I’ve been at turns frustrated and fascinated by the new sci-fi film Mortal Engines in the lead-up to its release. A giant tale about mobile cities ingesting smaller cities and the kids trying to stop them was always going to be an odd sell to those not directly familiar with Philip Reeve’s young adult novels that producer Peter Jackson has been enamored with for decades now, but it got made anyway.
Directed by Jackson’s acolyte Christian Rivers, Mortal Engines is a weird-ass thing for a studio to throw a hundred million dollars at, especially in concert with how bad films of this ilk have done over the past four or five years. It’s a little too late to be a part of the YA boom that happened in the wake of Harry Potter’s demise and the rise of The Hunger Games, and fits more comfortably in the broad sci-fi epic genre that has been boring the hell out of all but the most devoted nerds (we’re looking at you, fans of Krull, Jupiter Ascending and Battlefield Earth) and will always lose money. That said, we’re awfully happy that the people at Universal took a chance on this film, because it’s this unique and utterly fucking bizarre blend of Star Wars and the Pirates of the Caribbean. Well, it’s more Battle Beyond the Stars meets Cutthroat Island, but I think you’re catching my drift.
Here’s some haphazardly-explained exposition for you: In the middle of the 21st Century, a series of quantum weapons called M.E.D.U.S.A destroyed pretty much all of the large cities of the world, and ruined the Earth’s crust. And then we’ve got moving cities! Hooray! Or, at least that’s how Rivers and Jackson explain it (though it’s not really well-explained in the film, a quick look at the book’s Wikipedia page will tell you that survivors from those destroyed cities moved into those mobile cities in order to escape the constantly-changing weather conditions like earthquakes or giant storms caused by the Earth’s crust being fucked with). It’s somewhere in the far future, and young Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) is onboard a small city that, in the film’s thrilling 20 minutes, gets consumed by the giant moving city of London. London is a bit of a wonder, complete with tube stations and the “London Museum” of old artifacts, the latter where our co-protagonist Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) works. He meets Hester by happenstance, when she’s about to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), the leader of the Guild of Historians, for murdering her mother. Natsworthy and Shaw are thrown off of London, and have to fend for themselves against a whole host of enemies so that they can stop Valentine from attempting to revive the M.E.D.U.S.A project to wreck havoc on the city’s enemies.
Goddamn, even I’m getting confused now! So, let’s talk about a thing that becomes quickly obvious: The ensemble, save for some of the bigger names, is dreadfully miscast, Hilmar and Sheehan chief amongst them. The former, a Danish actor who has put in some delightful work in films like Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, since her career started in earnest some ten years ago, is emotionless and cold for the first half of the film and hysterical for the second. Sheehan, her foil, is basically doing the kind of Eddie Redmayne-style awkward bullshit that filmmakers are, for whatever reason, convinced that we respond to. There is a moment between the two of them at the beginning involving a pack of Twinkies that is perhaps the most uncomfortable character interaction glimpsed, at least, since Jupiter Ascending, and it’s well-worth the price of admission alone, if you can manage to stifle a laugh. Stephen Lang makes a CGI-slathered appearance, looking like fucking Blight from Batman Beyond, as the cyborg “Shrike” that is stalking Hilmar, and his backstory is so obvious and cribbed that I began predicting lines of dialogue before he even said them. Weaving, however, is quite fun — he’s always been an actor who has been able to navigate the uncanny valley between camp and deathly seriousness, a requirement when you’re trying to get audiences to believe in Hobbits or cosmic cubes or Laurence Fishburne’s kung-fu mastery — and he brings the same sort of delightful seriousness to his work here, where he shouts lines like “Prepare to ingest” or where he spends a quiet monologue elucidating over the qualities of an antique toaster.
Anyways, the effects work, as with every film that the good folks at Weta Digital work on, is as brilliant as it normally is. The cities have a brutal heft to them, and their stacked design makes them wonderfully interesting to look at. The airships, as well, are distinct — swashbuckler Anna Fang’s little red ship looks like if the Swordfish from Cowboy Bebop were more of a lobster, and if I were ten years old still, I’d probably be running around my town to figure out if I could buy a model kit of it. The action is filmed well enough, which was to be a given, thanks to Rivers’ past experience with Jackson, and when the film goes full Star Wars knock-off in the last half hour, it at least looks somewhat fun (seriously, I was humming this throughout the entire airship/London battle — one wonders when Jackson’s finally just going to suck it up and make his Dam Busters remake). However, this is all a bit funny, given that all of these scenes are memorable because they look nothing like the rest of the film, which is shot like an exceptionally bad BBC adaptation of a Dickens novel, just in a steam-punk universe. The action, when it doesn’t involve any effects work, is about as poorly photographed as any herky-jerky bullshit you’d find in a shaky-cam action film, and that’s a big downgrade from Jackson’s clear action work in all of his prior films (including those, like this, that he’s produced).
There’s not much in Mortal Engines to hang one’s thematic hat on: There are slight references to conspicuous consumption, colonialism and more baked into the film, which I’m assuming are a bit more of the point in the novels that the film is based on, but Rivers largely ignores them for a “don’t repeat the mistakes of the past” message. You know, the one you’ll find in pretty much every movie about overly-ambitious scientists dealing with tech they don’t really understand. Yet these nods are roughly enough to give the film a color that, much like Jupiter Ascending and plenty of other films before it, sort of lives and dies on its imagery more so than its storytelling.
Is Mortal Engines a bad movie? Hell yeah, it absolutely is: It’s probably one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year on a storytelling level. It overextends the meager powers of its director, may cause its cast not to have as long and as profitable careers as they would otherwise, and is virtually identical, at least from a financial standpoint, as Universal’s studio head lighting a $100 million on fire. Yet, warts and all, is it a blast to roll with when the going is good — all of the action sequences involving effects work, Weaving’s celluloid chewing — and to chuckle at when things start to get bad? Absolutely. Maybe watch it at home, though, if you have trouble stifling a giggle.
Featured image via Universal.