The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor(2008)

Plot Summary

• In ancient China, a brutal and tyrannical warlord unites the country's kingdoms into an empire and becomes the Dragon Emperor (Jet Li). The other rulers hired assassins to kill the Emperor before he conquered them all, but the Emperor was alert and defeated the assassins. His armies swept everything in their path and anyone who resisted met a terrible fate. Emperor led a conquest to unify Qin and became the founder of the Qin dynasty. He orders the construction of the Great Wall of China to bury and curse his dead enemies, eventually gaining power over the traditional Chinese Wu Xing elements of fire, water, earth, wood and metal.The Emperor soon grows fearful that his death will end all he has accomplished and summons Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh), a sorceress who is said to know the secret of immortality. The Emperor his second-in-command and trusted advisor, General Ming (Russell Wong), to find Zi and to bring her to the palace. Zi tells the Emperor that she does not possess the secret to immortality but knows where to find it. Emperor sends Zi with Ming to the Monastery of Turfan, to recover the Oracle Bones, a collection of all the mystical secrets of the ancient world. The book contained the secret to immortality and other magic beyond imagination. Zi Yuan and Ming fall in love despite the Emperor wanting her personally. When one of his servants witnesses them having sex, he has Ming executed in retaliation.Zi seemingly casts a spell on the Emperor in Sanskrit, before he executes General Ming, his trusted friend and Zi Yuan's secret lover. He stabs Zi Yuan with a dagger, but having foreseen this event, she immolates and imprisons the Emperor and his soldiers in clay, turning them into the Terracotta Army, and flees with the Oracle Bones. If the curse is lifted, the Emperor will rise again to enslave all of mankind.In 1946, thirteen years after the deaths of Imhotep and the Scorpion King, Alex O'Connell (Luke Ford), Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn O'Connell's (Maria Bello) son, and his archaeology professor Roger Wilson (David Calder) (Alex's supporter in his expedition of The Dragon Emperor's Tomb) locate the Emperor's tomb. Alex defeats the booby traps of the tombs, but loses many trusted workers in the process, and finds that the Emperor is buried with his entire terracotta army. Though attacked by a mysterious woman, who tries to stab Alex, but it forced to retreat when shot at by Wilson. They succeeded in bringing the coffin to Shanghai.Meanwhile, the British government entrusts the O'Connells to take the Eye of Shangri-La (a huge pear-shaped gemstone) back to China as a sign of good faith to the Chinese people. The gemstone was initially smuggled out of China in 1940. Rick and Evelyn were only too happy to accept the assignment as Evelyn was missing Alex and the duo were bored out of their skulls in their mansion in England.Jonathan, Evelyn's brother, owns a nightclub in Shanghai. Rick and Evelyn ran into Alex at the nightclub and found that he had dropped out of college to chase mummies.It is revealed that Wilson works for a rogue military faction led by General Yang (Anthony Wong) a Kuomintang General and the Emperor's supporter, who had provided the financial backing of Alex's expedition. Colonel Choi (Jessey Meng) works for Choi and is tracking the Eye of Shangri-La and its arrival in Shanghai with Rick and Evelyn. Yang believes that the Dragon Emperor is the one who can lead China out of the chaos following World War II and plans to resurrect him using the Eye, which contains the Elixir of Life.Planning to connect with Alex, Rick, Evelyn and Jonathan visit the mummy that he discovered. Rick and Evelyn hand over the Eye to Wilson. There, Wilson betrays Alex in front of Yang and reveals their purpose. Yang orders Evelyn to open the Eye, which can only be unlocked with the blood of a pure soul. Evelyn is willing to sacrifice herself to save Rick and is hence a pure soul. Her blood unlocks the Eye, while Rick opens the sarcophagus. The mysterious woman from the tomb, Lin, stabs the mummified body within the coffin and discovers it is a decoy.The Elixir from the Eye accidentally lands on the statue of the carriage driver, which is revealed to actually be the Emperor's mummified body. The Emperor is revived, trapped in his terracotta Undead form. He accepts Yang and Choi's service but kills Wilson. Lin attempts to kill the Emperor with a magical dagger, the only weapon that can destroy him. Yang takes a shot at Lin, but she miraculously survives. The Emperor escapes by driving the carriage through the streets of Shanghai.Along with Jonathan Carnahan (John Hannah), the O'Connells and Lin (Isabella Leong) Zi Yuan's daughter and protector of the Dragon Emperor's Tomb, Rick, Evelyn and Alex travel to a Stupa in the Himalayas that will reveal the path to Shangri-La when the Eye is placed on top of it. Since the Eye is with Yang, they know that the Emperor will be found there.With the help of Yetis summoned by Lin, the group hold off Yang's soldiers but the Emperor discovers Shangri-La's location. Alex attempts to trigger an avalanche. The Emperor throws a dagger at him, but Rick shoves Alex aside and is stabbed instead.Lin takes the group to Shangri-La, where Zi Yuan still lives and heals Rick's wound. The group discovers that Lin is Zi Yuan's 2000-year-old daughter, both rendered immortal due to the power of Shangri-La's waters. The magical dagger which Lin carries is the same dagger that the Emperor used in his attempt to kill Zi Yuan years earlier. Zi Yuan also reveals that she would have died if the Yetis had not saved her and warns Alex that if the Emperor is allowed to drink from the Pool of Eternal Life, he will not only be able to raise his army, but be granted the power to transform into ancient and fearsome Chinese animal spirits.As Rick heals, Alex and Lin have grown attached to each other, but Lin refuses due to her immortality, unable to bear falling in love with Alex only to watch him grow old and die, just as Zi Yuan mourned for General Ming.The Dragon Emperor and General Yang eventually arrive and attack them in Shangri-La, takes the dagger, and the Emperor bathes in the mystical waters, which not only restores his human form and youth, but also allows him to shape-shift. Transforming into a dragon, he kidnaps Lin and flies back to the tomb, raising his Terracota Army, and gives a speech declaring his intention to conquer the world before sending his soldiers to go past the Great Wall, after which they will be invincible.The O'Connells and Zi Yuan pursue the Emperor to the Great Wall, where Yuan, using the Oracle Bones, sacrifices her own and Lin's immortality to raise an Undead army of the Emperor's enemies, led by a revived General Ming. The Army of the Dead, with aid from the group's modern weapons and air support, fights the Terracotta Army.As Alex rescues Lin, Zi Yuan fights the Emperor and is mortally wounded, but secures the dagger. While dying, she gives the blade to Rick and Alex.As this is going on, the Emperor transforms into a horned Ogre to get past Zi Yuan's army and goes beneath the Great Wall in order to use his elemental powers to negate Zi Yuan's spell and draw Ming's army back underneath it. Rick and Alex attack him while Evelyn and Lin fight and kill Yang and Choi. The Dragon Emperor gains the upper hand over Rick. While Emperor is gaining the upper hand over Rick with his Wushu skills, Alex grabs the dagger's blade and slips into the nearby water. Rick takes the dagger's hilt and plunges it into the Emperor's chest while Alex stabs him with the blade's tip from behind, simultaneously piercing the Emperor's heart from both sides and releasing the dagger's curse. The Emperor is consumed from the inside and out by molten lava, resulting in the deaths of him and his army. Ming's army briefly celebrates before finally moving on to a peaceful afterlife.The O'Connells and Lin return to Shanghai, where Lin and Alex start a relationship, while Jonathan decides to move to Peru with the Eye of Shangri-La, as he wants to go somewhere with no mummies, only for credits on the screen to reveal that mummies were recently discovered there.

