A relic of horny Hollywood: why The Mummy remains a classic ...

At the threshold between life and death sits the ancient Egyptian city of Hamunaptra … and at the threshold of many a millennial adolescence (including mine) sits 1999’s The Mummy, a story about a hot lunk (Brendan Fraser) and a sexy nerd (Rachel Weisz) learning first-hand the consequences of expatriating cultural artefacts.

A turn-of-the-millennium Spielbergian blockbuster with shades of the superhero craze to come, Stephen Sommers’ desert romp remains dizzyingly fun to this day. Both masterfully well-made and refreshingly horny, it is one of the last great examples of a specific mode of multiplex entertainment now all but lost to the sands of time: the mid-budget action-adventure movie.

For an 11-year-old in 1999, blissfully ignorant about the folly of colonialist fantasy, nothing was more important than the adventure movie – your Mummies and Jumanjis and Jurassic Parks and even, dare I say it, your Wild Wild Wests. These films seemed to mirror coming of age; their characters existed on the knife-edge of discovery. Frightening but never harrowing, libidinous but never obscene, these films promised young audiences a world beyond this one, filled with swashbuckling danger and forbidden sensation. (And all this for seven dollars at the Pacific Six Cinemas at the Tuggeranong Hyperdome.)

Universal execs in the early 90s originally sought to update 1932’s seminal The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, as a low-budget horror for the modern era. But the film they ended up greenlighting drew just as much from 60s sword-and-sandal epics and 80s action comedies: one part Cleopatra, two parts Romancing the Stone, with its resurrected antagonist less a lovesick corpse than a bronzed-up Terminator. Sommers handles these tonal shifts flawlessly, from sprawling action set pieces to Busker Keaton-inspired comedy beats to genuinely grisly moments of horror: a particular instance of a scarab beetle crawling under a sidekick’s skin rivals only Hook’s Boo Box in my pantheon of childhood traumas.

To render its hungry scarabs, biblical plagues and walking dead, The Mummy embraced Industrial Light & Magic’s still-developing CGI technology. And while the effects themselves may look hokey by today’s standards, they still stand out for how thoughtfully they’re integrated with the film’s more tactile elements – its gargantuan handbuilt sets, lavish costumes and gooey prosthetics – without ever subsuming them.

A climactic sequence of Fraser’s Rick O’Connell taking on a troupe of CGI mummified guards (a clear nod to Ray Harryhausen’s janky stop-motion skeletons in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, and just as impressive to audiences of its day) remains thrilling not because the effects are “believable” but because of how well the digital objects complement the real-world choreography – as opposed to a lone human actor thrust into a green screen void, forced to fight their way out.

Also key to The Mummy’s enduring legacy is its status as a sacred text of millennial bisexual awakening. From floppy-haired Fraser to smoky-eyed Weisz, from Oded Fehr as a face-tatted desert warrior to an oily-pecced Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep himself (once his skin grows back), every character on screen – regardless of gender or narrative affiliation – exudes sweaty sexual energy. What’s more, there is unfakeable chemistry between the two romantic leads. This may be a film essentially populated by action figures but at least these action figures have genitals under their jodhpurs – as opposed to those in our now-mandatory biannual superhero corporate retreats, where everyone is beautiful but no one is horny.

no one is “born bi,” you watch The Mummy at a formative age and the whole cast turns you bi
— elle 🐉 (@Elle_Enasalin) December 30, 2020

Alas, the Mummyverse would quickly fall victim to the same overindulgence that now defines pop culture; trust a studio exec to ignore their own film’s warning about meddling with the dead. 2001’s The Mummy Returns somehow managed to be both too Spielbergian with its grating child sidekick and too Marvelesque with its soupy third-act CGI. 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor barely bears mentioning, while 2017’s attempted Tom Cruise reboot was so universally loathed that it single-handedly kiboshed the studio’s plans for an MCU-style interconnected Dark Universe.

But as a standalone object of weapons-grade entertainment, 1999’s The Mummy remains an oasis in a desert of faceless tentpole film-making: a relic from a time when Hollywood’s biggest hits could pay homage to their past while still breaking new ground.

The Mummy is available to stream on Binge and Prime Video in Australia and HBO Max in the US. In the UK, it is available to rent. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here