#The Mummy Returns Rewatch

[spockvarietyhour]

The Mummy Returns (2001)

[cocopubpotato]

Me: 😐

Me when i remember that one scene in the mummy returns: 🏳️‍🌈?

[somestorythoughts]

Look. I know she's a legit bad guy trying to take over the world and venomous snakes are dangerous no matter what you call them.

But every single time she says "poisonous snakes" my brain goes "wrong."

[ourfinehouse]

The Mummy franchise my beloved

[pespillo]

i rewatched the mummy returns 2001 and it was really fun . raeda au with em investigating titan related ruins and stuff with lilith n boom return of the white man (belos)

also yeah billos ment

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

I know I’ve spoken about my issues with ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ (2023) before, both in my initial thoughts post about the film after it released and a couple of smaller comments since, but I’ve realised something this past week after rewatching the original Disney cartoon and the 2003 non-Disney live-action while sick, and I feel I need to talk about it.

It’s about Wendy Moira Angela Darling.

While I stand by that Ever Anderson was one of the highlights of the film and that she did a great job as Wendy, the Wendy in the film is not really the Wendy seen in Barrie’s book, nor the one in the play and other films adaptations. It’s a very different character in a lot of ways, and while it’s normal for characters to differ from adaption to adaptation - especially over the course of 70+ years - I feel like the Wendy seen in the 2023 is more like Jane, Wendy’s daughter, from Disney’s Return to Neverland sequel in 2002.

Let me preface by saying that I actually love Jane in the sequel as a character - I see a lot of myself in her, and while the sequel in itself is not really my favourite, I do have some nostalgia for it because I grew up with it and it’s a cute little story. I like that Jane is actually different from Wendy in a lot of ways; she’s a lot more headstrong and more of a tomboy, and while she’s also a storyteller at times like her mother (mostly to her brother Danny), she is a lot more practical I think and seems to be opposite to Wendy in that she’s trying to grow up too fast. Wendy believes in Peter Pan and doesn’t want to grow up, meanwhile Jane believes Peter Pan to be silly childish nonsense, that she has to grow up quickly and be more adult due to the war/her father being away - Wendy says to her, “you think you’re very grown up - but you have a great deal to learn”.

Obviously the 2023 Wendy doesn’t want to grow up, that’s still the same, but in terms of personality, temperament and the way she treats her brothers after the broken mirror incident (blaming John for it), she reminds me more of Jane than Wendy. Like Jane, she also doesn’t seem to have a good time going to Neverland (at least not at first?) and she seems to take on a lot more action than Wendy did in the animated film.

Of course, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen Wendy wielding a sword and fighting pirates - the 2003 Wendy was shown to play with wooden swords and use real ones, even remarking, “who are you to call me ‘girlie’?!”. I’m not saying that Wendy can’t be a sword wielding girl and fight because she can, it’s one of the additions I love the most about the 2003 film.

The problem with the 2023 version of Wendy is not her being a main character (she has always been a main character), nor her sword fighting and being generally bad-ass - it’s the erasure of the other qualities that make her Wendy Darling.

One of Wendy’s primary character traits is her mothering nature - she is very motherly to her brothers, and when she hears that the Lost Boys don’t have a mother, she’s aghast and agrees to be their mother. The whole “Peter is father, Wendy is mother” idea is clearly a reference to how kids in the playground will play games like “mummies and daddies” - kids imitating what they see around them. It’s all a big pretend game in Neverland for fun. It’s also undeniable that Wendy pretending to be the Lost Boys’ mother is clearly reflective of her own mother, who she adores and is portrayed as the loveliest lady ever, and how she’s imitating Mrs Darling in a lot of ways during this “game” - singing to them, telling them stories, medicine etc.

Some would argue that Wendy is “forced” into being the “mother” and that while all the boys are off having fun, she’s left playing house, which I understand. But what a lot of modern audiences and filmmakers don’t understand these days is that motherhood is NOT an anti-feminist idea - there seems to be this view that portraying a girl wanting to be a mother or expressing the wish to be married/have children is some old-fashioned misogynistic notion, which is absolutely bizarre to me.

