I have bad memories of seeking out The Alchemist after hearing Richard Band's score. Ugh, what a mistake... took months for the music to regain its mysterious beauty.

So, it's just a question of whether you're willing to take that risk.

Kirk

The original Mummy didn't impress me too much, but I rather enjoyed it. And it's far better than this one.

(Of course, I also made the mistake to watch Air Force One because of the score once )

Gae NP Attack on the Iron Coast
(G. Schermann)

Air Force One some parts are dumb but overall I liked it.

quote:

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Originally posted by John Zimmer:
What's wrong with Air Force One and The Patriot?

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I haven't seen the latter, but I can explain my problem with AFO: When I don't know if I like the president or the terrorists less, something must have gone wrong.

Gae: The difference is that Mummy is dumb, Raiders isn't. I do have problems with parts of Temple of Doom for the same reason. When it's too dumb, it's neither funny nor thrilling.

quote:

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Originally posted by Marian Schedenig:
Gae: The difference is that Mummy is dumb, Raiders isn't.

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And see, that all goes back to the personal opinion thing. I've always found Raiders quite dumb, and in some ways much less enjoyable than The Mummy -- though that's mostly because my opinion has been tainted by so many people telling me what a masterpiece it (Raiders, not The Mummy) is.

Marian wrote:
- - "Plus it's overscored. I don't blame Goldsmith - on CD, the music is great, and I'm glad there's a lot of it -, but it's too much in the film." - -

Marian, if you really mean it, then I would certainly like to know your opinion about THE MUMMY RETURNS - where an excellent composer like Alan Silvestri "overdoes" it all in a very annoying way, in my opinion.

I have always liked Universal's ORIGINAL (1932) classic THE MUMMY - because it has class, nostalgia, plus David Manners and Boris Karloff - and naturally, when I went to see the remake, I DID COMPARE it to the original one - and I loved it. In this remake the director and the screenwriters managed marvelously to update a dusty old movie monster to the contemporary audience, and yet they managed to keep the atmosphere marvelously "old-fashioned", mainly thanks to incredible actors like Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And the most important thing was that this remake was genuinely FUNNY - in a most sincere way.

Furthermore THE MUMMY was treated astonishingly much as an ANIMATED MOVIE with its caricature-characters and simple writing that made the movie so approachable for even child audiences. I think that's exactly why there's so much of Jerry Goldsmith's music - and why the music is so wonderfully "characterized", played almost continuously to keep the pure fantasy of the movie intact.

Then came the sequel. And all the class was gone - the movie still is THE most irritating I've ever seen. It was obvious they wanted a "deeper story" into this one - and yet the screenwriters didn't use any brains in writing the story. THE MUMMY was a perfect package of real suspense, horror, comedy, adventure and romance, but in this sequel all the ingredients of the package had been separated in a most obnoxious way - plus (or actually, MINUS) they had forgotten that this movie SHOULD have been SCARY... I mean that THE MUMMY didn't "soften" its horrifying sequences, but in the sequel all the so-called "horror" was obviously softened for "more younger viewers". Obviously the filmmakers wanted THE MUMMY RETURNS to be a film for even larger audiences, which meant they wooed all the possible viewers in VERY WRONG ways.

And the music - for me it was a big disappointment, because it seemed that Alan Silvestri didn't trust in his more intimate sound, thus "overdoing" all the music TOO big - I have always thought that LESS is MORE. And, as I have said in my review of the soundtrack, Silvestri keeps all the action music irritatingly SAME (just loud and noisy), whether the scene is about a bus ride in London, a desert battle, a pygmy attack, etc...

There.

Just my opinion.

I won't go into the RAIDERS unless someone asks for it