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Jun. 19th, 2009 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaThe rain was interfering with our TV reception last night, so instead of watching The Colbert Report, my sister and I ended up watching her latest Netflix movie, which was The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Of the good: it was almost exactly the cheesy, goofy adventure movie that I was expecting it to be. There were explosions! Chase scenes! Family bonding in the midst of ridiculous chaos! Dramatic revelations that could be predicted at least twenty minutes in advance! One-liners that were sometimes actually funny, in the midst of a sea of rather uninspired but adorably cheesy dialogue!
I also appreciated some things about the setting - the acknowledgment that China had vast accumulated wisdom even that long ago was nice, although I don't know enough about Chinese history to judge whether the look and feel of that fantastic library was right. I was also pleasantly surprised by the use of oracle bones as the source of really old magic; I was expecting just another book, which would have been annoying. (I was a little confused by the Sanskrit - I didn't get a great look, but I didn't think the bones were written on in Sanskrit. Was the implication supposed to be that Zi Yuan translated what was on the bones into Sanskrit to keep the emperor from knowing what she was saying?)
And it was kind of neat that the ancient guardians of the pool, motivated at least partly by revenge, were both women - who had been guarding it for thousands of years, occasionally asked yeti for favors, and fought in occasionally gravity-defying ways that made me think of wuxia movies.
Of the not-so-good: Little things first, I'll save the big rant for later. Some of the dialogue went past cheesy-and-predictable and into terrible, and it wasn't helped by some of the line deliveries. The first quasi-relationship talk between Alex and Lin was especially painful. Yeesh. I think the pacing could have used a little work, too. It was also weird and slightly frustrating that Lin and Zi Yuan were both so easily taken out of commission when the emperor approached the pool; I know that he had to get to it successfully in order for the plot to progress, but there could still have been a ... slightly more dynamic fight sequence than there was.
Wholly expected race issues were wholly expected; there was bound to be something I wouldn't like in a movie that involves white people raising an army of people of color to fight another army of people of color led by a Big Bad of color, and there was. However, my distaste for that aspect of the plot was slightly mollified by the fact that it was Zi Yuan who called up the undead from beneath the Great Wall, and that she did so with plenty of references to their oppression. Their oppression ... by the Big Bad of color, I grant you, but it was still nice that the wrongs done to them didn't get completely ignored in favor of the coolness factor inherent in summoning up an undead army from beneath the Great Wall of China.
And now, the big sticking point. I said aloud during the fight sequence between Zi Yuan and the emperor that I would be pissed if neither Lin nor Zi Yuan killed the emperor, and I was - more so than I was expecting, even. In fact, considering the route that they went with Zi Yuan's death (letting herself be impaled by the emperor's sword, in order that she might get close enough to take the cursed knife away from him, and then living just long enough to hand the knife to Lin before she died), I would have considered the obvious next step to be Lin going after the emperor herself, wanting to exact vengeance for her mother - I was expecting the manly interference to come then, expecting Lin's derangement from grief and anger to make her make a misstep, at which point Alex (or Rick, but the odds were on Alex) would intervene; possibly a vague part of me was hoping that Evie might do it, or that the misstep would never happen at all.
But they didn't even manage to go that far with it. Instead, Lin got left crying over the body of her mother while Rick and Alex went off and defeated the emperor together - and yes, okay, the part where they both stabbed him from opposite sides with the pieces of the knife but only Rick withdrew anything because the pieces had welded together in the emperor's molten internal organs was kind of cool, but COME ON. I get that the franchise is about the O'Connells, but they could have been reasonably central to the ending without so much being taken away from Lin. I realize that Zi Yuan meant a lot to Lin, and that Lin had gone a very long time without even the vague expectation that her mother would die someday, but Lin had been around for a few thousand years, by this point; my guess is that she had already seen a fair number of people die. If the reasoning behind this was that Lin was too incapacitated by grief to do any world-saving ... I'm not sure I buy it.
In conclusion: I would give a lot for some kind of epic Lin backstory fic, because she is awesome (she guards tombs! using fighting moves she was taught by her mother! whom she has a very strong relationship with! also she calls yeti!) and we didn't learn nearly enough about her.
ETA: The Scorpion King is probably my favorite movie in the franchise (well, insofar as it can be considered in the franchise, given that it's a pretty loosely-connected prequel that's practically its own 'verse). I've certainly seen it the most times, although that's at least partly because USA shows it on a relatively frequent basis.
I'm not saying it's some kind of bastion of perfection or anything. It has its own troublesome gender issues; parts of it remind me of the Mars books by Burroughs. Cassandra does do a little fighting with a dagger, and also she throws a snake at Memnon, but that's about it; there are several points where she flails and gasps and doesn't do anything useful, and her costumes can get kind of hilarious at some points.
But Cassandra does a decently written Heel Face Turn; she saves Mathayus's life by risking her own, and then goes on to save a whole lot more lives with her vision at the camp. I'm pretty sure it's almost stated outright that one of the big reasons Memnon has done so well at that whole world-conquering thing is that he has Cassandra helping him, and his troops get edgy in her absence, because they're not sure Memnon can get anywhere without her. She uses the assumption that women who have sex are somehow tainted or wrecked thereby to trick Memnon for years, and the audience for a good twenty minutes, at least. Isis and her warrior women are pretty fucking awesome, and Balthazar - set up initially as the non-Big-Bad adversary who does a Heel Face Turn of his own, and is nearly as strong as Mathayus - cross-dresses.