As a feminist myself, I believe that there is no clear cut definition of “womanhood” or what it means to be a strong woman with autonomy. Some women want to have careers and not have children, and that’s fine; some women want to have children, that’s fine; some women want both, and that’s fine. What matters is that it’s the woman who is deciding what she wants.

For me, Wendy has always been this remarkable and extraordinary character to look up to because she chooses to grow up - and for her, that means having her own children to tell her stories to. That’s what she wanted, that’s why she went back to England, and that’s part of her character arc, realising that by growing up she has things to look forward to.

For some reason, when 2023!Wendy thinks “happy thoughts” to make herself fly when being walked off the plank, her vision for the future that she looks forward to involves piloting automobiles that haven’t even been invented yet and then dying alone? Which… I mean, if that’s how someone wants to live then fair enough but that’s not Wendy. That’s not the Wendy Darling I grew up loving.

A lot of my issues with the 2023 version of Wendy do in fact link with other issues of the film in general: the Lost Boys including girls, for example. Like I get wanting to be inclusive, and I 100% wanted to be a Lost Girl growing up, but the Lost Boys are boys for a reason (“girls are much too clever to fall out of their prams”), and when Wendy arrives it’s a huge deal because they’ve never actually lived with girls before, and the only concept of girls they have is their memories of “mother”, which is why Wendy becomes their mother figure - because they literally don’t have any other female figures in their lives to compare her to other than the tiny scraps they remember of their mothers.

There’s also the issue of the thing prompting Wendy not wanting to grow up being changed; in the original, it’s because it’s her last night in the nursery and moving from the nursery - aka the room she has spent her entire life thus far in - to her own room is a HUGE transitional worry that a lot of kids probably go through (usually it’s in the form of moving from toddler beds to big kid beds but still). In the 2023 version, she’s being sent off to boarding school for some reason which doesn’t really make sense to me because the Darling parents a) are so poor they have to have a dog as a nursemaid and b) love their children so much that they would never do that to them. I’m not saying that being shipped off to boarding school ISN’T a worry for a young girl or a huge deal, but it isn’t one that I think necessarily fits with the story.

There’s the fact that Wendy is no longer the storyteller; in most versions, the reason Peter visits the nursery is because he likes her stories. Instead, the reason he comes to the nursery is not because he likes her stories but because he used to live in the house? And instead of bringing her to Neverland to tell stories, he comes to take Wendy away as he apparently heard her saying she didn’t want to grow up? It just doesn’t sit right with me, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

Also, for some reason, Wendy and Peter don’t actually seem to like each other at all in the 2023 version - I’m not saying there should have been romantic hints or whatever, but even just in a friendship way they really don’t seem to care in any way about each other. They just seemed rather indifferent towards each other, and it’s kind of jarring to see.

In some ways, I feel like 2023 Wendy was made a little too bad ass and on the nose super feminist: “this magic belongs to no boy!”, slapping Peter across the face (which was just…??? Why?!?!), constantly criticising Peter/Neverland, having WAY more action and heroic moments than Peter Pan himself… maybe in a different story it could have worked but for this one, it came across forced at times, like they were intentionally trying to show “look! Look how badass she is! She can fight off grown men all by herself! She doesn’t need a boy to help her! She can do everything by herself!”

This is why I feel like the 2003 version of Wendy is the best one (so far): while they modernised her slightly by making her sword fight and express an ambition to write novels about her adventures, she was still a storyteller and motherly figure to the Lost Boys/her brothers. For me as a child, seeing Wendy be the storyteller and her journey of acceptance about having the grow up was really important to me because I could completely relate to it.

Of course, I recognize I’m very biased because this is the one I grew up with (along with the animated Wendy of course) so I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts!