Storyline

• Centuries ago, the evil Emperor Han was cursed by the sorceress Zi Yuan who transformed him and his army into mummies. In 1946, the explorer Rick O'Connell and his wife Evelyn O'Connell are invited by the British government to take a relic, the diamond "The Eye of Shangri-La" to China. The ancient stone is capable of resurrecting the Emperor Han and of pointing the way to Shangri-La and the eternal pool of life. When the couple reaches China, they meet their son Alex O'Connell, who has discovered the tomb of Han, and Evelyn's brother Jonathan Carnahan. The O'Connells are betrayed by their friend Prof. Roger Wilson, who is associated with General Yang. Yang wants to serve Emperor Han, so he resurrects the mummy and they head for Shangri-La. The guardian of Han's tomb (and Zi's daughter) Lin tells them that the only ways to destroy Han are to prevent him from reaching Shangri-La or by stabbing his heart with a cursed dagger. — Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil In ancient China, the sorceress Zi Yuan curses the Emperor Qin for killing General Ming, Zi Yuan's secret lover and stabs her with a dagger. Centuries later, The O'Connells was tricked into awakening the emperor and must stop him before he awakens his army and rules brutally once again. — ahmetkozan Choked in a monotonous life of luxuries, the married adventurers, Rick and Evelyn O'Connell, enjoy an early retirement in 1940s England, while at the same time, their intrepid son, Alex, inadvertently awakens the cursed Dragon Emperor's mummy during an archaeological expedition. However, when the British government entrusts the couple to escort back to China a historical artefact of inestimable cultural value, the Eye of Shangri-La, the family will reunite once again, as the awakened emperor's army of slumbering terracotta warriors threatens to take the world by surprise. Is there any hope against the omnipotent shape-shifting foe? — Nick Riganas After an ancient emperor mummy comes to life, a family of archeologists team up with a sacred family to stop and put down the emperor mummy before he unleashes mayhem across the land and continue what he was trying to achieve in the old days. — RECB3 1 more All