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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Despite it's bad reputation & slow pace I actually quite liked it., 14 June 2005
6/10
Author: Paul Andrews (poolandrews@hotmail.com) from UK

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The Awakening starts in Egypt 'Eighteen Years Ago' where an archaeologist named Matthew Corbeck (Charlton Heston) & his assistant Jane Turner (Susannah York) are on the verge of making the biggest archaeological find since the discovery of Tutankhamen. Corbeck is obsessed with locating the ancient 3,800 year old tomb of the evil Egyptian Queen Kara. Corbeck is so obsessed that he neglects his heavily pregnant wife Anne (Jill Townsend) who is in Egypt with him. Corbeck eventually locates Queen Kara's tomb & ventures inside, as he is about to open Kara's sarcophagus Anne gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. As Corbeck opens the lid to reveal the mummified Queen Kara his daughter starts to breathe almost magically coming back to life. It's now 'The Present' & Queen Kara's sarcophagus is housed in a museum in Cairo, Corbeck is now married to Jane & teaches in England while his ex wife Anne & his daughter Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist) both live in New York. News reaches Corbeck that Queen Kara's remains may be deteriorating due to a fungus & that it needs to to treated. Margaret, who is just one week away from her eighteenth birthday, suddenly decides she has to see her Father & flies to England at the same time the mummified remains of Queen Kara arrive from Cairo. However death seems to follow Kara around, almost as if a supernatural force is guiding her to a predetermined destiny & anyone who stands in the way can expect to experience a fatal accident. Margaret starts to change, she appears to become possessed by the evil Queen Kara who wants to live again...

Directed by Mike Newell I actually quite liked The Awakening despite the stick it seems to get. The script by Chris Bryant, Clive Exton & Allan Scott based on the Bram Stoker novel 'The Jewel of Seven Stars' is intricate & you need to have patience to get the most out of it. If you want CGI mummy's & explosions every couple of minutes then The Awakening is definitely not the film for you, stick with Stephen Sommers The Mummy (1999) & it's sequel The Mummy Returns (2001) both of which I throughly like by the way. This is basically the same film as Hammer's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971) which I thought was crap & I much prefer this take on Stoker's novel. The biggest problem I had with The Awakening, & the one most of it's detractor's seem to have, is that when the film returns to 'The Present' it is just too slow, it desperately either needed a couple more killings to liven things up a bit or to be edited down by five or ten minutes to quicken the pace. There is no mummy walking around in bandages so don't expect any of that sort of thing, the core storyline of The Awakening relies on a supernatural angle & possession rather than a guy in bandages. I think The Awakening is a very handsome film with real Egyptian location filming, in fact it's probably the only mummy film ever to be actually shot in Egypt! The cinematography by Oscar winner Jack Cardiff is as accomplished as you would expect. The sets especially Queen Kara's tomb, the Egyptian artifacts & general production design credited to Micheal Stringer are excellent throughout. I thought director Newell managed to create some good scenes & have an overall foreboding atmosphere for most of the film. There isn't much in the way of blood or gore but there is a really cool scene when a slither of glass falls from a broken window & impales someones throat, ouch! The acting is pretty good, well I thought so anyway. I liked The Awakening despite the fact everyone else seem to hate it, sure it's slow but I found it quite involving as well & was a nice change of pace without ever threatening to put me to sleep. I'm not sure I can recommend The Awakening as it would probably put most people into a coma but what the hell, I liked it & that's all that really matters to me.

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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Not THAT Bad...Not THAT Good Either, 3 September 2001
Author: BaronBl00d (baronbl00d@aol.com) from NC

The Awakening is a film about an archaeologist that finds the tomb of a nameless Egyptian queen named Kara. Charlton Heston plays Dr. Corbeck, a man consumed with finding evidence to support this legendary status of Kara. A man who puts work ahead of family, even during the birth of his own daughter. Heston finds the tomb in the very long introductory flashback of 18 years ago beginning the film. He finds it under somewhat strange circumstances. A man is killed attempting to stop his dig mysteriously. Whilst all this is going on, Heston's estranged wife is bearing his daughter after waking from a coma. Now, I am not really sure what the significance of all these events are, but I found the first part of this film in particular very engrossing. The next three fourths is what really lost me and some logical credibility as Heston meets his sultry 18 year-old daughter, they discuss how Queen Kara had killed her father and everyone that touched his hand because he killed her lover and made her partake of his own bed, and then takes her(Heston's daughter) to Egypt. While in Egypt, Stephanie Zimbalist goes under some strange transformation as if she is becoming Kara and we go from there. This film has some beautiful location shots in Egypt, and I found the information, whether real or imaginary, about the queen, mummification, canopic jars(jars used for organs), etc... quite fascinating. The acting is pretty good. I thought Heston did a fine job. Zimbalist is good as well. The biggest problem is the writing. After you watch the film, you really are not sure what happened. I still don't know. The film is also a bit slow in the first half, but there are(for those who really enjoy it) some very gruesome deaths too. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the film, but if you enjoy the mysteries of Egypt or mummy movies in particular...I would give it a look see. What could it hurt?

