Two Slashes

I’m not normally one for movie reviews, but I’m bored enough that just about anything is fair game for the moment.  And I need to stop with the multi-meaning post titles, I think.

During the course of this weekend, it came to be that I was stuck in a movie theater, once again (involuntarily) subjecting myself to overpriced/underperforming excuses for Hollywood creativity.  This weekend, the excuse was called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and for starters, this is probably one franchise they could have gone in a completely different direction with.

The writing is probably the biggest issue this movie has going for it.  Not only is it a rehash of everything already seen (with a backdrop in China this time), but they’ve taken anything that might have made the characters interesting and spun it into their most annoying attributes, with some off-brand sci-fi added in for kicks.  This combination means that not only is there absolutely nothing that holds your attention for long, you can see the clear transitions where action X happened in one or both of the previous movies.  The movie additionally suffers from some emotional compass issues that for all the world look like someone put a magnet next to the compass about halfway through the writing process, making the end result look inhuman enough to ruin the experience.

The special effects weren’t the worst, and took a bit of work (that much is apparent), but the storyline is too much of a black hole for them to save anything (in my opinion).  Anyone who has seen the movie should get what I mean when I say ‘avalanche,’ for example.

I’m not stopping you from seeing this (Warning: clichéd adjective) monstrosity, but I’m extremely curious how something with such poor reviews (more about my interpretations of them in a moment) managed to barely succomb to The Dark Knight, especially considering the showing I went to had no more than twenty-five people in a theater for several hundred.  At the least, you should be prepared for disappointment and a lack of new content, though.

Now, I’m sure someone’s going to call me out for mentioning reviews, since of course the reviewers are not me and probably don’t have the same biases or any of that other related baggage.  However, I’ve generally trusted Rotten Tomatoes (to an extent), with the rule of thumb that anything with an exceedingly low score (to compensate for their experiences) tends to suck as much for me as it did for them, anything with a middling score or above is probably something that will be at least watchable.

While The Mummy is not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, it certainly does nothing to make me want to watch it repeatedly.  Personally, I’ll go back to watching whatever movies the rest of my family has watched to death over Tomb again.

Note to Hollywood:  Care to stop ruining any more watchable movie franchises while you’re ahead?  My movie money may very well end up spent on my college textbooks if you keep this up.  And I promise to quit writing reviews if you follow through.