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The Mummy
The Mummy
May 7, 1999
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"Imhotep" was actually the name of the architect who developed the first pyramids in ancient Egypt, most notably the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara around 2600 BC. His ability was such that he was later said to have descended from the gods. His name means "one who comes in peace"
I mean, it was a mummy movie. It was a good film independent of its source. It that looks like Lawrence of Arabia on steroids in a lot of ways.
Brendan Fraser
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The Mummy is a 1999 American adventure film written and directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and Kevin J. O'Connor, with Arnold Vosloo in the title role as the reanimated mummy. The film features substantial dialogue in ancient Egyptian language, spoken with the assistance of a professional Egyptologist. It is a loose remake of the 1932 film of the same name which starred Boris Karloff in the title role. Originally intended to be part of a low-budget horror series, the movie was eventually turned into a blockbuster adventure film.
Filming began in Marrakech, Morocco, on May 4, 1998, and lasted seventeen weeks; the crew had to endure dehydration, sandstorms, and snakes while filming in the Sahara. The visual effects were provided by Industrial Light & Magic, who blended film and computer-generated imagery to create the titular Mummy. Jerry Goldsmith provided the orchestral score.
The Mummy opened on May 7, 1999, and grossed $43 million in 3,210 theaters; the movie went on to gross $416 million worldwide. Reception to the film was mixed, with reviewers alternatively praising or complaining about the special effects, the slapstick nature of the story and characters, and the stereotyped villains. The box-office success led to a 2001 sequel, The Mummy Returns, as well as The Mummy: The Animated Series, and the prequel film The Scorpion King. Another sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, opened on August 1, 2008. Universal Studios also opened a roller coaster, Revenge of the Mummy, in 2004. The movie and its sequel's novelizations were written by Max Allan Collins.
In Egypt, circa 1290 BC, high priest Imhotep engages an affair with Anck-su-Namun, the mistress of Pharaoh Seti I—other men are forbidden to touch her. When the Pharaoh discovers their tryst, Imhotep and Anck-su-Namun murder the monarch. Anck-su-Namun then kills herself, intending for Imhotep to resurrect her. After Anck-su-Namun's burial, Imhotep breaks into her crypt and steals her corpse. He and his priests flee across the desert to Hamunaptra, the city of the dead, where they begin the resurrection ceremony. However, they are caught by Seti's guards before the ritual could be completed, and Anck-su-Namun's soul is sent back to the Underworld. For their sacrilege, Imhotep's priests are mummified alive, and Imhotep himself is forced to endure the curse of Hom Dai: his tongue is cut out, and he is buried alive with a swarm of flesh-eating scarabs. The ritual grants eternal life, forcing Imhotep to endure the agony of his wounds for all time. He is buried under high security, sealed away in a sarcophagus below a statue of the Egyptian god Anubis, and kept under strict surveillance by the Medjai, descendants of Seti's palace guards. If Imhotep were ever to be released, the powers that made him immortal would allow him to unleash a wave of destruction and death upon the Earth.
In 1926, Cairo librarian and aspiring Egyptologist, Evelyn Carnahan is presented with an intricate box and map by her bumbling brother Jonathan, who says he found it in Thebes. After the pair discover the map leads to Hamunaptra, Jonathan reveals he actually stole it from an American named Rick O'Connell, who is currently in prison. Rick tells them that he knows the location of the city because his unit of the French Foreign Legion reached the fabled city only to be overrun by Arabs. He makes a deal with Evelyn to reveal the location of Hamunaptra, in exchange for Evelyn saving Rick from being hanged. Rick leads an expedition to the city, where the group encounters a band of treasure hunters led by the famed Egyptologist Dr. Allen Chamberlain and guided by Beni Gabor, a cowardly former Legion soldier who served with Rick and also knows the location of the lost city.
Shortly after reaching Hamunaptra, both groups are attacked by the Medjai, led by a warrior named Ardeth Bay. Bay warns them of the evil buried in the city. Rather than heed his warning, the two expeditions continue to excavate in separate portions of the city. Evelyn is looking for the Book of Amun-Ra, a solid gold book supposedly capable of taking life away, but unexpectedly comes across the remains of Imhotep instead. The team of Americans, meanwhile, discover a box containing the black Book of the Dead, accompanied by canopic jars carrying Anck-su-Namun's preserved organs; each of the Americans takes a jar as loot.
At night, Evelyn takes the Book of the Dead from the Americans' tent and reads a page aloud, accidentally awakening Imhotep. Although both groups return to Cairo, the mummy hunts down the Americans who opened the box, slowly regenerating with each person he kills. Beni survives a meeting with Imhotep by pledging allegiance to him and helps him track down the Americans and the canopic jars in Cairo. Evelyn hypothesises that if the Book of the Dead brought Imhotep back to life, the Book of Amun-Ra can kill the high priest once again. Imhotep captures Evelyn, intending to sacrifice her to resurrect Anck-su-Namun, and returns to Hamunaptra, pursued by Rick and Jonathan. Evelyn is rescued after an intense battle with Imhotep's mummies, and she reads from the Book of Amun-Ra. Imhotep becomes mortal, and Rick stabs him. Rapidly decaying, Imhotep leaves the world of the living, vowing revenge. Beni accidentally sets off an ancient booby trap and is trapped by a swarm of flesh-eating scarabs as Hamunaptra begins to collapse into the sand. The heroes escape and ride off into the sunset on a pair of camels laden with treasure.
