7 Guardians of the Tomb – 2018 – Spiders…

7 Guardians of the Tomb is described like this on IMDb. “An innocent discovery of a well-preserved mummified Chinese Emperor from 200 B.C. unearths a two-thousand-year-old nightmare, a secret that should have remained buried.”. That’s what I had to go on when choosing to see this movie. I was under the impression that it was about this secret society of guardians, sacrificing everything for the sole purpose of keeping a secret. We have all seen those kinds of movies, haven’t we?

Furthermore, I was expecting 7 Guardians of the Tomb to have booby traps a la Indiana Jones. Maybe not on that grand scale since I realize that 7 Guardians of the Tomb only had a fragment of the budget that Indiana Jones had. Nevertheless, I love lost treasure films, whether they contain lost tombs or just the hunt for the treasure. I think they are tremendously entertaining. But I am confused. Who are these seven guardians meant to be? I didn’t count to seven when I saw the film?

There is a lost tomb

There is a lost tomb though, And there are booby traps, a hero, a villain, and so on. So 7 Guardians of the Tomb has all the necessary ingredients to create a very entertaining film. The rating is low on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, but I don’t care. I like this. I think that it’s a great film. Could it have been done better? Absolutely! Does it contain all the clichés in the book? Damn Right! That is what makes this movie work I think. They could have lost a few of the most obvious cliches of course. We didn’t have to have a character self-sacrificing. We didn’t need to have an egocentric villain in the group. Someone who leaves the others behind once he has found what he’s spent years looking for. But what we absolutely needed is the guy who drops one bad gallow-homur joke after another.

But on the other hand, it works! Why reinvent the wheel again? 7 Guardians of the Tomb is not a movie that claims to be creative when it comes to storytelling or character development. You could have asked for some more depth here and there – sure! But it’s really not needed. You can just take it for what it is. With that said. The most wooden actor of them all is Kelsey Grammer, who I imagine is the main attraction of the movie actor-wise. At least for me, he is the most-known actor here by far. I can’t say that he’s a favorite of mine though.

Spiders!

But what is the movie about then? If it’s not 7 guardians? Well, there is a tomb and there is an expression going after survivors from the previous expedition. Pretty standard stuff. Of course, they find the survivors and also the lost tomb of some ancient Chinese emperor. Who the tomb belongs to isnät that important. what is important is what’s actually guarding it. I didn’t see that come, which I should have if I looked at the cover art… SPIDERS!

I love spider-movies. Most of them are pretty bad though. Like in all creature features or animal horror movies, they tend to make the animals, insects, or whatever unnaturally large. So large that it becomes ridiculous. They don’t fall into that trap here. Of course, there are some of the that are larger. There must always be a “boss fight” but for the most part, they seem pretty reasonable in size. And even the big ones aren’t made ridiculous. It’s actually hard to say how big, the biggest of them are since there’s no real reference to something else in those frames. They are bigger than the other spiders for sure but on the other hand, the queen of and spider, or insect society is always much bigger than the rest of them.

With that said, I think that this film is pretty believable. I love it as a spider movie and I like it as a lost treasure movie. Not to say that it’s realistic, by in the cinematic universe, what’s described in this movie could actually happen. Well, kind of. There are some parts that might have been best to leave out.