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Why can't archaeologists just leave tombs alone?, 16 February 2007
6/10
Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA

Moses returns to Egypt, but not to free his people. In this case, Charlton Heston plays an egyptologist who opens the tomb of an evil queen. Sure enough, the spirit awakens with it, and possesses Heston's newborn daughter. And anyone who gets in her way is asking for it.

Obviously, a movie like this can't reach the quality of "The Shining", but it is good in a pinch. I really liked the end scene; as NRA president, couldn't he have just pulled out a rifle and dealt with it that way? But anyway, "The Awakening" will almost certainly keep you awake. As far as I'm concerned, these archaeologists need to just leave tombs alone; they deserve to experience bad things for opening them.

Also starring Susannah York, Jill Townsend, Stephanie Zimbalist, Ian McDiarmid (of the "Star Wars" movies) and Miriam Margoyles.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
The Omen Meets The Mummy, 10 December 2007
5/10
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Starting in the Eighties although he certainly had some duds earlier in his career, the number of decent film projects seemed to dry up for Charlton Heston. My guess is that Heston decided to cash in on all the end time films that seemed to be cleaning up at the box office starting with The Omen. So the man most famous for starring in The Ten Commandments decided to do a combination of a Omen and Mummy tale.

Thus was born The Awakening. In it Charlton Heston plays an archaeologist who discovers the tomb of an unknown Egyptian princess. Heston knows something's afoot because he has previously uncovered records of a royal household member whose name like that of Prince Moses was stricken from all records because of some terrible occurrence.

Around the time Heston is unsealing the tomb in the valley of kings, his daughter is being born who grows up to be Stephanie Zimbalist. Flash forward to 18 years later and the daughter like Damien the devil's child seems to have a whole lot of people dropping dead around her.

Any film fan will recognize the plot threads in both The Omen and in the Boris Karloff classic, The Mummy. They're combined here in The Awakening with more or less mixed results. Susannah York is also along for the ride as Heston's girl Friday assistant who meets a rather grisly end.

It's not the worst film Heston ever did, but you sure long for the days of even the stilted Victorian dialog of Cecil B. DeMille.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
All this time we thought it was the big sleep..., 26 May 2002
5/10
Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico

This movie isn't as terrible as some reviewers have made it out to be. Let's say, overall, about average for its type. The photography is more than adequate, the locations unmistakably including Egypt. The score does its job well. And the acting is on par with Charlton Heston's usual. He can do better when he wants to, as in "Khartoum." Stephanie Zimbalist is fresh, attractive, and seductive -- both before and after she is possessed by the spirit of Kara. She's pretty sexy too, decked out in tight bell-bottomed slacks and wearing her long auburn hair held back by a barette -- is that the word? One of her more exciting moments comes when she steps down in the tomb and kisses her father warmly on the lips. She seems to have not much more than a few expressions to work with, which is okay; Gary Cooper only had one and a half. She relies mainly on an intense stare and half smile, which can signal either happiness or evil intent. The editing is confusing and the ending leaves the story open for a sequel which will probably never come. The story itself is dated, although spiced up with some Omen-like executions.

Heston would never get away with removing those artifacts from Egypt today. Not unless there was a huge under-the-table payoff made. No more Elgin-marble controversies. The archaeological techniques are dated as well. The archaeologists we seem to think of as heroes would be considered criminally sloppy by today's standards. If you excavate a site now, you don't just dig into it to see what you can find. You dig a trench into the site, from the outside inward, so you leave most of the site intact for future research. We don't know what analytic techniques will be available a hundred years from now, anymore than Carnaveron and the rest could foresee Carbon dating. Brouilloin, the information theorist, called this "the principle of fundamental surprise." If we knew now what we will have discovered a hundred years from now, we would already have discovered it. What Schliemann did at Troy was simply dig it up until all the information was gone, the archaeological equivalent of strip mining. King Tut's tomb was handled just as badly. When they first cracked the wall of the as-yet unsullied part of the tomb, a breath of air whooshed out from the opening. That air was three thousand years old. It was the same air breathed by the Egyptians who built the tomb. We will never know its chemical composition or what kind of particulate matter might still have been floating around. And the soil of the tomb, which surely contained biological materials like pollen and the residue of three-thousand-year-old microorganisms, was treated like -- well, like ordinary dirt.

