All of this blended together yielded a film that felt timeless yet timely, post-modern yet classical, faithful to adults looking for romance and horror while never alienating kids looking for fun set pieces and silliness. But the charming, fleet, and wholly entertaining picture also blends elements of classic, romance-tinged adventure cinema - Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, The African Queen, early film serials - and contemporary, family-tinged action-adventure cinema - Jumanji, Hook, Men in Black, and Jurassic Park. Most bluntly, it’s a take on Universal Pictures’ The Mummy series of films from the 1930s and ’40s, and a general update of that studio’s classic, Gothic horror films (many of which are adaptations of Gothic horror novels and stories before them).

The Mummy, a Stephen Sommers action-adventure-horror blockbuster from 1999, is an obvious melange of influences. My counter-argument would be that “nothing new under the sun” gives creators freedom - if everything’s already been done, why not have fun doing it?

It’s easy to see how this phrase could be distressingly applied to the Hollywood machine, full of reboots and sequels and bald-faced pastiches. There is nothing new under the sun - not even that sentiment, which first originated in some old book called The Bible and has since wormed its way into modern vernacular as an efficient way to express a kind of weary cynicism about the repetition of life.

The mummy 1999 watch