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Thursday, February 27, 2014

Night #75 - Kahmunrah and World Domination Revisited

This post was inspired in part by further reflection on a statement one of my friends made, to the effect of
"[Kahmunrah's] role would just be a farce. We couldn't get past his lisp." It made me recall what some friends and I have been discussing about Night at the Museum 2, chiefly that the whole point behind Kahmunrah's plot is to make people respect him, or at least fear him, by gaining complete control over everyone on the planet. It stems from his speech impediment making listening to him too amusing to fully take him seriously, and also from a variety of circumstances during his youth, among them potential illegitimacy and abuse in such a formalized situation where he had no power that quite frankly he convinced himself that the only way to do anything about it was to take matters into his own hands, which clearly he is capable of doing, if given enough of a reason to.

But so far as Kahmunrah's success and the aftermath of it are concerned, I think my friend has a point. Kahmunrah's battle for fear would be far from over, simply because listening to him talk is so damned funny. Sure, we take him a bit more seriously at first, but as the movie progresses, he starts to lose all composure and exposes himself as a spoiled six-year-old on the inside, and at this point, his lisp becomes the icing on the cake in terms of comedy. If one man is enough to make him crack this way, imagine what it'll be like against a whole bunch of people opposed to being ruled period. Not only will he crack big time if things don't go his way, and not only does he rely on the somewhat sketchy status of his birdmen warriors, there is next to zero likelihood that anyone hearing him rant with that lisp will do anything but bust up laughing.

Kahmunrah therefore cannot reasonably expect to pursue world domination in and of itself, and we cannot expect that of him if we were to give it any consideration at all. To Kahmunrah, the world seems like just recompense (plus interest) for the loss of the title of "crown prince" to his younger brother, when he has no reason to suspect that there is a good reason for this, for example, his illegitimacy. The real goal, then, is justice, in whatever odd sense that happens to be. He is trying to gain something which will make up for the way his parents and the rest of the world treated him while he was alive, and it has warped into an obsession, and possibly an impossible quest. Supposing he seized the throne of Egypt after his brother's death (natural or otherwise), he is still trying to rule the rest of the world, when all he really had any conceivable claim to was Egypt. This suggests that he won't be satisfied with anything, always searching for that elusive "something" to make him feel better about his life.

But that "something" might not be so elusive after all, if the film makers could contrive to have the Brothers Egypt reunite and level with each other again as brothers first, royal second.

Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": I compare Night at the Museum to the well-known anime franchise Yu-Gi-Oh! on the first of three criteria: the use of magic.

Countdown: 297 Days to NATM 3

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