YMMV / The Mummy (2017)

• Adaptation Displacement: Many people are unaware that this is actually the third remake of Universal's 1932 horror classic and assume it's a remake of the 1999 film. Hammer's 1959 version is even less likely to be remembered.
• Awesome Music:
  • The remix of "Paint it Black" used in the second trailer is given an Egyptian flavour. And it sounds absolutely amazing.
  • The score provided by Brian Tyler and performed by a full orchestra is pretty fantastic too. Standouts include "The Mummy", "Nick's Theme", "Between Life and Death" and "Destiny". Note that Tyler worked on the score for a year and a half, and the album has a longer playtime than the movie itself.
• Base-Breaking Character: Some fans find Nick unsympathetic, claiming that he seems to be trying to act like the hero of a blockbuster and the girl who dies first in a horror movie, at the same time. Others enjoy his snark and sense of humor, and appreciate the fact that he has flaws.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The whole subplot about Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde does nothing to advance the plot and ultimately goes absolutely nowhere. If they'd just left it out, nothing would've been lost at all. It's not even really necessary to introduce Nick to the hidden monster world, because by the point Jekyll Turns Red, Nick has already passed several very distinctive monster relics and has had a clingy Person of Mass Destruction hot on his heels for at least a couple hours, and he's damn well aware of all of it. This has been pointed out as one of the more obvious cases of the movie being assembled to start a franchise first and foremost rather than just tell its own story like its forebears Iron Man 2 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
• Broken Base: It's a remake of one of the most iconic Universal Monsters, of course there's going to be discourse. Whether or not the movie should be set in present day, whether or not they should create an entirely new character that replaces cult icon Imhotep, and if a female mummy is a needless Gender Flip or an interesting new take on the character.
• Complete Monster: Ahmanet, once trained to succeed her father on the throne of Egypt, made a dark pact with the god Set after the birth of her baby brother to bring darkness throughout the world. Murdering her father, stepmother, and baby brother, Ahmanet was mummified alive before Set could manifest. Freed millennia later, Ahmanet drains the life of innocent people to replenish her strength and attempts to manifest Set through hero Nick Morton. Later captured by the organization called The Prodigium, Ahmanet escapes by massacring the personnel and creates widespread chaos and death throughout London. Setting her eyes on Nick, Ahmanet spitefully murders Nick's Love Interest Jenny and attempts to convince him to accept Set so she may rule over the world as a queen.
• Designated Hero: Nick is, at best, a thief and opportunist who risked the lives of soldiers and civilians in time of war. At worst, he's a near-perfect Expy of Dennis Reynolds, right down to the womanizing, cowardice, and selfishness.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Nick and Ahmanet proved to be a popular pairing with viewers due to Ahmanet's popularity as a character, their actors having some actual chemistry, Ahmanet's attraction to Nick seemingly being genuine despite it being entirely one-sided, and the romance between Nick and his canon Love Interest Jenny being underdeveloped. Many commenters on YouTube clips of the film expressed disappointment that Nick ended up choosing Jenny over Ahmanet or wishing that she had lived so that she could get together with him.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the movie was beaten to a pulp by Wonder Woman's second weekend in the U.S., it set the record for the biggest single-day opening for a movie in South Korea by a significant margin. South Korean box office receipts on previous Tom Cruise vehicles indicate that many people in the country are huge fans of the actor. The film's worldwide opening week-end was also the biggest for the actor. Overall, the international gross is more than four times the domestic total ($327 million to $80 m).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • According to director Alex Kurtzman, he chose to go with a female mummy this time around because he didn't want audiences to mistake the character's design for En Sabah Nur, in part because the character's design was similar to what they had planned at one point and in part because they wanted to make sure the character didn't look like a supervillain. As soon as the trailer dropped, audiences started to claim that she looked like the Enchantress, another supervillain with a similar design.
  • Set is also the Greater-Scope Villain of the video game The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian, set within the universe of The Mummy Trilogy.
• Ho Yay: Between Nick and Vail. The two bicker like they've been married for years, Nick doesn't bother covering up when he sees Vail on waking up naked in the morgue, he brings Vail back and hangs out with him post-possession despite deeming Jenny at too great a risk...
• Inferred Holocaust: Half of downtown London getting devastated by a magical sandstorm can't have been healthy for the millions of people living and working there. And that's not even getting into the fact that said sandstorm consisted of pulverized buildings (mostly their windows as glass is sand), most of them pretty tall, and probably all of them packed with civilians. As usual for such a movie, matters like these aren't touched upon at all.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Due to Princess Ahmanet's appearance after she is brought back to life, many joke that Enchantress has got her own solo movie.
  • Because Tom Cruise is the male lead, "SHOW ME THE MUMMY."
  • The first trailer was accidentally released with key sounds and music missing for most of the first half. As such, it's very exploitable, from adding inappropriate music to using Tom Cruise's screams in other videos.
• Narm:
  • The close up of Ahmanet's feet and hands while she walks through the desert in one of Nick's visions, which highlights her extravagant body paint, can easily draw giggles from the crowd for Fashion-Victim Villain reasons. It makes it look like she got a bit overzealous with the nail polish and just dipped her entire toes and fingers into it.
  • Crowe's mockney accent in Hyde-mode is utterly, utterly farcical; less terrifying and more like Crowe is expecting to audition for a role in Eastenders when he's done shooting.
  • Similarly, it's a bit hard to take Hyde seriously when the only visual distinction between him and Jekyll is that Hyde has yellow eyes. That's it.
