There are only five day left if you want to see the mysteries of the mummies come to life on the big screen – Mummies: The Secrets of the Pharaohs ends its two-year run at IMAXcinemas across the world next Monday. But you won’t just want to see it for the breath-taking sights, epic storyline and endless line of experts – the film stars none other than our favourite Egyptologist, Dr Zahi Hawass! The antiquities chief gives his best Indiana Jones impression, as the illustrious movie takes viewers on a technicolour tale through in time. First they can see the methods, techniques and beliefs which made a civilization preserve their dead as time capsules; frozen for thousands of years. Then the film leaps ahead to the late 19th century and the earth-shattering discoveries of the mummies of Ramesses the Great, Seti I and his son. Unearthed a full forty years before the glittering arrival of Tutankhamun‘s tomb, the find is widely regarded as the greatest in history, and provides a perfect apothee for modern Egyptology, which the film explores in detail.
The movie’s final third concerns itself with the DNA work of the present which is delving deeper into the secrets of the mummies. A decade ago, Dr Bob Brier of Long Island University, USA was the first person to attempt a modern Egyptian mummification. Now, his creation may hold clues to a myriad enigmas, including why pharaohs ground up mummies to cure disease. Billing itself as ‘part historic journey and part forensic adventure’, Mummies brings together the ancient and the modern with all the glitz of an IMAX epic. Starring Brier, Dr Hawass and featuring the voice of Christopher Lee – who played the lead role in the 1959 film The Mummy – the movie tries to bring together both the beliefs of the present and the ancient past, and the changes in the way mummies are examined. It promises to be an intriguing into the study of mummies in the age of high-tech forensics.
But hurry up if you want to catch it – the Lost Egypt exhibition, at the Centre of Science and Industry, Columbus, Ohio, finishes on 7th September. Tickets are $7.50, with reductions for COSI members.