The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec 2010

In Paris, circa 1912, Professor Espérandieu tinkers with telepathic techniques, and a lab accident hatches a 135-million-year-old pterosaur egg inside the National Museum of Natural History. The hatch triggers a string of eerie sightings and a fatal incident—the former prefect dies after sharing a taxi with a Moulin Rouge showgirl, witnessed only by a drunken passerby, Ferdinand Choupard, who is detained by the police. The President of France orders the case treated with utmost urgency, but control falls to the seasoned yet bumbling Inspector Caponi.

Adèle Blanc-Sec, a bold journalist and travel writer, returns from Egypt with a mission to revive the mummy so her sister, Agathe Blanc-Sec, can be saved from a coma caused by a tennis accident involving a hatpin. After a tense confrontation with the enigmatic Professor Dieuleveult, she retrieves the mummy and heads home. Espérandieu, meanwhile, is on death row, blamed for the pterosaur attacks, as the celebrated but ineffectual hunter Justin de Saint-Hubert and other authorities struggle to stop the beast. Andrej Zborowski, a researcher at the Jardin des Plantes, is drawn to Adèle and helps lure the creature into hiding. Adèle, riding the pterosaur, rescues Espérandieu moments before his execution.

Saint-Hubert fires at the pterosaur, and the wound echoes Espérandieu’s, a fatal shot that nevertheless frees Espérandieu to revive the mummy. The mummy reveals itself to be the Pharaoh’s physicist, and, while unable to heal Agathe, accompanies Adèle to the Louvre, where the Pharaoh’s mummified court is revived on display, including the Pharaoh himself. The Pharaoh’s doctor uses his advanced medical knowledge to revive Agathe, then decides he wants to see Paris, and the whole court wanders through the night, frightening the ever-hapless Choupard.

Adèle decides a vacation is in order and boards a ship; the name RMS Titanic is revealed, and Dieuleveult is shown, with a wry farewell: “good journey.”

In a mid-credits scene, Professeur Ménard pursues Saint-Hubert with a rifle, outraged by the pterosaur’s fate, and Caponi arrests Ménard as two gorillas watch the exchange.

I’m a nuclear physicist. I deal in figures, signs and equations.