  • Nick gaining mummy wrappings on his hands for no reason whatsoever after stabbing himself with the ceremonial dagger other than to drive the point home that "Get it? He's the mummy now!" The wrappings also seem to have finger-bone features, making them look rather like a kid's toy.
• Narm Charm: Tom Cruise's scream during the plane crash sequence in the trailer is delightfully over-the-top, reminiscent of his many death yelps in Edge of Tomorrow.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: There was a surprisingly good tie-in game titled The Mummy Demastered, which was a retro-style Metroidvania.
• Older Than They Think: Certainly not the first time there's been a female Mummy. Like, by over a CENTURY. Most notably, there's The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker, which has been adapted to film a number of times, once by Hammer Productions (as Blood from the Mummy's Tomb).
• One-Scene Wonder: Despite his non-existent plot relevance, Dr. Jekyll's transformation into Mr. Hyde for about three minutes is still well remembered by many due to Russell Crowe's Laughably Evil performance, some considering it to be more compelling than the rest of the movie.
• Rooting for the Empire: Due to a combination of sexiness, being played by fan-favorite Sofia Boutella, her sympathetic backstory, and Tom Cruise's unpopularity with certain members of the audience (partially due to his "views"), to say nothing of how Unintentionally Unsympathetic Nick is, many have found themselves rooting for Ahmanet to retake the world. Some were actually heard in theaters wanting Nick to choose Ahmanet over Jenny.
• Signature Scene: The trailers love showing off the moment where Ahmanet's eyes slowly turn into double irises.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • As an urban fantasy horror story about a secret London-based organization devoted to fighting supernatural evil, it's probably the closest we'll get to a film adaptation of The Secret World.
  • The movie ends with Nick taking all the powers of Set into himself, with his human side questionably in charge, turning it into something akin to Devilman.
• Squick:
  • Several reviewers were turned off by the fact that Tom Cruise (Nick) is old enough to be the father of Annabelle Wallis (Jennifer); they were 55 and 33 respectively at the time of the film's release.
  • There's also the subplot about Ahmanet basically wanting to jump Nick's bones to seal her deal with Set; while Sofia Boutella is a touch older than female co-star Wallis, Cruise still has twenty years on her.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: One of the main complaints about Ahmanet is that her powers not only are taken directly from Imhotep, but also are represented visually in exactly the same way, including the latter's signature face-shaped sandstorm. While there is admittedly not much room for originality in giving a mummy character superpowers, many people would have liked the producers to do something different this time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A common complaint about the film is the relative lack of Ahmanet, the titular Mummy, whom many viewers considered a far more engaging character whose presence led to things that were interesting, as opposed to the divisive Nick Morton and his exposition scenes, and were disappointed when she was killed off (at least temporarily) so Nick could be a major character in upcoming movies.
  • Many feel Ahmanet would been more suited as the protagonist given her origin story is largely nonsensical and could have been the product of historical revision by those who imprisoned her for eternity, and Nick as the antagonist given he's a greedy selfish tomb robber.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Ironically, despite the fact that a large amount of the film spends time setting up a universe, one of the things it lacks is The Stinger to foreshadow the next movie. As James Rolfe pointed out in a crossover with The Nostalgia Critic, that would've been the perfect time to hint at the Dark Universe's equivalent of The Wolf Man (1941)^note to be fair, it's worth noting that there was already a remake of that movie that came out seven years prior, although it's not part of the Dark Universe because it’s stand alone and at the time, cinematic universes were not as much of a big thing; however, they could've just as easily used the Dark Universe equivalent of Bride of Frankenstein, which was slated to be the next film in the franchise.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Sofia Boutella, who is a commanding presence in every scene she's in, even if Cruise's script meddling hindered her character's development.
• Uncertain Audience: A sort of head-butting issue that impacted this film and the whole Dark Universe. This movie sells itself as a part of the new breed of Shared Universe to make it appeal to the audiences that are eating up the modern superhero movies, but it also features elements that define many series of the horror genre, including the original Universal Horror slate. This has caused a lot of people from both sides watching the same movie to ask, "Why would we want this?", over different things. Given that the model that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe - and the more rushed DC Extended Universe - work was in part made for people who like comics, and aimed to introduce them to a larger audience via positive word of mouth, those universes have very set target audiences. The first entry to kickstart the Dark Universe franchise failed because it couldn't win any specific demographic; fans of the classic horror movies were turned off by how the movie spends most of its runtime on Tom Cruise's character instead of the titular monster, while mainstream audiences weren't won over by the film's connection to rather obscure horror monsters. The MonsterVerse so far as seemingly managed it better, mostly due to Just Here for Godzilla tendencies, but it has been pointed out that the ways Universal and Toho (let alone other horror/monster franchises) made their crossovers work and the way the MCU set up things are actually polar opposites. Making it hard to please both sides and any film in either could suffer if it isn't settled which audience they want to cater more too.
• Unexpected Character: If you haven't really paid attention to any of the promotional materials, the last person you'll expect in a Mummy reboot is Doctor Jekyll (not least because he wasn't even part of the original Universal Monsters lineup).
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Word of God says that Ahmanet was supposed to be seen as tragic and it's clear the movie wants to portray her as such, but given her jump to murdering her family to take the throne and then the jump to bringing out Set to take over the world with him, it's at that point then when she later says: "It was a different time", it just doesn't cut it. Her motivation (at least before she was mummified) doesn't make sense; she's angry at being passed over for the throne, so she makes a deal with Set — then kills her family, which she could have done without any supernatural help. Then she plans to unleash Set into her lover so they can take revenge upon the world. Revenge for what, exactly? The people who supposedly betrayed her are already dead!

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