The movie has few zingers. It moves slowly and deliberately, a pace that many modern moviegoers are no longer used to, after so much exposure to MTV techniques. And the director -- all directors -- need to have it pounded into their skulls that when a character looks into a mirror on screen, the audience is not supposed to see her staring obliquely into the camera lens. Not only does the use of this stupid trick contribute absolutely nothing, but it is distracting and jarring, and an insult to at least some of the viewers.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
The first horror movie I ever saw and still not beaten., 9 June 2006
10/10
Author: Rabensblut from Slovakia

This is actually one of my most favourite horrors about ancient Egypt. From the archaeological and egyptological sides all fits (see name Ka-ra written in hieroglyphics that really corresponds to the signs and mean - the spirit of the sun). The scene with the tombs was made in one of the tombs discovered by Howard Carter in valley of the kings. I really think that this film can be appreciated only by those who like intelligent movies and who like ancient Egypt (and know about the place and history a lot like me). I am a big fan of Charleton Heston as well. Here You can see one of his best appearances. I didn't find a mistake on this film so the rating is 10/10.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Tension, thriller, suspense, and unsettling images set in Egypt and London., 4 November 2009
6/10
Author: ma-cortes from Santander Spain

A veteran archaeologist(Charlton Heston) in Valley of Kings, Egypt, discovers the coffin of a nasty queen ( Hatsetsupt ?) but open the tomb , the mummy's spirit is transfered to his baby daughter (one time grown-up is played by Stephanie Zimbalist), born from his wife (Jill Townsend) at that moment. His spouse flees and Heston falls in love with his archeology's partner(Susanna York).

This supernatural picture based on Bram Stoker's novel is packed with thrills, chills,suspense and wonderful outdoors from Egypt. The chief excitement lies in watching that new and innocent victim can be executed (Omen-alike) by the Egyptian mummy. The movie is full of grisly killings, terror, shocks and several eerie scenes. It displays a mysterious and sinister atmosphere, while the look is suitable spooky and frightening, the plot spreads to breaking point and the final turns out to be a bit frustrating. Appears as secondary Ian McDiarmid , today famous for his role as Chanciller Palpatine in Star Wars and Myrian Margolies who appears in Harry Potter films. Colorful cinematography by the classic Jack Cardiff and good musical score is composed by Claude Bolling. The motion picture is professionally directed by Mike Newell. He's a nice director film-making for BB television, dramas as ¨Enchanted April¨, ¨Mona Lisa smile¨, who achieved success as ¨Donnie Brasco¨and ¨Four wedding and a funeral¨, furthermore ¨Adventures of young Indiana Jones¨ series and ¨Harry Potter and goblet fire¨,among others.The film will appeal to Charlton Heston fans and Egyptian theme fonds.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
An Egyptologist's daughter's life becomes entwined with in her father's obsession to revive the mummy of an evil queen., 26 June 2007
10/10
Author: thomasbecker108 from United States

If you are any kind of Egypt enthusiast, you will love this! The university lecture, the tomb scenes, the obsession with research, the special organ jars (spelling of which "c a n o p i c" is denied by IMDb!) -- it is all well done and fun. Having taught ancient Egyptian history for many years, I find that this movie is filled with great realia and references to the rich mythology of Egypt. I routinely showed it to my 6th grade ancient history class! The plot moves well and there is a great sense of rising action and suspense. The acting is solid, and the music and the filming are well done. I really have no idea why this film has been rated so low by the viewers. Please see yourself and boost the rating on this fine piece of suspenseful work!

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Where all good horror tales of Egypt should go., 14 April 2007
8/10
Author: ozthegreatat42330 from Central City, Kentucky

A beautifully atmospheric movie in the genre of Mummy movies and a cut above most of the others. This one is a personal favorite of mine, and Heston once again shows why he has been consistently popular with the movie going public for a half century now. As a driven archaeologist he manages to bring ruin down upon himself by once again failing to heed warnings to not disturb the resting place of a particular burial. As he is opening the tomb, miles away his daughter is being born at the same moment. The two events will come together in the future to cause a catastrophe. The pace here is somewhat slower than most horror films but allows you to get more deeply into the characters. Just a good movie for those who like such things.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
A real beauty, 10 January 2007
8/10
Author: in_any_case from Germany

the story is as old as egyptomania, a dead queen, a curse, apocalyptic threats. so, that's nothing new, the plot is not surprising at all. though there truly are some thrilling moments the final is not spectacular. it doesn't offer a lot for minds papered by action in these days. after "the mummy" (from egyptological and aesthetic point of view a catastrophe) most of the people are to fastidious to recognize the value of this even-tempered and atmospheric composition. but what a beauty it is! photography and music are brilliant and project the fascination for the beauty of Egyptian art and culture, the desert and all its colours. To call the work of the actors a "bad" is downright unreasonable. The fact, that most of the actors are stage-proofed is not just noticeable, but essential for the style and charmism of the movie. it doesn't need shock-effects or blood-fountains. maybe it needn't to be called a horror movie either. it's just a sad but truly beautiful short-story about a man's blind love for a place and an idea.

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