Thanks to a little of our own continent-hopping adventuring, we’ve learned that the hero and heroine of Alex Kurtzman‘s upcoming reboot of The Mummy will be a soldier and an archaeologist. So far, that’s not too dissimilar to Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz‘s mercenary and librarian combination, which isn’t a bad thing. The soldier will be the only survivor of his unit, losing his comrades in the first action set-piece when The Mummy rises near the start of the film. Again, this harks back to Stephen Somers‘ movie.
Things do start to get more interesting and unpredictable when more details of the female lead come in to play. We’ve been told that she’s going to be an archaeologist who not only sells artefacts to black market dealers in order to fund her research, she then secretly steals them back and donates them to museums. She’s part Raiders-era Indie and a little bit Lara Croft, all topped off with a light dusting of Mika and Pete from the much-missed Warehouse 13 for good measure.
This character has a complex, chewy, fun back story. She won’t just be brainy eye candy, a foil to the soldier boy’s brawn and wisecracking. She even comes pre-packed with her own nemesis; a sleazy billionaire with an axe to grind because she turned down his amorous advances.
Then there’s the Mummy himself, who, this time, is going to be Assyrian. That’s a clear deviation from all the previous movies, and it should give the movie some extra charge and potency. The imagery of an Assyrian mummy versus an American soldier does have a lot of weight behind it and, if this goes wrong, the film could veer off into flag-waving Michael Bay-territory.
But if it’s done right, this has the potential to give the movie a welcome, interesting new twist and fresh resonances.
Our heroes will bump against a special military unit who specialise in powerful mystical artefacts. These characters will be a common thread throughout the ‘Universal monsters’ series, often on the hunt for any given movie’s McGuffin. To my mind at least, this suggests an eventual ‘monster heist’ story line, a raid on their special warehouse.
Also recurring throughout the series will be The Rebel Temple, a secret organization dedicated to battling supernatural danger. They mix their own muscle with hackers and intelligence specialists. Maybe we can compare them to The Rising Tide from Agents of SHIELD, just with more funds and resources, and none of them living in a van. They’re going to be very helpful in taking on the mummy… and in dropping teasing hints and ‘easter egg’ clues of what to expect from future films in the series.
The one thing the franchise is missing is Dracula, at least so far. The Luke Evans movie Dracula Untold was designed and put into production before this shared universe project came together and, for now, it will stand alone. But if that film does turn out to be massively successful, there’s always the possibility that Evans’ vampire could be brought into the present day and plugged straight into the broader continuity.
one.