[ihavenoideahowtodream]

I rewatched The mummy returns last night and Jonathan is 100% in love with Ardeth and Ardeth is waiting for Jon to figure it out so they can start dating. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

[quentinfiletmignon]

Couldn't resist. After rewatching The Mummy & The Mummy Returns in the past two weeks I just had to draw this man.

[renmarrr]

While I’m waiting for helluva boss season two, I started to draw villainous characters. I didn’t do it before because I was confused with how exactly should I draw them. But now when I take any cartoony style as a challenge, I tried to return to it. Whole main quartet is done, but for now these two.

Creators were saying that BH is pure evil. I think he has to look accordingly (in some way). I tried to do him more intimidating and a bit disgusting, old skin, mummy-like, etc. I think he should look look so creepy people should fear the very thought of seeing him without clothes. But if he’s still attractive, that’s a win too.

Dr Flug surprised me. I wasn’t expecting his bag sitting on his head so neat and not too weird. Plus I did a mistake. I thought he has a big reason to hide his skin (his gloves are very long), I had an idea of his skin being burnt, but then I rewatched the series and… he was fine there and he’s just hiding his face. Or all of his problems are on his head, so here I too tried to make him less cute than the fandom portrays him. Anyway the bag thing is working, I’m glad.

[coraniaid]

I know that Halloween isn’t really one of the very best Buffy episodes.  (I mean, it’s not even the best Halloween-themed Buffy episode.)  I know that its discussion of gender roles is, at best, kind of questionable; I know that  Buffy’s idea of what a noblewoman would actually do all day is laughably shallow; I know that this is pretty clearly one of the early episodes when the show was mostly being written by men.  I even know that the special effects aren’t that good.  And I definitely know that Angel’s “you’re not like other girls (who by the way I find beneath contempt, so don’t necessarily take that as a compliment)” speech to Buffy at the end is almost certainly meant to be romantic and not the huge red flag it actually is.

But.  Unfortunately I also know that I love this episode.  As a certain recurring vampire would say, it’s just … neat.

A couple of interesting things have been happening over the past few episodes of this rewatch.

One is that the world of the show has been getting bigger, or rather more solid.  We’re starting to see characters outside the Core Four who actually seem to have lives of their own and don’t just vanish back into the void once their episode is over.  Spike and Dru are the big ones, of course (the Master is a fun enough villain but he isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a person you can imagine having a rich inner life), but in Inca Mummy Girl we also met Devon and Oz and Jonathan, all of whom will appear multiple times this season, and this episode introduces Ethan and Larry.

(Purely coincidentally, Larry and Ethan have more in common than just first appearing in this episode. They are both gay men – or at least a heavily queer-coded man, in Ethan’s case – who will recur only a few times before being written out of the show in ways that I’m actually still kind of mad about.  But I’ll save that rant for later in the rewatch, assuming I get far enough.)

One of my biggest criticisms of the first season is how many times the show will introduce a new student (or group of students), insist that they’ve always been there, then completely forget about them forty-five minutes later.  The only genuinely recurring minor character that season was Harmony, and she was only in two episodes and not even mentioned in any of the others. Amy will return later but so far she’s just another example of the show introducing a character, establishing that Willow’s known them for years, then insisting that they don’t exist the next episode.  But that’s starting to change now, even if we’re not quite there yet – the next episode’s Lie To Me will arguably pull a variant of the exact same trick with Billy Fordham – and even if it isn’t something the show ever really grows out of completely.

Speaking of Willow, that’s the other big change that’s been happening, and the one I want to talk about most: Willow’s been slowly becoming more central to the show.  This is another slow process which won’t really finish this season, but the signs are there already.

In the first season of Buffy, I’d argue that there’s a very clear hierarchy in terms of how much attention the show gives the Core Four: Buffy is, of course, the central character, but after that the writers clearly think Giles is more important than Xander who is more important than Willow.  