In 1992, producer James Jacks decided to update the original Mummy film for the 1990s. Universal Studios gave him the go-ahead, but only if he kept the budget around $10 million. The producer remembers that the studio "essentially wanted a low-budget horror franchise"; in response, Jacks recruited horror filmmaker/writer Clive Barker on-board to direct. Barker's vision for the film was violent, with the story revolving around the head of a contemporary art museum who turns out to be a cultist trying to reanimate mummies. Jacks recalls that Barker's take was "dark, sexual and filled with mysticism", and that, "it would have been a great low-budget movie". After several meetings, Barker and Universal lost interest and parted company. Filmmaker George A. Romero was brought in with a vision of a zombie-style horror movie similar to Night of the Living Dead, but this was considered too scary by Jacks and the studio, who wanted a more accessible picture.
Joe Dante was the next choice, increasing the budget for his idea of Daniel Day-Lewis as a brooding Mummy. This version (co-written by John Sayles) was set in contemporary times and focused on reincarnation with elements of a love story. It came close to being made with some elements, like the flesh-eating scarabs, making it to the final product. However, at that point, the studio wanted a film with a budget of $15 million and rejected Dante's version. Soon after, Mick Garris was attached to direct but eventually left the project, and Wes Craven was offered the film but turned it down. Then, Stephen Sommers called Jacks in 1997 with his vision of The Mummy "as a kind of Indiana Jones or Jason and the Argonauts with the mummy as the creature giving the hero a hard time". Sommers had seen the original film when he was eight, and wanted to recreate the things he liked about it on a bigger scale. He had wanted to make a Mummy film since 1993, but other writers or directors were always attached. Finally, Sommers received his window of opportunity and pitched his idea to Universal with an 18-page treatment. At the time, Universal's management had changed in response to the box office failure of Babe: Pig in the City, and the loss led the studio to want to revisit its successful franchises from the 1930s. Universal liked this idea so much that they approved the concept and increased the budget from $15 million to $80 million.
Filming began in Marrakech, Morocco on May 4, 1998 and lasted 17 weeks. Photography then moved to the Sahara desert outside the small town of Erfoud, and then to the United Kingdom before completion of shooting on August 29, 1998. The crew could not shoot in Egypt because of the unstable political conditions. 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. Sandstorms were daily inconveniences. Snakes, spiders and scorpions were a major problem, with many crew members having to be airlifted out after being bitten.
Brendan Fraser nearly died during a scene where his character is hanged. Weisz remembered, "He [Fraser] stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated." The production had the official support of the Moroccan army, and the cast members had kidnapping insurance taken out on them, a fact Sommers disclosed to the cast only after shooting had finished.
Production Designer Allan Cameron found a dormant volcano near Erfoud where the entire set for Hamunaptra could be constructed. Sommers liked the location because, "A city hidden in the crater of an extinct volcano made perfect sense. Out in the middle of the desert you would never see it. You would never think of entering the crater unless you knew what was inside that volcano." A survey of the volcano was conducted so that an accurate model and scale models of the columns and statues could be replicated back at Shepperton Studios, where all of the scenes involving the underground passageways of the City of the Dead were shot. These sets took 16 weeks to build, and included fiberglass columns rigged with special effects for the movie's final scenes. Another large set was constructed in the United Kingdom on the dockyard at Chatham which doubled for the Giza Port on the River Nile. 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".
The filmmakers reportedly spent $15 million of the $80 million budget on special effects, provided by Industrial Light & Magic; the producers wanted a new look for the Mummy so that they would avoid comparisons to past movies. John Andrew Berton, Jr., Industrial Light & Magic's Visual Effects Supervisor on The Mummy, started developing the look three months before filming started. He said that he wanted the Mummy "to be mean, tough, nasty, something that had never been seen by audiences before". Berton used motion capture in order to achieve "a menacing and very realistic Mummy". Specific photography was conducted on actor Arnold Vosloo so that the special effects crew could see exactly how he moved and replicate it.
To create the Mummy, Berton used a combination of live action and computer graphics. Then, he matched the digital prosthetic make-up pieces on Vosloo's face during filming. Berton said, "When you see his film image, that's him. When he turns his head and half of his face is missing and you can see right through on to his teeth, that's really his face. And that's why it was so hard to do." Vosloo described the filming as a "whole new thing" for him; "They had to put these little red tracking lights all over my face so they could map in the special effects. A lot of the time I was walking around the set looking like a Christmas tree." Make-Up Effects Supervisor Nick Dudman produced the physical creature effects in the film, including three-dimensional make-up and prosthetics. He also designed all of the animatronic effects. While the film made extensive use of computer generated imagery, many scenes, including ones where Rachel Weisz's character is covered with rats and locusts, were real, using live animals.
