THE MUMMY No, the sarcophagus is not a metaphor for the current state of original ideas in Hollywood. Why do you ask?
There’s a lot riding on the Tom Cruise-starring reboot of The Mummy. It’s the inaugural film in the “Dark Universe” series, a sprawling, Marvel-style movie franchise intended to interweave all of the classic Universal monsters from the ’30s and ’40s into a sparkling, CGI-enhanced mega-narrative. Fortunately, this first installment doesn’t rely on too many dangling threads for future films—although there are a few—and seems content to omnivorously devour and digest films from the past, resulting in a tonally baffling pastiche that has a few moments of occasional fun.