Night #90 - Character Journey in Action and Comedy

In Night #78, I discuss Larry's journey in the Museum movies, which is essentially a step-wise process of finding his way home. For Rick O'Connell, the protagonist of the first two Mummy movies, it's a lot more understated, if it exists at all. The guy got out of the French Foreign Legion three years before the start of the movie, but his unit was stationed where the movie is set, so we see that back story anyway. We hear in the second movie that he was orphaned and lived in Cairo, where he received a creepy Medjai tattoo and somehow picked up what to say to a given query ("I am a stranger, traveling from the East, and I seek something which is lost," or something like that, to which the response is, apparently, "I am a stranger travelling from the West, and it is I whom you seek."). Other than that, we get jack.

And as far as the growth of the character goes, from what I can see an exceedingly large chunk of it happens off-screen, between movies (except a moment in Mummy III when Rick and his son Alex come to a random understanding after Rick comes back from the dead). It serves to up the motivation, as the bridge between the first and second is enough time for the main couple to have an eight-year-old son, who is later used to motivate the protagonists into going along for the adventure. Over the course of a given movie, however, the most blatant example of this that I can pick out among these three is in the first movie, wherein at first Rick wants to ditch the clutzy librarian Evelyn as soon as possible, but they develop this bond over the course of the movie as mummies attack, plagues ravage the land, and things generally get worse, resulting in an interesting flash-forward for people who do develop relationships this way, in other media or in real life, in Mummy III, when practically the only thing which turns Evelyn on anymore is the thought of their old mummy-hunting career. Other than that...

But the discrepancy makes sense. The Museum franchise is a series of family-oriented spectacle-comedies, where the director specifically states he wanted a solid story to base the series off of, for each movie so far made and, we can reasonably assume, for the upcoming third, as well. The Mummy franchise is primarily about action and adventure and characters doing awesome things. The Mummy is about spectacle and awesomeness above the characters themselves, because that's a convention in the genre. As a typical comedy functions the same way, the only reason the Museum movies have the characters and journey that they do is because of the director's insistence on the point, as well as, according to Mr. Levy, Mr. Stiller's insistence, as apparently they're a tag team on this. In any event, one functions as an example of its genre while one goes the extra mile, and therein lies the difference.

Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": The Mummy Week bonus round! The Brits do it with accents!

Countdown: 283 Days to NATM 3