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Rob Cohen has been very open and willing to talk about his latest film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
{sidebar id=1}His latest interview was actually skewed a bit differently, did you know Cohen graduated Harvard with a degree in Anthropology?
He spoke with Archeology Magazine recently about the film and it's Chinese history, plus gave a few details about the characters.
Here are a few excerpts,
This film doesn't have a mummy in it, per se, does it?
Not
of the traditional Egyptian variety, but as we know, many cultures
became very fixated on the return of life and the desire to return to
life in the same form as you left it. This [film] is based around, by
the stroke of imagination, the terracotta army of Xi'an. The closest to
a mummy we have is Jet Li, the persona of an emperor who was encased in
clay and baked to death as a punishment for all the evil he has done.
How bad is this guy [Jet Li]?
He's pretty f***ing bad. In the opening 10 minutes, Jet Li kills three
assassins then he leads an army of conquest that burns half of China,
enslaves all his enemies to build the Great Wall, and brands and
beheads people. This is all in the first five or six minutes. Then he
has his best friend ripped apart by horses and stabs Michelle Yeoh in
the gut. Now that's before he even becomes a mummy. [Laughs] Then he
becomes a mummy and it gets worse!
He sounds far worse than the guy from the first two movies.
He's way badder than Imhotep. His body count is in the hundreds of
thousands before he even turns into a mummy! Then he comes back as a
horribly burnt guy who creates havoc wherever he goes. The only thing
that stands between him and world domination is the O'Connells, so he
spends most of his time trying to kill them--unsuccessfully, because
they're a wily group. He's like a fascist and that's part of the
Chinese Legalism of the period. Adolph Hitler would have been right at
home with the ideas. In Legalism, the people exist for the sole benefit
of the state. The people were so terrified. If you did not report a
crime, even if it was committed by one of your family, you were as
guilty as if you had done it. So the emperor was free to have a
million-man army because he didn't need a big police force, which
allowed him to go conquer. The unification of the written language and
monetary system came out of that. But it was terrifying to have so much
power invested in one man's whims. All of this was fascinating to me
because it is so easily translatable to today.
So is the hero Rick O'Connell still something of a treasure hunter?
When we find him now, he and his wife, now played by Maria Bello, are
retired and living a boring life in London. They're called by the
foreign office to return an artifact to Shanghai, which takes them to
the Shanghai museum, where their son, Alex, has housed the recent
discovery of the tomb of the dragon emperor. And the artifact is the
key to awakening the emperor. The real bent of the story now is the
father and son and how their relationship is reformed as equals. In
this movie, the son is an archaeologist. The parents come in because of
their ability to handle danger and their love of antiquities.
Read the entire interview with a lot of information on the history behind the film and more here at Archeology Magazine.
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