The world of movie making looks to be quite glamorous from the outside looking in. That may even be the case a lot of the time, but sometimes the job just makes you sick. The first trailer for The Mummy recently dropped and much of it was dedicated to a military transport plane losing pressure and crashing. Little was fun had shooting those scenes, as they took place on a plane famously known as the Vomit Comet. A plane which apparently lived up to its nickname.
Do you know how it works, the vomit comet? So you go up, basically with the Gs of a rocket going into space. Then you even out and everything starts to go weightless, and then you free-fall for 22 seconds and everybody goes up in the air. We had grips holding lights and puking while the shot was going on. ... Here's the thing, you have to take a bag with you and you have to hold it right here, and the hope is that when you do vomit you manage to grab all of it in the bag before the chunks float off into space.
While much of what we saw in The Mummy trailer could have been achieved via green screen, and according to Alex Kurtzman in Collider, some of it was, Tom Cruise is famous for getting his hands dirty and wanting to be involved in as many practical stunts as he can. Apparently, it was Cruise's idea to use the plane that astronauts use to train for zero gravity to film part of the sequence that we see in the trailer.
Of course, when the actor says we're going to go up in a plane and film ourselves getting thrown around, he's not only forcing himself to do that. All the crew that is needed to film the scene has to be there too. It sounds like they didn't quite handle the experience that well. Getting sick is no shame here, it's called the vomit comet for a reason. Apparently, it took 16 parabolic arcs over the course of four separate flights to capture all the practical footage that the film needed. That's enough to make anybody sick.
The Vomit Comet has been used to film weightlessness in films several times before including The Martian and Apollo 13. It's great to see films still doing their best to film this sort of thing as practically as possible. The service of the crew members who sacrificed their lunch to get those shots will never be forgotten. The Mummy will be in theaters June 9, 2017.
