The Mummy is still my favorite Star Wars film

I’ll never forget watching the Phantom Menace for the first time. The lead up to that movie is hard to explain to people who didn’t live through it, especially if you were the right age to take it all in, and I was 14. Star Wars was everywhere. And the whole decade of the 90s felt like it had been building to this movie. In 1991 Timothy Zahn proved that Star Wars still mattered with the first Thrawn trilogy, and from then to the summer of 99 there were comics, video games, lots more books and the rerelease of the controversial special editions. I drank as much of it in as I could, Star Wars felt like the biggest, coolest thing ever.

But I avoided watching the new movie for weeks. Nerds were camped out and the lines were long. I didn’t push my parents to take me, I knew I would see it when the time was right. And one night while visiting family friends in Portland it happened. They decided to treat us to a movie as a surprise. I thought this is perfect, this was the way it was meant to be.

I was so excited. The big STAR WARS comes up with John Williams booming music…but then as the crawl starts to go by I knew something was off. It was weird. Trade routes and politics? For everything that felt right, there was something that felt wrong. And the experience of watching it was experientially overwhelming. There had been CG before that of course but not to that degree. I remember feeling like the effects were actually hard to take in, especially because a lot of the non CG effects were remarkably well crafted. It left me with a sense of unreality, which is probably what Ray Harryhausen used to mean by the “nightmare quality” he was always going for when you know something is fake but because its being presented so forcefully you must accept that its real. That was what King Kong was like in 1933. And there was part of me that liked that feeling, but ultimately it wasn’t a sense of wonder, it was a sense of vacuity, or hollowness. I can still remember the sense of wonder I felt watching King Kong for the first time sitting on the carpet in my Aunt Barb’s living room. It was in color, not black and white, and I just got swept up in it. That tiny TV image and effects that were over half a century old still worked. But Phantom Menace didn’t. Something was wrong.

We left the theatre end they asked me if I liked it. And I genuinely didn’t know. I think it was the first time that had happened to me. I knew I wanted to like it, but I also knew deep down inside that it simply didn’t work. The film was bloated, kinda boring and unsatisfying. I’ve never hated the film like so many geeks of my generation, but I definitely think it’s a cautionary tale for filmmakers with no accountability. If George had just hired Lawrence Kasdan or someone like Jeffrey Boam (who apparently actually wanted to rewrite them) to do either write the scripts outright or rewrite them my guess is those films would’ve been significantly better.

But thankfully the summer was not ruined by the Phantom Menace. 1999 is probably the best year in film history, so so many good movies. The Matrix and Fight Club being two of the of most notable, but I was too young to see or really appreciate eitehr of those films at the time. No the movie that still defines 1999 to me is The Mummy written and directed by the campy Stephen Sommers. And because of the kind of film it is, a classic pulp adventure that harkens back to old Hollywood, it filled in the gap that Phantom Menace had left.

The Mummy is basically universal monsters meets Indiana Jones. Ultimately its netiher, maybe best described as a poor man’s Indiana Jones. But I didn’t feel that way at the time. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I could tell it wasn’t necessarily a great movie, I knew it was corny and silly in a way that actual Indiana Jones movies were not but I just loved every piece of it. Especially Rachel Weisz, I absolutely fell in love with her. I still think Evie is one of the great screen heroines. She’s beautiful yes, but she’s incredibly intelligent and brave as well. Unlike Princess Leia she is definitely a damsel in distress much of the time but she never feels objectified. Earnest and naive but still courageous. She contributes and drives much of the narrative. In some ways Brendan Fraser’s O’Connell is her sidekick.

The Mummy scratched my Star Wars itch that summer and really gave me the Lucas/Speilberg film that I was looking for in The Phantom Meance. It was there for me when I needed a pulp adventure movie to remind me what I loved about movies, what I loved about the movies of Lucas and Spielberg in particular. And honestly even from a technical perspective I still think it outshines Phantom Menace today. It looks fantastic. The future of cinema seems to be more CG, more AI and less realism. But the Mummy is mostly shot on location and the excellent effects work compliments real things. Even when you know something has to be CG in a shot much of the time your eyes can’t really tell. Especially all the Imhotep effects. Groudning your effects in real things like minatures and locations and building with CG as a tool on top of that is the best way. It’s the way that Cameron and Spielberg pioneered with T2 and Jurassic Park. Really its still the Ray Harryhausen playbook. Do what you can in camera then add what you can’t later. The zenith of this kind of filmmaking is probably still Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Mummy was a much more important film in that trajectory than many realize. The magnificent opening shot of the Mummy is a perfect example. It’s a continuous camera move but multiple techniques are used and it still feels virtually seamless. CG, miniatures, blue screen and it all flows together beautifully.

I’ll never forget watching it with my Dad at Ever Gotesco, a Mall in Manila that was near our house. My dad had introduced me to Star Wars and Indiana Jones around the age of 6. And I know neither of us expected much from The Mummy. I don’t remember if he liked it all that much. But I loved it so much as soon as it was out on VHS I got a copy and watched it endlessly. I can still see that plastic clamshell case. No idea where that tape went, I probably got rid of it when we got the dvd version a few years later. Wish I would’ve kept it.

Sadly I fell out of love with The Mummy as my film taste became more pretentious. It didn’t help that all my friends loved the Matrix and thought the Mummy was stupid. But I always return to it eventually. As my love for classic cinema and old monster and horror movies grew I found myself reappreciating this wonderful popcorn movie. And as much as I love Star Wars and Indiana Jones (probably my favorite film series of all time, I genuinely like every entry even the one I’m most critical of: Temple of Doom) none of those films are in my official top ten, but the Mummy is. It’s just so much fun, and that’s really what Star Wars was about. Fun and the joy of storytelling.