The comedic nature of The Mummy misleads people into thinking itâs just a jokey movie but itâs got a lot of stuff in it that hits Hard when you pay attention. This is set post First World War. Itâs set in a country that has finally began to kick British rule (although, as usual, the British still occupied Egypt) in 1922. Itâs set in 1926, so that freedom is brand new and makes everything very charged politically.Â
Jonathan is a rich kid who was raised on stories of heroes and the honour of war, shoved knee-deep into the trenches and learned first-hand that his teachers were liars, the stories untrue, and that the honour of war was for the generals not the soldiers in the trenches being taken out by mortar and mustard gas.Â
Rick wasnât raised like Jonathan and knew there were no heroes to start with. No grand stories to share and believe in the wonder of war. Life is a constant battle and if you donât keep fighting, then you die. So he joined the French Foreign Legion and he kept damned fighting.Â
Ardeth is the outlier in that his entire culture differs to Rick and Jonathanâs. Heâs an outsider to the world that places Rick and Jonathan as above him because of their skin colour, their nationality, whatever. Ardeth knows that heroes arenât always easy to find but theyâre out there. They just happen to be people who donât give up, who fight and fight, and do whatâs Right even if it means their death. Ardeth and his people saw war and itâs impossible to not be drawn into it somehow, either as victims or allies to one side or the other. He learnt that war has a cost and that the growing industrialisation of the West made that cost So Much Higher. Swords arenât the primary weapon now, you donât fight your opponent up close. Now war is distant and bloody and the crack crack crack of broken silence.
None of them have lived easy lives, either from the beginning or through events greater than any of them. But The Mummy shows very damned well that you can cope with what you see, what your experience.
You either try and pretend it didnât happen, joke and laugh and hide how you really fear (Jonathan). Or you keep going, surviving from day-to-day and fighting because thatâs what you know keeps you alive (Rick). Or you put your damage aside and focus on what needs to be done for the Greater Good because you canât give yourself the time to break because people need you now (Ardeth).
This movie shows the trauma of war and how little support was given post WWI to survivors because the idea of soldiers having trauma was a shameful, alien concept. Not when single rifles and swords, bows, and arrows, were the way of war, coping was known how to be done. But with machine guns, mortars, and gas designed to kill or drive you mad⊠how do you cope with that when youâve never really been taught how to cope with weakness? How do you be vulnerable, admit it, and let yourself heal when youâve never been taught how?
The Mummy makes it laughy and jokey and keeps it light, but thereâs a very real thread of the Cost Of War woven throughout it. Intentionally or otherwise, itâs a damned good representation of the fact that the First World War was a war like no other that came before.