, and Ardeth recruit Captain Winston Havelock, a member of the Royal Air Force with a death wish, to fly them back to Hamunaptra in pursuit of Imhotep. However, Imhotep magically conjures a sandstorm, crashing their plane and killing Havelock. Rick, Jonathan, and Ardeth locate the Book of Amun-Ra in Hamunaptra while Imhotep prepares to sacrifice Evelyn, also bringing Anck-su-namun's mummified remains to life as part of the ritual. Rick manages to rescue her after a brutal fight with Imhotep's mummified priests and mummified soldiers; Anck-su-namun's mummy is also slain during the melee. Evelyn reads from the Book of Amun-Ra, making Imhotep mortal, and he is fatally wounded by Rick. Imhotep degenerates back into his mummified form and descends into the pool of souls, vowing revenge.

Beni accidentally sets off a booby trap while looting the city of its riches and is killed by a swarm of flesh-eating scarabs as Hamunaptra collapses into the sand. Ardeth bids Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan goodbye, and the trio rides away on a pair of camels, not realizing it is laden with Beni's stolen treasure.

Evelyn Carnahan was named in tribute to Lady Evelyn Herbert, the daughter of amateur Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon, both present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.[18] The studio originally considered American actresses, and Rachel Weisz auditioned multiple times before getting the part.[15] Weisz was not a big fan of horror films, but saw the movie as more of a "hokum" comic book.[19] John Hannah was picked for the role of Jonathan Carnahan, despite the fact that Hannah felt he was not a comedic actor, with Sommers saying that, "He had no idea why we cast him."[15]

To avoid dehydration in the scorching heat of the Sahara, the production's medical team created a drink that the cast and crew had to consume every two hours.[17] Sandstorms were daily inconveniences, and wildlife were a major problem, with many crew members having to be airlifted to medical care after being bitten or stung.[22] Fraser nearly died during a scene where his character is hanged.[19] The production had the official support of the Royal Moroccan Army, and the cast members had kidnapping insurance taken out on them.[7]

After shooting in North Africa, production moved back to the United Kingdom before completion on August 29, 1998.[21] Here, the dockyards at Chatham doubled for the Giza Port on the Nile River.[25] This set was 600 feet (183 m) in length and featured "a steam train, an Ajax traction engine, three cranes, an open two-horse carriage, four horse-drawn carts, five dressing horses and grooms, nine pack donkeys and mules, as well as market stalls, Arab-clad vendors and room for 300 costumed extras".[21]

The filmmakers sought to make something faster and scarier for the title creature, using cutting-edge techniques to create something never before seen.[16] ILM started developing the look of the Mummy three months before filming started.[21] "We wanted to create a photorealistic corpse that was obviously not a man in a suit, obviously not an animatronic, and obviously alive," he recalled.[6]

The score for The Mummy was composed and conducted by Jerry Goldsmith, with orchestrations provided by Alexander Courage.[28] Goldsmith had previously scored Deep Rising for Sommers. As he reached the final few years of his career, Goldsmith was coming off a number of action and adventure films in the 1990s, from multiple Star Trek films to Air Force One. Goldsmith provided The Mummy with suitably bombastic music, with the traditional European orchestra supplemented with regional instruments such as the bouzouki.[29]

The opening of the film contains nearly all of Goldsmith's major themes for the score, with what music critic Jeff Bond calls an "Egyptian theme" reused in different configurations throughout to establish the epic settings and sense of place for Hamunaptra; a theme for Imhotep/the Mummy that is performed in an understated manner early in the film, before repeating in more forceful, brassy renditions after the Mummy has regenerated; a love theme used for both Imhotep/Anck-su-namun and Rick/Evelyn; and a heroic theme for Rick.[29] In addition to the extensive brass and percussion elements,[30] the score uses sparing amounts of vocals, unusual for much of Goldsmith's work.[30]

The Mummy was the number one film in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend, grossing $43 million in 3,210 theaters. Its weekend take was the highest non-holiday May opening, and ninth-biggest opening of all time.[33][34] The film later fell to second place behind The Phantom Menace. The Mummy grossed over $155.4 million in the United States and Canada and $261 million internationally, grossing over $416.4 million worldwide.[3]

The Mummy received mixed reviews from critics.[34] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 62% based on 104 reviews, and an average rating of 5.9/10.[35] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 48 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating mixed or average reviews.[36] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[37]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a positive review, writing, "There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased."[38] Critics such as Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman and The New York Times' Stephen Holden concurred with the sentiment of the film as a breezy crowd-pleaser.[39][40][41]

Less positively, Keith Phipps of The A.V. Club wrote that the film's attempt to create a big, Indiana Jones-inspired action film felt "forced" and the result was unsatisfying.[42] Other reviews complained of an overstuffed plot or recycled elements from better movies.[43][40] Reviewers comparing the film to the 1932 original sometimes favored the original's focus on atmosphere and dread,[43] though others welcomed the change to a more energetic Indiana Jones-type film.[44]

The effects were generally praised, especially the title creature.[45] Ernest Larson's review for Jump Cut felt that the effects were too similar to ILM's other work, and that the effects alone could not support the weight of the rest of the movie.[46] Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle and Hal Hinson from the Dallas Observer agreed that the effects never overshadowed the human aspects of the film.[45][47] Gleiberman said that the horrors of the effects were undercut by the lightheartedness of the film, while the BBC's Almar Haflidason felt that the effects were occasionally unconvincing, and the heavy reliance on cutting-edge computer-generated imagery would likely date the film heavily as time passed.[39][48]

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