Headscratchers / The Mummy (2017)

• How did Ahmanet, buried 5,000 years ago, know where the dagger was hidden by Crusaders 900 years ago?
  • Presumedly, she has a connection to it since she may have created it for the ritual. Or it's just one of the magical abilities she gained.
• If Ahmanet wanted to rule as a queen (altrough she had a lover) but being the royal heir princess, why she wishes to be secondary ruling after Set? "I will be your queen" she says to Nick.
  • Because Set is an actual god, not a fellow mortal; Ahmanet was born and raised into worshipping the Egyptian pantheon. So the idea of Seth being above her is natural to her, but her newborn brother is an entirely different matter.
• Why couldn't Jenny drive the ambulance?
  • There wasn't enough time to switch driver while Princess Ahmanet was in front of them.
• Why the harpoons harm Ahmanet?
  • It's implied that the harpoons by Prodigium had mercury, and mercury harms Ahmanet. She was also almost regenerated, and as we see before her escape, in contrast with Imhotep, she has tissue, muscles, blood, veins, organs, and fluids, so the mercury keeps her weakened.
• Why does Ahmanet prefer going barefoot despite being Egyptian royalty and the heir to the kingdom no less?
  • Your question is seriously?
  • We really don't know, but in her introduction she is practicing her combat abilities on sand, so it's practical. Two, Egypt and the desert are warm, and yes, probably she is a barefooter or she feels comfortable without any footwear. And three, she uses visions trying to seduce Nick, and it would not be strange if he had a foot fetish or something similar, despite all, she can read his mind, and learn English by mindreading.
  • Fanservice.
• Why didn't Nick stabbing himself with the dagger cause him to be taken over by Set? Even Princess Ahmanet seemed concerned about him stabbing himself.
  • It seems like it did with the fact that Nick's irises split into two, but he managed to overcome it through Heroic Willpower. IMO pretty weak display of power for the god of storms and evil.
    • Ahmanet did seem to try very hard to get him to give himself to her (and to Seth) willingly. maybe, by stabbing himself (i.e., choosing himself) for his own altruistic reasons, he somehow soiled the ceremony. Also, if I am not mistaken, Nick stabbed himself in the knee instead of through the heart, which is way too symbolic to be meaningless.
    • Nope, it wasn't the knee, but it wasn't his heart either; he stabbed himself right in the craw.
    • Also, Nick managed to crack the stone before stabbing himself with the knife - perhaps that's weakened Set's hold.
• Why did Ahmanet even need Set to murder her family? All she ends up doing is slitting their throats, did she really need to call the "God of Death" and make a deal with him in order to do so? Was she like "Oh darn, I don't have a knife, maybe I should ask Set if he has one."
  • If you're going to commit treason, it's a good idea to have the most feared God in Egyptian Mythology in your corner.
    • A lot of good it did her, huh?
    • The most feared God in Egyptian Mythology would have been Apep/Apophis, while Set (who DID do some extremely douchy things in their mythology) is noted in the myths for defending Ra and his entourage from the Apep/Apophis on a daily basis. However, as Set is most famous for slaying his brother Osiris (and in later myths, trying to defeat his nephew Horus), the slaying-of-family-members fits a nice theme.
    • While Ahmanet did not need Set to kill her family, she needed him to survive (in a way) the attempt. Without Set she would have been tortured and killed, but by becoming his undead servant/priestess/lover she gained a second chance at gaining her throne. And frankly, if she wanted to kill her family, why not to gain from it some very useful powers, wicked makeover, cool-looking knife, immortality and a god's favor as well ?
• Was it absolutely necessary for Ahmanet to kill her half-brother? As his sister she would most presumably become his wife and, being 20+ his senior, the true power behind the throne by sheer experience. She has already been prepared to be a queen after all. By allying herself with Seth and murdering her whole family (in the most obvious way possible) she actually lost everything - her father, the throne, and her soul.
  • 1) There is a possibility that she was already in a committed relationship by the time her brother was born. The guy she first tried to summon Set into was implied to be her lover. 2) Depending on how long her father would have lived, he could have prepared her brother to rule well enough to not need/listen to Ahmanet's guidance. 3) There is also a chance he could have become pharaoh Joffrey B. Mk II which opens so many possible ways for Ahmanet's plans to go wrong. 4) Marrying her brother would only give her an imitation of what she was promised and she would likely need to constantly scheme to remain the second most important person in Egypt. Set, at least, seemed to offer her to be the second most important person in the world+personal benefits. 5) If she succeeded, she would have immediately become queen as opposed to some time later.
  • Technically this is just faulty research. In ancient Egypt at the death of a king there was 24 hours to install a successor in order to maintain cosmic order. A male heir would be the first choice but there are plenty of recorded instances where the would be king is too young and a woman, either a sister or mother, is assigned the role of co-regent to rule in their place until they come of age. It's a good deal for a time, but Ahmenet clearly wanted a long term gig and American audiences aren't generally open enough to concepts of polyamory, let alone ancient practices of marital incest. If she weren't a straight up psycho she WOULD have just married him when he came of age, and maybe just slowly poisoned him and make him sickly, to hold on to the power. But then the rest of her family would pretty much ensure she never keeps the power. Murder it is.
  • All that aside, trying to murder her half-brother when he's still a tiny baby seems awfully impatient of her. Infant mortality rates being what they were, you'd think she could afford to hold off for a couple of years to see if the kid would die of smallpox or malaria or whatever.
  • In Amanet's eyes she was cruelly betrayed by her father and had her future stolen from her by her brother. In all probability she wanted immediate revenge and had no desire to wait and observe the situation. She might have been more careful in her assassination attempt but she got overconfident because of her deal and newfound powers and the rest is history.
• At one point in this movie, we see the Book of the Dead from the 1999 Mummy movie. So...I guess it means I was right all along, and "Dark Universe" is simply the name given to the until-now-unnamed multiverse of the Universal Monsters. And if I'm wrong...how can the Book of the Dead be here?
  • I think this is going to be one of the issues where the horror fans and the modern universe fans are going to be at odds. Horror reboots are used to just tossing in things to their older incarnations and play offs to other films as just that. Not clever little bits we want answers too. As a result I don't think too many of those fans are going to want explanations why the book of the dead is there, heck nor any specific explanations why there's also a vampire skull and a gillman hand in there other than the place hunts monsters, the end.
  • And this will continue to play out until Universal figures out which audience are they really trying to attract. Given the way the Universal Horror films originally took themselves and the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe takes themselves are rather different, it really shouldn't be surprising they will be at odds.
  • Minor point, but it's not the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead was black, and had an embossed scarab in the center of the lock. The Book seen in the movie is clearly made of gold, and has an Eye of Ra/Horus engraved in the center of the lock - making it The Book of Amun-Ra.