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Brendan Fraser passed out while filming because the noose around his neck was too tight.
Blixa Bargeld, of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, is credited as having provided the "spirit voices".
With the exception of a loin cloth and a few pieces of jewelry, Patricia Velasquez's costume consists entirely of body paint which took 14 hours to apply.
Ardath Bey, an anagram of Death By Ra, is the name of a sworn protector of mankind from the mummy Imhotep. However, in The Mummy (1932), Ardath Bey is the alter-ego of the mummy Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff) when he attempts to pass for a modern Egyptian.
An Egyptologist was brought in to phonetically render what Ancient Egyptian might have sounded like for the dialogue.
The prison scene was shot entirely at an apartment complex in Marrakech.
The library disaster was done in one take. It would have taken an entire day to re-shoot if a mistake had been made.
John Sayles did an uncredited rewrite.
According to director Stephen Sommers, Universal phoned him the morning after this movie was released and said, "We need another one."
It was originally planned to open the film with the old black and white Universal logo that had been used at the beginning of The Mummy (1932) which would dissolve into the blazing desert sun.
The white nightgown Evelyn wore when the ship was attacked became transparent when it got wet and had to be digitally painted white during post production.
The opening voice-over was originally intended to be read by Imhotep. Director Stephen Sommers later realized that Imhotep wouldn't be able to speak English, and gave the voice-over to Ardath Bey instead.
When King Tutankhamen's tomb was found on November 4, 1922, the person in charge was George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Along with him was his daughter, Lady Evelyn Carnarvon. Rachel Weisz's character is named Evelyn Carnahan. Originally, her character was meant to be Evelyn Carnarvon. She and her brother were to be the children of the "cursed" Lord Carnarvon. The only evidence of this left in the film is in the line where Evelyn tells O'Connell that her father was a "very, very famous explorer". The Mummy novelization goes into a bit more detail on her back story.
This was the first theatrical film to be broadcast on the WB television network.
Omid Djalili's film debut.
Clive Barker, Joe Dante and George A. Romero were each attached to direct at different points.
The white cat seen in Evelyn's apartment is given no name in the film, but in the movie novelisation the cat's name is revealed to be Cleo.
A different take of Ardath Bey's introduction scene on top of the mountain was used later in the film when O'Connell and crew are crossing the desert at night. This time, the lighting was adjusted accordingly.
During the filming of the scene in which hail and fire fall down on Cairo, dried dog food was painted white and used as balls of hail, thrown down on the set.
While filming, John Hannah sprained his wrist and had to wear a brace on it, which shows up during his final scenes.
The building used for the Cairo Museum was an actual government building in Marrakesh.
The locusts shown in the scene at Hamunaptra were mostly computer-generated, but a number of live grasshoppers were used for the shot; the grasshoppers were chilled in a refrigerator to make them more sluggish and easy to film.
The line "think of my children!" given by Beni in the scene aboard the riverboat was ad-libbed by Kevin J. O'Connor.
The scenes showing the Cairo streets were shots of a souk in Marrakesh that was so expansive that the actors and crew were warned not to wander too far from the set or risk getting lost.
The shots of Giza port were shot in England and edited digitally to show the pyramids and Nile.
The scene of the Cairo Prison was shot on the very first day of filming in Marrakesh.
The children shown in the shots of the Bedouin trading outpost, as well as the shots of the Royal Air Force runways were local Marrakesh children.
The scene in which the scarabs come from the sands to chase the explorers was done by using an air compressor on the set that went off to simulate the insects' emerging from the sand.
In the scene on the riverboat, Beni is thrown overboard and into the river by O'Connell; during filming, Kevin J. O'Connor helped Brendan Fraser to appear as though he was throwing him overboard by jumping up.
Brendan Fraser's camel during filming was named Barney.
In one scene, Beni is shown with a sackful of gold which he is trying to load onto a camel, and Beni pulls the camel by the reins but the camel doesn't budge; the camels all, for some reason, hated Kevin J. O'Connor.
Kevin J. O'Connor had been roughed up so much during the filming of the scene with Beni in the Egyptologist's office that he was badly bruised and his nipples had to be iced afterward.
The lever-triggered slowly settling stone megaliths with sand pouring out like water, from which the characters must escape or be entombed alive, are based upon Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1955), where Pharaoh Cheops's tomb is constructed to be sealed in this manner after he is placed within. Historically no such sophisticated engineering technology was ever employed.
The character Ardath Bey was originally scripted to die at the end of the film. This was changed by director Stephen Sommers.
The location shown in the scene where Imhotep and his minions corner the protagonists was an actual entrance to a thirteenth-century graveyard in Marrakesh. In the shots of the graveyard entrance, a manhole cover was used for the surviving protagonists to escape; the manhole was constructed for the film and had a large pad inside so that the actors would land on the pad and not hurt themselves.
During the filming of the scene with scarabs eating his brain, Omid Djalili acted out his character's pain so much that he had ended up tearing his own shorts off.
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