Something is deeply wrong with IMAX’s trailer for The Mummy, the Tom Cruise–led 2017 reboot of the 1999 film and subsequent sequels starring Brendan Fraser. Like a perfect smile that’s lost some teeth, the trailer appears to be missing crucial chunks of its audio, leading to weird, cackle-inducing silences and moments where you have actors’ vocals but no other sounds.
The original video has been taken down from IMAX’s official YouTube page, but not before being saved and uploaded to Twitter and other social media.
The best part comes around the where Cruise and his crew are tossed around inside a tumbling airplane after the aircraft is attacked by a flock of birds. Birds fly through the plane’s windshield and impale the pilot, but you can’t hear a thing. The sound of wind isn’t present, though it’s whipping through the plane’s cavity. The crunch of bodies hitting the plane’s metal body doesn’t exist, though it’s happening. All that exists are the cast’s puny grunts, yelps, and imagined vocalization of what it would sound like to get sucked out of the plane midair.
It’s unclear what’s happened here, though the effect seems to be similar to the isolated vocal tracks that are used in music production. It seems the trailer’s booming background audio, music, and “vocal” tracks have been separated, and only the latter made it into this trailer. The result is hilarious, and reveals how off-putting and bizarre movies would be if they didn’t have all the flourishes of modern sound design.