This shows up in a few ways.  Speaking time is the one that’s easiest to quantify (roughly speaking, over the whole of the first season for every four minutes Willow speaks Xander will speak for five minutes, Giles will speak for seven minutes and Buffy will speak for eleven minutes), but I think this claim is also true if we consider things like how often they get to directly impact the plot or how much attention the show gives to both their relationship to Buffy and their lives outside of Buffy.  (Outside of I Robot, You Jane S1!Willow mostly exists to pine over Xander, to be rescued from danger by Buffy and to provide the sort of high school level exposition that Giles can’t deliver.)

That’s still true to a large extent in early Season 2 – Willow definitely is still pining over Xander, Buffy did go to rescue her in When She Was Bad and Willow still does get to deliver a lot of exposition – but it will stop being true by the time the season is over.  From Season 3 onward, I think it’s very clear that Willow is the most important member of the Scooby Gang after Buffy herself.  (In fact, in Season 6 I think you could argue that they’re almost co-protagonists.  That season is Willow’s story almost as much as it is Buffy’s.)

This post-Season 2 change is reflected in all sorts of ways: Willow’s average speaking time suddenly overtakes both Xander and Giles; she starts having proper arcs of her own (learning magic, dating, coming out as a lesbian); and, of course, she starts to play increasingly active roles in the plot.  And there are signs of all of this happening already, even if we’re not quite there yet. 

Taking speaking time, for example.  In Season 1 Willow had the fourth most speaking time of any of the Core Four in eight episodes, the third most speaking time in three episodes, and the second most speaking time in just one episode (The Pack).  She only had more than 12.5% of total speaking time in two episodes (The Pack again and also I Robot, You Jane), something that Xander managed in three episodes and Giles managed in eleven.  (Buffy has more than 20% speaking time in every episode of the season, as is only proper and correct.)

But although she had fourth most speaking time again in When She Was Bad, Willow did get 13.16% speaking time.  And in Reptile Boy and Halloween she is second in speaking time for two episodes running for the very first time (with 14.29% and 19.61% of all speaking time respectively).

She manages that by becoming much more assertive (that is, because the writers decide to make her more assertive).  She has, by now, mostly accepted that her romantic interest in Xander is doomed.  In Reptile Boy, she gets to dress down both Giles and Angel for their poor treatment of Buffy before leading them to go and help her.  And Halloween, more than any episode prior, really does belong to Willow. 

Willow, as much as anybody else, is responsible for saving the day here.  Not Xander, for all his costume-inspired military training.  Not Buffy, who hides behind Willow when she sees a car and asks her fearfully “what does it want?”.  And not even Giles, who does confront Ethan and  break the spell but who was so busy sitting in the library pretending to enjoy cross-referencing that without Willow he wouldn’t even have known there was anything strange going on that night.

And, of course, Willow seems to be the only one of the people changed by their costumes to retain their memories of their real lives.  Partly this has to be for plot reasons – somebody has to remember who they are if we’re going to figure things out before the final ad break – but I suspect there’s a little more to it than that.

For the most part, Ethan’s spell shows us who the Scooby Gang aren’t.  Buffy isn’t really a helpless delicate princess who’d rather die than fight and who faints at the first sign of danger.  Xander isn’t really a heroic man of action who beats up pirates and rescues damsels in distress.  Giles, we’re told, isn't really the “sniveling, tweed-clad guardian of the Slayer” he’s been pretending to be.

But the increasingly self-confident and self-assured Willow we see at the very end of this episode, as Oz drives by in his van?  The Willow who’s not just smart and knowledgeable but also willing to take charge in a crisis?  The Willow who learns to embrace the idea of wearing different outfits and taking charge of how the world perceives her?  The Willow who had more speaking time this episode than Buffy herself managed last episode?

That isn’t who Willow Rosenberg is yet.  But it’s who she’s going to become.

[finnglas]

top 5 rewatched movies 🍿

oh man. uh. I rewatch a lot of movies. (it's the tism) Let's go!