• More direct question to the YMMV, while I get Vosloo's Imhotep is cool and iconic, but when talking about Universal Horror is it not Kharis who most people think of as the Mummy? The bandaged up classic slow walking mummy? Not Karloff's Im-Ho-Tep or Vosloo's Imhotep? It just seems weird that when talking about the iconic Universal mummy on several bullets, Kharis' name is nowhere.
  • Honestly? Kharis' Mummy isn't that memorable. Karloff's was the first notable mummy, one of the few that actually struck fear into people's hearts. Sure, he was slow, but the threat he possessed of being able to bring back the dead is enough. As for Vosloo, he had the power of the plagues on his side and was unkillable! Kharis' Mummy is just an amalgamation of abilities and motives, so the audience doesn't really know what to be afraid of!
  • At this point it feels like Kharis as a character hasn't stuck to the non-horror consciousness as much as some Universal fans may have liked. Let's also face fact that just like with the comic movies there are whole swashes of people eating them up that haven't kept up with comics since they were teenagers, there are also probably plenty of people talking about movies like the Mummy and haven't actually followed all their movies. I wouldn't be surprised if some people just thought the mummy in the Mummy series has always been Imhotep. The idea that some of us split off Karloff and that there ever was a Kharis may be over a part of the audience's head.

• Story perspective, Why did they decide to make the nain character, (Nick), a soldier? In most adaptations (heck most works) featuring a mummy, the protagonists are usually archeologists, which makes sense since those are the kind of people you'd expect to be searching around tombs. But with Nick the only reason I can think why they made him into a marine is to make him more like an action star, but the MC of the 1999 Mummy film and it's sequels was a pretty badass dude (granted he's more of a treasure hunter), and that's not even getting into some famous archeologists in fiction (Like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft). Plus the fact the dude hunts for treasure anyways, kinda makes him hard to sympathize by description alone. "A Sergeant in the army disobeys orders and possibly abandons his fellow soldiers (some of whom may be under his own command) just so he can track down some treasure for personal profit." with A description like that something tells me that the eriters where intentionally trying to get people to root for Ahmanet.
  • If Nick hadn't been a fairly shady character to start with, the writers would've forfeited the melodrama of making it seem plausible that he might give in to Ahmanet's promises of power and immortality. It's possible they also wanted to play up a parallel with Dracula's origin-story from the previous Dark Universe movie: two "fallen warrior"-types who got saddled with supernatural curses they can barely keep in check.
  • And to be fair, Rick O'Connell in the first movie was actually a soldier in the prologue.
• How many people actually recognized Jenny's last name was a reference to a character in The Mummy's Curse?

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