There’s a new Mummy in town, and there’s a lot riding on her bandaged shoulders.
The latest iteration of the classic Universal movie monster isn’t merely a modern rethinking of the 1932 Boris Karloff chiller, nor, thankfully, is it an attempt to reboot the CG Mummy action trilogy that mercifully gasped its last a decade ago.
“The Mummy” 2017 hopes to do for Universal what comic book properties have done for Disney and Warner Bros., start an interconnected “Dark Universe” of monster films that will include Frankenstein, Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and, probably, Dracula (there’s a second attempt at “Van Helsing” on the proposed slate).
Responsibility for the overall shape of this endeavor rests with Chris Morgan, the writer-producer who serves similar duties for Universal’s lucrative Fast and Furious franchise, and Alex Kurtzman, who also directed “The Mummy.”
It was Kurtzman’s idea to make this particular, undead ancient Egyptian a female (Princess Ahmanet is played by Algerian-French “Kingsman” ass-kicker Sofia Boutella), set events in contemporary times (Ahmanet was so bad the Egyptians buried her in far away Mesopotamia, and her sarcophagus is uncovered during an Iraq War firefight) and to get no less than Tom Cruise (Kurtzman was a writer on “Mission: Impossible III”) to star as the film’s roguish tomb raider Nick Morton.
For all “The Mummy’s” new wrinkles, though, Kurtzman hopes the one element that defines the Dark Universe will be its reverence for all the artful horrors Universal’s directors got onscreen in the early Sound Era.
“I grew up absolutely loving the Universal monsters,” Kurtzman, 43, reveals. “For me, what defines them is that you fear the monsters and you fear for them. Because of that, it’s a genre really separate unto itself. It’s not like regular horror, it’s not slasher, it’s its own thing. I felt that in order to protect and preserve that, I wanted to pay tribute to the Karloff film that inspired me so much. There are some very direct references that we make to that film; those shots of Karloff’s eyes that were so prominent in that film, I essentially stole them for this movie. There’s a love triangle and a dagger that feature very prominently in the 1932 film; we hooked all of that into our story.”
That’s not all. As it turns out, Morton isn’t the only one seeking Ahmanet. Archaeologist Jenny Halsey (British actress Annabelle Wallis from TV’s “Peaky Blinders” and, um, the horror movie “Annabelle”) works for a secret organization that tracks monsters called Prodigium. It’s headed by one Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who has his own issues with the good and dark side of human nature.
Jekyll also has a London lab/monster prison that, though state-of-the-art, resembles the gothic workspace where Dr. Frankenstein brought his creations back to life.
“It’s no accident that Jekyll says ‘Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters,’ which is obviously the line from ‘Bride of Frankenstein,’ ” Kurtzman says, referencing James Whale’s 1935 sequel that is widely considered the greatest Universal horror film of them all and which is the next Dark Universe remake, with “Beauty and the Beast’s” (and Whale biopic “Gods and Monsters’”) Bill Condon set to direct and Javier Bardem tapped to play the Monster.
“The set design of those films is extraordinary,” adds Kurtzman. “Massive, massive sets that, obviously, did not have the benefit of CGI back in the day. I really wanted to build sets that echoed both the look of those original sets and also their lighting, which was very influenced by German Expressionism.”
Which is not to say that the new “Mummy” skimps on up-to-date spectacle, both of the digital kind and that Cruise specialty, ridiculously demanding, never-before-done stuntwork. “Mummy’s” breakthrough practical tableau comes when the cargo plane carrying Ahmanet crashes over England. Rather than the usual wires-on-an-empty-greenscreen-stage approach, a C130 interior made of rubber and foam was built on a gimbal at Shepperton Studios, and the cast and crew went up in an Airbus A310 that did parabolas over France to achieve shots of true zero gravity.
“In that parabolic arc, which we did 64 times, we were weightless for 30 seconds each,” Wallis, who following the Cruise example did all of her own “Mummy” stunts, explains. “It was incredible but very taxing on the body. That plane is famously called the Vomit Comet.”
So, um, did she? We had to ask.
“There were crew members getting quite ill around us,” Wallis confirms. “The ego took over for me; the vision of being the actress who got sick all over Tom Cruise gave me a Zen-like sense of stomach control.”
Some pretty sickening makeup applications notwithstanding, Boutella was thrilled to embody a female mummy.
“I was just finishing shooting ‘Star Trek Beyond’ when I got this script and read it,” says the actress, who got to know Kurtzman via that franchise, one of the many he’s been associated with over the years. “Then I met with Alex and he offered the role to me. Couldn’t have been easier! But there was a process, talking about the character and my career, how would we go about telling that story.
“The makeup was quite challenging,” Boutella adds. “It started taking six hours to apply, we trimmed it down to four hours, but it was still a process. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, though, because that was the only way I’d become the Mummy. I didn’t feel like her until I had the makeup on, so it was necessary in the end because it was really cool to play a woman monster.”
In what can accurately be described as the Wonder Woman Movie Summer, that take makes “The Mummy” seem even more up-to-date.
“Making the Mummy a woman was, for me, the reason to make the film,” says Kurtzman, who has previously served in writing and/or producing capacities on the likes of “Xena: Warrior Princess” and “Alias,” and is producing the upcoming, female-centric “Star Trek: Discovery” television series. “That made it topical and relevant. I remember seeing ‘La Femme Nikita’ as a kid and thinking, how come people aren’t doing this more? It only took something like 30 years for Hollywood to catch up, and I’m really happy about it.”
Although “The Mummy” is only his second feature-directing effort — the first was the modest, 2012 family dramedy “People Like Us” — Kurtzman tried not to let the logistics of the production get to him. As for launching a series meant to rival Marvel’s or the Justice League, well …
“Obviously, there’s a pressure related to it,” he admits. “With anything that is biting off as much as the Dark Universe is, there’s pressure. But it’s not really something I can control. The only thing I can do is focus on making the best movie I know how to make and hope the audience will find it.
“My compass for that is love for the monsters,” Kurtzman concludes. “Whenever I feel or have felt that pressure, all I think of is what it was like to watch Karloff open his eyes for the first time, and how exciting and scary that was. Hopefully, I will succeed in bringing that feeling to a new generation.”