And, of course, the tyrannical Big Bad is the whitest member of the cast, except maybe for Philos, the kooky inventor, or the jerky little prince who betrays everybody. Suffice it to say that if I had to pick which one of these to watch again, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Of the good: it was almost exactly the cheesy, goofy adventure movie that I was expecting it to be. There were explosions! Chase scenes! Family bonding in the midst of ridiculous chaos! Dramatic revelations that could be predicted at least twenty minutes in advance! One-liners that were sometimes actually funny, in the midst of a sea of rather uninspired but adorably cheesy dialogue!
I also appreciated some things about the setting - the acknowledgment that China had vast accumulated wisdom even that long ago was nice, although I don't know enough about Chinese history to judge whether the look and feel of that fantastic library was right. I was also pleasantly surprised by the use of oracle bones as the source of really old magic; I was expecting just another book, which would have been annoying. (I was a little confused by the Sanskrit - I didn't get a great look, but I didn't think the bones were written on in Sanskrit. Was the implication supposed to be that Zi Yuan translated what was on the bones into Sanskrit to keep the emperor from knowing what she was saying?)
And it was kind of neat that the ancient guardians of the pool, motivated at least partly by revenge, were both women - who had been guarding it for thousands of years, occasionally asked yeti for favors, and fought in occasionally gravity-defying ways that made me think of wuxia movies.
Of the not-so-good: Little things first, I'll save the big rant for later. Some of the dialogue went past cheesy-and-predictable and into terrible, and it wasn't helped by some of the line deliveries. The first quasi-relationship talk between Alex and Lin was especially painful. Yeesh. I think the pacing could have used a little work, too. It was also weird and slightly frustrating that Lin and Zi Yuan were both so easily taken out of commission when the emperor approached the pool; I know that he had to get to it successfully in order for the plot to progress, but there could still have been a ... slightly more dynamic fight sequence than there was.
Wholly expected race issues were wholly expected; there was bound to be something I wouldn't like in a movie that involves white people raising an army of people of color to fight another army of people of color led by a Big Bad of color, and there was. However, my distaste for that aspect of the plot was slightly mollified by the fact that it was Zi Yuan who called up the undead from beneath the Great Wall, and that she did so with plenty of references to their oppression. Their oppression ... by the Big Bad of color, I grant you, but it was still nice that the wrongs done to them didn't get completely ignored in favor of the coolness factor inherent in summoning up an undead army from beneath the Great Wall of China.
And now, the big sticking point. I said aloud during the fight sequence between Zi Yuan and the emperor that I would be pissed if neither Lin nor Zi Yuan killed the emperor, and I was - more so than I was expecting, even. In fact, considering the route that they went with Zi Yuan's death (letting herself be impaled by the emperor's sword, in order that she might get close enough to take the cursed knife away from him, and then living just long enough to hand the knife to Lin before she died), I would have considered the obvious next step to be Lin going after the emperor herself, wanting to exact vengeance for her mother - I was expecting the manly interference to come then, expecting Lin's derangement from grief and anger to make her make a misstep, at which point Alex (or Rick, but the odds were on Alex) would intervene; possibly a vague part of me was hoping that Evie might do it, or that the misstep would never happen at all.
But they didn't even manage to go that far with it. Instead, Lin got left crying over the body of her mother while Rick and Alex went off and defeated the emperor together - and yes, okay, the part where they both stabbed him from opposite sides with the pieces of the knife but only Rick withdrew anything because the pieces had welded together in the emperor's molten internal organs was kind of cool, but COME ON. I get that the franchise is about the O'Connells, but they could have been reasonably central to the ending without so much being taken away from Lin. I realize that Zi Yuan meant a lot to Lin, and that Lin had gone a very long time without even the vague expectation that her mother would die someday, but Lin had been around for a few thousand years, by this point; my guess is that she had already seen a fair number of people die. If the reasoning behind this was that Lin was too incapacitated by grief to do any world-saving ... I'm not sure I buy it.
In conclusion: I would give a lot for some kind of epic Lin backstory fic, because she is awesome (she guards tombs! using fighting moves she was taught by her mother! whom she has a very strong relationship with! also she calls yeti!) and we didn't learn nearly enough about her.
ETA: The Scorpion King is probably my favorite movie in the franchise (well, insofar as it can be considered in the franchise, given that it's a pretty loosely-connected prequel that's practically its own 'verse). I've certainly seen it the most times, although that's at least partly because USA shows it on a relatively frequent basis.
I'm not saying it's some kind of bastion of perfection or anything. It has its own troublesome gender issues; parts of it remind me of the Mars books by Burroughs. Cassandra does do a little fighting with a dagger, and also she throws a snake at Memnon, but that's about it; there are several points where she flails and gasps and doesn't do anything useful, and her costumes can get kind of hilarious at some points.
But Cassandra does a decently written Heel Face Turn; she saves Mathayus's life by risking her own, and then goes on to save a whole lot more lives with her vision at the camp. I'm pretty sure it's almost stated outright that one of the big reasons Memnon has done so well at that whole world-conquering thing is that he has Cassandra helping him, and his troops get edgy in her absence, because they're not sure Memnon can get anywhere without her. She uses the assumption that women who have sex are somehow tainted or wrecked thereby to trick Memnon for years, and the audience for a good twenty minutes, at least. Isis and her warrior women are pretty fucking awesome, and Balthazar - set up initially as the non-Big-Bad adversary who does a Heel Face Turn of his own, and is nearly as strong as Mathayus - cross-dresses.
And, of course, the tyrannical Big Bad is the whitest member of the cast, except maybe for Philos, the kooky inventor, or the jerky little prince who betrays everybody. Suffice it to say that if I had to pick which one of these to watch again, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
