There were reports after The Mummy’s flop that it was Cruise and his people (including Christopher McQuarrie, who seems to have replaced Robert Towne as Cruise’s house screenwriter) whose work distended the movie’s shape.
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The Bride of Frankenstein is on the agenda, which means my wee-nerd favorite movie is in for a desecration. The denouement signals that the story of Cruise’s character is ongoing (at least they thought so at the time) and that there will be other characters for the team to face. Hyde and wrecks part of the set - on the way to the Mummy herself, played (very well, not that it matters) by a glowering Sofia Boutella. There are all sorts of sub-villains to be dispatched - in the case of The Mummy, a plot-stopping scene in which Jekyll becomes Mr. Then comes the climax - really, multiple climaxes, because without developing or varying the story, the weight is firmly on spectacle, and one face-off never seems quite enough. Instead, there’s one mini-climax after another, with no one able to get from point A to point B without some inessential intervening calamity and a lot of impersonal, computer-generated effects. It’s more than half an hour into the movie before the premise is even apparent, so there’s barely time for a second act in which the characters show different sides of themselves. The storytelling is so poor that what brought Cruise’s character to his present location - the action that initiates his entire narrative - happened offscreen, when he bedded Jenny Halsey and, while she slept, made off with a map to what proves to be the mummy’s tomb. Jekyll a lengthy flashback to ancient Egypt that seems completely unmotivated (I missed the rationale in any case) and, finally, the entrance of the star, Tom Cruise, giving a wink-and-nudge comic performance as a wily smuggler in Iraq. In the case of The Mummy, no one seemed to know how the story should begin, which meant it has essentially four opening scenes: a prologue involving an ancient holy order of monster killers a modern-day discovery of a tomb under London and the entrance of Dr. What’s obvious, though, is that a universe-building screenwriting team has to keep many balls in the air: multiple protagonists, multiple villains, multiple tangential characters to be spun off, acknowledgements of what came before and teasing hints of what’s to come. Character specialists might be hired to punch up, say, the woman’s part or give the black sidekick some tang. (Joss Whedon, whom you’d think would have had some power after The Avengers, was subjected to frazzling daily challenges.) On most of these projects, there are several sets of screenwriters, one to devise the story beats, another to provide the dialogue, another to add jokes, and another to pull it all together. Directors are hired help and often driven mad by interference from on high. A universe runs by Hamiltonian, not Jeffersonian laws, by which I mean that every meaningful decision emanates from a single executive source instead of individual artists making individual creative choices. It’s Marvel superheroes, DC superheroes, Star Wars Jedi knights.
It was more along the lines of, “We haven’t got a universe and Disney has gobs of them! What properties do we own that we can squeeze billions out of?”Ī universe, if you don’t know, is the mother lode. But I don’t think anyone behind the Dark Universe project began with a love of these characters. Henry Jekyll and one Jenny Halsey (allegedly kin to the pre-Buffy vampire archnemesis, Professor Van Helsing.) It’s a bit like The X-Files. I don’t even hate the idea of a sort of Mission: Impossible monster-hunting team, headed by Dr.
I subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and, per its punning editor, spoke of Horrorwood, Karloffornia. As a wee nerd, I built models of Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, etc. I’d normally be over the moon about this idea. Some background: The Mummy is the first product of something that Universal Pictures has labeled the “ Dark Universe,” which lifts the famous monsters from Universal horror classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy. An autopsy is essential, if not - I warn you - for the squeamish. I hate to kick a movie when it’s down, but the much-maligned The Mummymight end up being the most important movie of the year for all the wrong reasons: a textbook case of what happens when a studio’s drive to build franchises, tentpoles, and universes rearranges a screenplay’s DNA and, with the addition of a major star’s demon semen, produces a mutant more horrifying than anything onscreen.