“Visionary filmmaker Peter Jackson presents a startling new adventure unlike any you’ve seen before. Hundreds of years after our civilization was destroyed, a new world has emerged. A mysterious young woman named Hester Shaw leads a band of outcasts in the fight to stop London – now a predator city on wheels – from devouring everything in its path.” – Official Synopsis
Mortal Engines is a dystopian-future action novel written by Philip Reeves, adapted to film by Peter Jackson and associates, and directed by Christian Rivers as his directorial debut.
The film’s story is acceptable at best. At its core, it’s about a series of characters trying to stop a leader in a moving, “predator” city from using weapons of mass destruction (that destroyed the world previously) to commit genocide against the people who live in “static” cities.
I have quite a lot to say about the film’s story, so spoilers ahead.
This film is a series of “Chekhov’s Gun”s thinly masquerading as foreshadowing and storytelling. I want to watch this film as a drinking game for every recurring character and item briefly mentioned at some point.
The story has too many inconsequential actions. Things just happen in an order and they have little to no bearing on the characters themselves. For example, the mobile city of London tries to kill a static city, and, not too long after, the static city welcomes them in. These citizens of London should have been fed heavy propaganda to belittle and ridicule the static denizens. Why would they gladly fall at their mercy? Also, the static people just watched the city kill their entire Air Force. Why should they so casually welcome them?
There are a ton of scenes that felt incredibly derivative. There was one scene with saw blades cutting through a tight hallway the characters were running down that felt too much like The Last Crusade. There was a Book of Eli-esque scene where the welcoming couple were actually bad guys all along. There was just a “Terminator”.
There was also some pure pulp trash.
The main conflict of the film happens because of a character named “Pandora” finding a box.
There’s a truly awful plot twist involving the female main character and the main villain possibly being her father.
Did the two main characters have to fall in love? A team of professionals couldn’t find something more unique to do with the characters?
There’s some bad commentary on modern culture: Minions as “American Deities”, “The people in the screen age might have forgotten to how to write”, etcetera. I would rather eat a raw potato than put up with this. Is it even possible to be nuked so hard that the entire world’s hard drives are wiped? Why wouldn’t people try to fix those first? Why would books have survived if the technology didn’t?
The writing itself was alright. There were an obscene amount of one-liners, which is a thing if you like that.
Almost every character sucked. They all got what they wanted, except, of course, the villains. Did every character have to monologue? Why was there so much bad backstory? Have we learned nothing from Mad Max? Your catalyst for the story needs no backstory if your villains are well written enough.
The male lead character, Tom, is a cringy weenie. He tries to act macho but just ends up looking like a dumbass. In general, he comes off as pretty annoying. He “It’s a Unix system”s his way into a Death Star trench run at the end of the movie. Where he casually mentions throughout the film that he trained as a pilot, eight years ago, and hasn’t really flown since, but he can do deft maneuvers into the mobile city of London to destroy the engine. There was also some weird acting, where in one shot he grabs the female lead character, Hester’s, wounded leg and no one reacts. That may have been a direction issue where the actor was told to act defensive and no one caught that he grabs her wound.
Speaking of Hester, she has an unnecessarily tragic backstory to justify her attempted assassination of the main villain, which you wouldn’t need if there wasn’t a “plot twist” that he was creating a weapon of mass destruction. That information alone is enough to justify his murder. There are also some weird writing bits where she doesn’t know characters who were her mother’s friends. Her mother was an archaeologist, and Hester isn’t shown to have a caretaker. This means that it is incredibly unlikely that she wouldn’t have gone with her mother on her expeditions. How has she never met, or heard of, these people? Hester is also an incredibly short-sighted character. Her actions lead the audience to understand that most of the situations she is in are her own fault. She is nearly killed by the main villain because she doesn’t think through an actual assassination plot. She gets wounded because she drags along Weenie Tom. She gets hunted down by Shrike because she refuses to explain anything to him before leaving him alone.
On the topic of the discount bin Terminator, Shrike is actually probably the most interesting character. His entire motivation is that he wanted to adopt Hester and save her from the pain of humanity. She had promised to become a cyborg like him, but then she runs away. He’s trying to chase after her because he’s angry that she broke her promise. However, why didn’t Hester bring Shrek along for her revenge plot? He could have killed the villain in half a second! Also, why does he die when he learns that Hester even remotely cares about Weenie Hut Jr.? Is that what happens when you’re a father? Your daughter brings home her boyfriend and then you lay down and will yourself to die? Why does he have a weird redemption montage? He wasn’t a bad guy. He was a morally grey character and should have been left as such.
The main antagonist, Thaddeus Valentine, is one of the more interesting characters as well. He is also arrogant and short-sighted and that leads directly to his downfall. He gets really interesting at the end when he is willing to destroy the entire mobile city of London in his quest for genocide. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s part of what makes it interesting.
Valentine’s real daughter is a trope-y character as well. How hasn’t she drank her father’s Kool-Aid? How is she not a part of his propaganda machine? She should have been fed his racist tirades since birth, so why does she immediately disown him when he wants to kill them all? This shouldn’t be new info to her. Also, why is she used as a stepping stone to talk about the social class/caste system in London when it literally never matters, even once, afterwards?
The cinematography was pretty good. There were quite a few shots that impressed me. The lighting also helps the sets come to life throughout the film.
The editing was weird and it neutered some of the action and violence. There was one shot where they cut in the middle of Tom’s fall and it completely threw off the weight of the action. There was another scene where two characters traveled halfway across London in the middle of a sentence. The action scenes are very modern in their pacing. Honestly, I stopped paying attention after the first few, so I don’t have a lot to say about them.
The audio sometimes felt a little out of sync with the video. It was like they recorded some of the lines ADR and the new takes didn’t exactly line up with the old ones. Also, sometimes when the actors were facing away from the camera it felt as if they weren’t actually delivering their lines.
There was also line that Hugo Weaving delivers in the beginning of the film that had some awful noise under it. It threw me off so much that I rewound the film to make sure I heard it correctly. There’s no way that should happen in a AAA film.
The special effects looked really good. The moving cities have a lot of weight in their movement. Everything is aesthetically very interesting with the steampunk-esque style. However, as soon as an actor was in the shot the effects look notably worse, but that’s a pretty common pitfall.
The Special Features are pretty interesting as well. There were a series of interviews about every main character. These didn’t change my opinions of the characters in any way whatsoever, but it is neat to hear what the cast and crew think about them. There are also a series of interview discussing the various set designs and what it took to create them. It was incredibly interesting to see how much work went into the production of this film.
There was unfortunately one that was a “tour” of the old tech museum which included more hamfisted commentary on modern life. There was also one that felt like an advertisement for New Zealand film production companies, which was fine. It was just kind of odd.
In conclusion, I bet the books are much better. I feel like most of the pitfalls in the story came in from the adaptation. The things I noticed about the distillation of the characters into a film format are nothing like what the screenwriters and the author said about the characters in the interviews, so maybe it wasn’t the source but the execution.
I would set this film up there with Stardust or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus where I would have enjoyed this when I was younger, but now that I know the tropes and twists I just can’t put up with it.
