The sands will rise. The heavens will part. The power will be unleashed.
The Mummy movie storyline. An English librarian called Evelyn Carnahan becomes interested in starting an archaeological dig at the ancient city of Hamunaptra. She gains the help of Rick O’Connell, after saving him from his death.
What Evelyn, her brother Jonathan and Rick are unaware of is that another group of explorers are interested in the same dig. Unfortunately for everyone, this group ends up unleashing a curse which been laid on the dead High Priest Imhotep. Now ‘The Mummy’ is awake and it’s going to take a lot more than guns to send him back to where he came from.
The Mummy is a 1999 American action fantasy film written and directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, and Kevin J. O’Connor, with Arnold Vosloo in the titular role as the reanimated mummy.
It is a loose remake of the 1932 film The Mummy, which starred Boris Karloff in the titular role. The film follows adventurer Rick O’Connell, who travels to Hamunaptra, the city of the dead, with an archaelogist and her brother. There they accidentally awaken Imhotep, a high priest from the reign of the pharaoh Seti I, who has been cursed for eternity.
Filming began in Marrakech, Morocco, on May 4, 1998, and lasted seventeen weeks; the crew had to endure dehydration, sandstorms, and snakes while filming in the Sahara. The visual effects were provided by Industrial Light & Magic, who blended film and computer-generated imagery to create the titular Mummy. Jerry Goldsmith provided the orchestral score.
The Mummy opened on May 7, 1999, and grossed $43 million in 3,210 theaters during its opening weekend in the United States; a surprise hit, the film went on to gross $416 million worldwide. The box-office success led to a 2001 sequel, The Mummy Returns, as well as The Mummy: The Animated Series, and the prequel/spin-off film The Scorpion King. Seven years later, the third installment, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, opened on August 1, 2008. Universal Pictures also opened a roller coaster, Revenge of the Mummy, in 2004. Novelizations of the film and its sequels were written by Max Allan Collins.
Filming began in Marrakech, Morocco on May 4, 1998 and lasted 17 weeks. Photography then moved to the Sahara desert outside the small town of Erfoud, and then to the United Kingdom before completion of shooting on August 29, 1998. The crew could not shoot in Egypt because of the unstable political conditions. To avoid dehydration in the scorching heat of the Sahara, the production’s medical team created a drink that the cast and crew had to consume every two hours. Sandstorms were daily inconveniences. Snakes, spiders and scorpions were a major problem, with many crew members having to be airlifted out after being bitten.
Brendan Fraser nearly died during a scene where his character is hanged. Weisz remembered, “He [Brendan Fraser] stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated.” The production had the official support of the Moroccan army, and the cast members had kidnapping insurance taken out on them, a fact Sommers disclosed to the cast only after shooting had finished.
Production Designer Allan Cameron found a dormant volcano near Erfoud where the entire set for Hamunaptra could be constructed. Sommers liked the location because, “A city hidden in the crater of an extinct volcano made perfect sense. Out in the middle of the desert you would never see it. You would never think of entering the crater unless you knew what was inside that volcano.”
A survey of the volcano was conducted so that an accurate model and scale models of the columns and statues could be replicated back at Shepperton Studios, where all of the scenes involving the underground passageways of the City of the Dead were shot. These sets took 16 weeks to build, and included fiberglass columns rigged with special effects for the movie’s final scenes.
Another large set was constructed in the United Kingdom on the dockyard at Chatham which doubled for the Giza Port on the River Nile. This set was 600 feet m) in length and featured “a steam train, an Ajax traction engine, three cranes, an open two-horse carriage, four horse-drawn carts, five dressing horses and grooms, nine pack donkeys and mules, as well as market stalls, Arab-clad vendors and room for 300 costumed extras”.
The Mummy (1999)
Directed by: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Jonathan Hyde, Kevin J. O’Connor, Oded Fehr, Stephen Dunham, Corey Johnson, Patricia Velasquez
Screenplay by: Stephen Sommers
Production Design by: Allan Cameron
Cinematography by: Adrian Biddle
Film Editing by: Bob Ducsay
Costume Design by: Allan Cameron
Set Decoration by: Peter Howitt
Art Direction by: Giles Masters, Tony Reading, Cliff Robinson, Peter Russell
Music by: Jerry Goldsmith
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for pervasive adventure violence and some partial nudity.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: May 7, 1999
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