The Mummy

Long before Stephen Sommers got hold of it, this project passed through several hands. George A. Romero wrote an unstoppable, Terminator-like creature; Clive Barker’s treatment struck the studio as too perverse; Joe Dante pushed the budget up hoping to land Daniel Day-Lewis as Imhotep and lost the job. In 1997 Sommers proposed the opposite of all of it: not a horror picture but an Indiana Jones or Jason and the Argonauts adventure in which the mummy simply gives the hero trouble. He told Universal he would need fifteen million for effects alone, and got the money. That bargain shows up as a creature who revives in four visible stages. Sommers said he did not want a man in bandages, he wanted a real human turned into a corpse and then back again. The practical payoff is a readable gauge: the more complete the villain’s face, the further along the plot has travelled. Sandstorms were routine during the Moroccan desert shoot, and crew members were airlifted out after animal injuries. Brendan Fraser genuinely blacked out filming the hanging, describing an elbow in his ear, a sideways world and gravel in his teeth. Right for a viewer happy with John Hannah carrying the comedy while Fraser plays it straight. Wrong for anyone hunting the slow dread of the 1932 original.