Wow. The first trailer for the reboot of The Mummy just aired during Sunday Night Football and it looked horrible.
The Mummy is one of the original Universal Studios monsters. The first film was released in 1932 and starred horror legend Boris Karloff in the role of Imhotep. The film centers around Imhotep stalking a woman who he believes to be a reincarnation of his lover. A remake was released in 1999 with a similar plot as the original. The remake was followed with two sequels of its own and a spinoff franchise with The Scorpion King.
After seeing the trailer for this newest reboot, the only question is “why?” As per usual with action movies these days, there’s a bunch of poor CGI effects and seemingly an entire city at stake. This film doesn’t appear to do anything that the previous series did well. It felt like an actual adventure and referred to a lot of history and mythology. This new film doesn’t look like it’s going to do any of that. The trailer looks like it’s going to substitute storytelling for nausea inducing action.
While the trailer truly looked cringeworthy, all hope is not lost just yet. It’s still extremely early in the promotional cycle and hopefully the next trailer will focus a little more on characters than nonstop action. One positive note is that the female mummy of the film actually looks pretty good. While the villain of these films has predominantly been male, it’ll be interesting to see if they do anything different with this incarnation.
The Mummy stars Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, and Russell Crowe with Sofia Boutella as the titular mummy, Ahmanet. The film is set for release on June 9th, 2017. Check out the first trailer and comment below.
