Mortal Engines (2018)

Film review #628

Director: Christian Rivers

SYNOPSIS: A thousand years in the future after a great war, giant mobile towns and cities roam around the continent, attempting to absorb one another for resources. In the mobile city of London, a small mobile town is harvested, among the population is Hester Shaw, a young woman who attempts to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine, a high ranking member of the city, but is stopped by Tom Natsworthy, a young historian. When Thaddeus learns that she told Tom about how he killed her Mother before she fell down a chute, Thaddeus pushes Tom down too, hoping to eliminate any evidence. With Hester and Tom cast out of the city as it rolls away, they must find a way to work together and get back to London before Thaddeus can complete his secretive project…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Mortal Engines is a 2018 sci-fi film based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve. Set a thousand years in the future after a “sixty second war” obliterated the old world, humanity now lives on large mobile cities and towns that move across the continent capturing other towns and cities for scarce resources. London is one such city, and after capturing a small mining town, takes the residents aboard including Hester Shaw, a young woman who attempts to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine, a high ranking member of the city. She is stopped by Tom Natsworthy, a young historian, who chases her down, and reveals to him the secret that Thaddeus killed her Mother before she falls down a chute. When Tom tells Thaddeus this, he is also pushed down the chute, seemingly to erase the evidence. Cast out of London as it rolls away, Tom and Nester must learn to work together to learn the truth and stop whatever Thaddeus is planning. The film starts off, as most of these post-apocalyptic films do, telling how civilisation was wiped out in a war, and introducing the novel concept of mobile cities that move around like giant tanks swallowing others for resources. We get a fairly standard action sequence to kick things off which illustrates the concept well, but perhaps lacking that necessary hook to grip viewers.

The two main flaws of the film quickly make themselves known, in the first twenty minutes we are introduced to character upon character, thrown at us relentlessly. The cast is just far too large, and we don’t really get a strong main character to settle us into the world, and are rather just thrown around a lot. The second issue which stems from this, is that everyone we meet already has a history with everyone else, which just complicates everything tenfold. This feeds into a plot which is tied together with a mass of conveniences, where characters coincidentally meet who just happen to know each other in some way. There’s nothing organic about the development when all of this is just shunted into the film and we as the viewer are made to play catch up as the film explains the nature of their relationships, rather than letting it happen in the present on screen. The two main characters have that very typical relationship of hating each other and eventually getting closer, and you can easily predict every beat in their relationship and when it’s going to happen, draining any chemistry between them. Thaddeus isn’t really much of an interesting villain either, as his plan just seems to be to blow up a wall so he can go and pillage some non-moving cities in east Asia, but we don’t ever see any of them, or what they’re like, so we don’t really get a sense of the consequences of his actions other than blowing up a big wall. Hugo Weaving still turns in a good performance as you would expect, but he just doesn’t really have anything special to do, like most of the characters.

I haven’t read the book, so I’ can’t comment too much on the themes there, but the film does have a theme of “Municipal Darwinism,” with the strong cities absorbing the weak and their resources in order to survive. An interesting idea, but only really mentioned once in the opening and never really explored. There’s also a sense of nationalism/colonialism in having the populations of these cities cheer on as they watch “their” city destroy another, which again is hinted at in the opening and a bit at the end, but never really dug into or forms any part of the plot. I feel this is something that would have been interesting sub-text in the novel, but maybe was flattened out to make the film more Hollywood and devoid of any metaphor or controversy. These might also have had more weight if we saw more than one mobile city throughout the entire film. What happened to all the other big cities? Wouldn’t it have been interesting to see London take on Paris, or any other major capital? As it is, there’s not even a mention of them.

Produced by Peter Jackson, as the trailers are at pains to point out, he lends his skills well to the big battle scenes, and the visuals are good for them. Jackson hired Philip Reeve for his directorial debut to work on this film, and the inexperience certainly shows in all the points mentioned above. There’s plenty that could have been done with this film, I am sure, but as it is, it is a meandering two hours around half-baked plot points connected by huge coincidences and a bloated cast. It fails to make up for the weak plot as well with a lack of excitement, action, humour, or anything else really. Clearly everyone else felt the same, as it was a box office bomb against a huge budget. Mortal Engines stalls before it ever gets anywhere good. The historian characters remark that somehow history is not as they know it, and that it seems to have been changed somehow. I assume this is because the plane has travelled back, but it just seems like an excuse not to be historically accurate (such as the German planes used not being in use until 1942).

The characters are all fairly bland and a typical cast who react to the situation differently. Acting is weak, and we don’t really get any insight into the lives of these characters other than the tropes they are meant to be.