The Mummy

It is a Universe... of DARKNESS.

The DARK UNIVERSE globe appears to be behind and to the left of Universal Earth, at a right angle.

The Mummy was in places quite fun, and in places quite strange. The two overlapped pretty heavily. It was flattest when being a normal action-adventure summer movie.

Also, arachnophobes will not have fun with some scenes.

Blame the Templars. Always a good choice.

Pretty big chunk of the 1999 version of The Mummy from the get-go with the monster hunter’s narration over flashbacks of ancient evildoing causing a living mummy. (And a direct reference at one point. Can it still be called an Easter Egg when it gets a big closeup?)

Also, unexpected bits of An American Werewolf In London (interestingly mentioned in this interview with director Alex Kurtzman), Constantine (in a never-clearly-seen shrivelled monster), Lifeforce (a nearly naked monster wandering around loose in England, kissing the life out of men and them coming back as actually-pretty-creepy zombies) and The Blind Dead series - the return of the Templars was a deeply weird highlight.

Russell Crowe’s super-affable Jekyll (pronounced Jek-il, not Jeek-ul) was good fun. His bruiser Hyde really needed a reason to appear in the film other than establishing he’s there. (Having him show up to fight the Templars rather than having them just conveniently go, perhaps.) And having a part-time monster in charge of the monster hunters does seem like a security issue. In an advisory position, sure, but not making policy...

Before the commentary confirned it I guessed that the British Museum was meant to be used as a location as it would fit better than the Natural History Museum.

Sofia Boutella as the Mummy herself only really gets two of the classic Universal monster sympathetic moments, the reason for super-excessive evil in the backstory and her capture shading into torture. She spends most of her time strutting badass-ly and chasing after Tom Cruise in a rather stalker-y way.

Set is the god of lots of bad things, but not really death.

At no point is anyone scared off by a cat.

Could have done with more standalone-film-ness and less DARK UNIVERSE setup, overall.

And Tom Cruise was in it.

He fairly closely followed the Iron Man arc of starting as a selfish jerk and having a rude awakening. This was, I suspect, not a coincidence. He’ll probably show up a lot in these films, if they happen on the intended scale, this one being largely an origin story for his character as a possible monster-hero-thingy.

With all the setup wedged in, it felt like Iron Man II more than Iron Man itself.

I’d rather have an antihero Frankenstein Monster or heroic Wolf Man, but oh well.

Fingers crossed for Bill Condon’s The Bride Of Frankenstein.