The Mummy & The Mummy Returns

Beetlejuice

Song of the Sea

A Hard Day's Night

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Honorable mention to Still Breathing and Little Shop of Horrors

[spockvarietyhour]

[a-strange-inkling]

Rewatching the first two Mummy movies and realizing how much Old Haunts Eddie radiates Rick O’Connell energy.. 😭😂

Ahhh!!! Yesss!! It’s one of my favorite movies! Evie and Rick are a major inspiration for Chrissy and Eddie, especially after they’re married in the Mummy Returns ❤️

[lincolnchristie]

I could never be a gravedigger

I can’t go to the fast food joint the one next to the old Blockbuster that is now a mattress store.

You probably won’t be there. I don’t know why you would be. But one time we ate there together.

There’s a place in St. Louis I can never eat. There’s a store in Manhattan I can never shop. There’s a beach in California I can never go.

I can’t rewatch The Mummy. I can’t reread C.S. Lewis. I can’t return to Madrid.

You haunted me in Hawaii. Your ghost sits beside me in the movie theater. Green grapes and Havarti cheese sour in my mouth.

On a Notes app on my phone is a link to a birthday present I will never buy you. There’s a list of questions about Los Angeles that I won’t ask you. There’s an essay of things I never said because even as you stabbed me I chose to choke on the blood and swallow it rather than spit it in your face.

I saw your ex the other day don’t worry, he’s still a piece of shit. He was friendly to me. I imagined playing with his intestines as payment for what he did to you.

I wore your yellow dress to meet my grandmother for lunch she said I looked lovely.

Two days ago I texted your best friend and confessed I’m not brave I care what people think about me and I miss you because you were never scared of a fight you’d know how to tell me how to live with making people hate you.

I never really got good at accepting nobody will come back for me. I never got good at understanding nobody will catch up to me. I can’t get over the echo of my footsteps.

All around me are the empty caskets of my immoderate love that once held people

maybe someday I can delete our emails I will go back to our strip mall I won’t type your name in the search bar

maybe I’ll stop discreetly checking your social media to make sure you’re okay. maybe I’ll stop sending our mutual friend money so she can Venmo you when you need twenty bucks and you won’t know it’s from me. maybe I’ll stop asking your best friend’s husband if you’re going to therapy if you got sober if you stopped cheating.

maybe I’ll plug up the holes in the shape of you I’ll fill in the caskets someday

[furrbbyx]

I have been summoned to answer for my life choices! I am so bad at remembering to do these, @dreamlikedesires

Three ships:

sailor Jupiter x sailor Venus but recently into Mercury x Jupiter

The Forest Spirit and San

All monsters x me 😇😌

First ship was a self ship of me domming draco malfoy with sexual denial. So sorry

Last song b3fore my current fixation was "come clean" by hilary duff. it was an impulse listen.

Currently reading whatever my revolutionary study group is reading this week bc I'm taking a break from romance.

Last film was probably the mummy returns. 1 billonth rewatch

Currently craving ackee and salt fish and bread fruit. Super milky tea, and a steadfast group to watch empires burn down with 🩷🙌🏿

[herefortarlos]

7 Comfort Movies

Wooo! Thank you for the tag @thisbuildinghasfeelings!! It's been a lot of fun seeing people's picks and being reminded of ones that I love and need to rewatch! I'm cheating a little with some of these 💜

The Mummy and The Mummy Returns (I rewatched these multiple times a week as a kid)

The Fast and the Furious Franchise (Tokyo Drift is my favorite!)

Memoirs of a Geisha (Michelle Yeoh I have always loved you)

Ratatouille

Star Wars series (The Originals and the Prequels! I love Mark Hamill and Hayden Christensen)

The Twilight Series (A guilty pleasure, don't look at me 😆)

X-Men (The Original first 3)

I tag @heartstringsduet @lightningboltreader @tailoredshirt @lemonlyman-dotcom @mikibwrites @orchidscript and @kiloskywalker if you want to share your comfort picks!!