Though Peter Jackson’s name only appears in the producer credit of Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines, the film bears all the worst attributes of his blockbuster filmmaking. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which cities have been remade into colossal, mobile vehicles, it devotes a commanding portion of its running time to the kind of intricate, effects-heavy world-building that Jackson made industry standard nearly 20 years ago before spiraling off into excessively fussy, garishly over-animated work with the Hobbit films. This is a movie of endless gears, gushing diesel smoke, rusted metal and filthy humans, with each movement of the behemoth wheeled cities documented with the most obsessive affection. Yet as with Jackson’s post-Fellowship of the Ring work, Rivers’s film gets so lost in its minute CG animations that it spares barely a second thought for its thin narrative and even weaker characters, making for a titanic slog.
The dominant city-state of the film is London, a towering metropolis that roams continental Europe literally hunting and “consuming” smaller cities harpooning them like whales before pressing their residents into menial labor and gutting the towns for supplies and fuel. One such roving hamlet captured at the start of the film contains Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), a mysterious, scarred young woman who reacts to the upheaval with deliberation, seeking out one of London’s engineering luminaries, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), to assassinate. Her attempt is foiled by lowly historian Tom (Robert Sheehan, proving that even in a post-apocalyptic, distant future England can still produce Ben Whishaw types). Despite saving the day, however, Tom learns too much from Hester about Valentine’s monstrous nature, causing the villain to throw the lad from the city to dispose of any possible complications to his reputation.
The remainder of the film concerns Tom and Hester’s attempts to return to London to stop Valentine from unleashing one of the cataclysmic weapons of the pre-collapse era on a static, walled Asian state, and they drift through a barren wilderness filled with cannibals and slavers. Along the way, the pair meet allies like Fang (Jihae), a stylish rebel, and foes like Shrike (Stephen Lang), a re-animated, biomechanical corpse who resembles Iron Maiden’s Eddie mascot as seen on the Somewhere in Time cover. Shrike is a garishly ugly creation, animated with the aggressively smooth quality of much less advanced CGI, and the emotional subplot they attempt to graft onto this moaning, zombie-like creature is embarrassing. But human characters fare no better; Fang is presented as a chic, wisecracking Han Solo type, but she falls prey to a recurring issue where neither Rivers nor his editors know when to cut a shot, so that a lame quip or inspiring statement ends and the camera just holds on an actor’s face for so long that the dead air becomes unbearable.
Mortal Engines never settles on a consistent tone as it hops through the motions of contemporary fantasy. Its jokes stem from miserable references (ceramic figures of Minions are referred to reverently as “American deities”) to made-up futuristic idioms, while its sense of emotional drama is boilerplate material soldered onto characters who lack any definition beyond expository background. One character in particular is given a death scene so ludicrously protracted that it drags on for nearly five minutes of saccharine flashbacks. The climax is a mess of neon lighting, explosions and moving parts, all arranged in that ineffable way so common to present-day blockbusters where every shot has been animated with impossible precision yet total emotional indifference, so that all that minute rendering of complicated, interlocking objects feels slapdash and tossed-off because the viewer has no reason to care about any of it. There are more egregious examples of soulless fantasy being churned out on a regular basis, but this epic bore is but the latest reminder that a genre founded on unbridled imagination long ago slipped into formula.
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