Movie Reaction: Mortal Engines

Formula: Mad Max ^ The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I haven't been very kind to Mortal Engines leading up to its release. I've been seeing trailers for it for over a year now*. It's felt like my little secret, because no one I've mentioned it to has had any idea what I was talking about. Even at Thanksgiving, when I mentioned it to people, I got blank stares. Since the first trailer I saw, I was convinced this would be a bust. It looked like a silly idea. It leaned far too heavily on the Lord of the Rings connection (Pro-tip: When a trailer says "From the Producers of" but not "From the Director of", that's a bad sign). I've been referencing this as a certain box office bomb for months. And I was right. I felt bad though, and decided to see it anyway. Maybe I'd be wrong and this was another John Carter; crushed by the weight of its $100 million budget and the expectations that come with that.

*I think the release was delayed at one point, so the teaser trailers have been around for a while.

Mortal Engines is a tough sell. It's a fantasy movie that takes place 1000 years in the future. After the world bombs itself into the stone age, the remaining people decided that the key to survival was mobility. So, now cities are built on wheels. London is the biggest city of all. It's a super structure, a thousand or more feet tall. It chases down smaller settlements and strips them of their resources. There's a mayor, but the city is really run by Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), the cheif engineer or whatever (He's in charge of powering the city). Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) is an orphan who wants revenge on Valentine for killing her mother. Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) is a museum worker and aspiring aviator who gets caught in the middle of Thad and Hester's feud. Thad is up to something nefarious. Hester and Tom get paired up and have to team with a rebellion to stop Valentine. Familiar stuff to anyone who has seen any fantasy movie ever.

Honestly, Mortal Engines gets the basics right. Everything looks big and expensive. A lot of imagination went into the design of the wheeled cities and assorted flying and land vehicles. Hilmar is a solid heornie with a tortured past. Sheehan successfully plays the transition from goof to hero. Weaving plays the villain with reflexive aplomb. Jihae, playing a rebel badass, has enough shades of Han Solo to work. There are a couple big action sequences that have showdowns and races against the clock. It's a good example of a "second choice movie". Something you watch when you've seen Lord of the Rings too much and want something similar, even if it isn't as good. I really didn't hate watching this.

This movie drove me nuts though.

There's a difference between size and scale. Anyone can make something big in a movie. With the right computers, that's easy. Scale is harder to pull off. That involves having a feel for how much bigger one thing is than another. Lord of the Rings pulled off scale like few movies ever. It took entire movies for characters to travel from point A to point B. When you see Minis Tereth: the city built on a mountain, it feels like a huge community, not just a structure that's big for the sake of being big. The Battle of Helms Deep is epic because the size of the orc army is overwhelming to look at. Mortal Engines doesn't pull that off. Characters travel places too quickly or meet too often by chance. The wheeled city of London never feels real. I never believe that it's a real structure. I never believe in this world as a whole.

Part of the problem is that it tries to tie things to reality too much. As soon as they say that this is Earth 1000 years in the future and it has Twinkies and Minion statues, it's asking me think critically about this version of the future. And I don't buy any of it. If they can build these giant wheeled cities, then they don't need 1000 year old technology to build weapons with. They would also have better records of the past. They just would. Even if the computers were all destroyed, people would write things down and, again, if they have the technology for these giant cities and still understand the concept of London, then they wouldn't be amazed by old broken toasters. Then there's the fact that this world couldn't exist without some standardization. Everything in this movie looks like it's held together with duct tape and sweat. In Star Wars, everything seems old, but it does seem standardized (i.e interchangeable parts and industry standard sizing for parts). In Mortal Engine, everything looks like a custom job. Technology can only go so far without some kind of standardization, especially in a world that supposed to be the "real world". I forgive Middle Earth and the Star Wars galaxy, because they aren't tied to anything real. If Middle Earth suddenly referenced Texas, I'd have a slew of new questions for it and clarifications needed. The world if Mortal Engines is filled with cool ideas, not practical ideas that would actually exist in the world. There's this settlement in the sky they visit at one point. When a fight breaks out there, people start falling to their death through what turns out to be a very thin floor. If I'm going to buy that place as a community that people would actually stay in, I'm going to need so evidence that someone doesn't fall to their death because of a loose floorboard once or twice a day. Or, at the very least, have a character or two nervously navigate through there. Please, some recognition of the danger.

This is one of the most egregious failures of my One Big Leap test in quite some time. The narrative of this movie is driven completely by coincidence and contrivance. The exact right people all know each other. Everyone, even people supposedly in hiding, show up exactly when and where they need to. For example, after an assassination attempt hobbles Valentine, he's able to give chase to Hester in a massively dangerous area, find her in this huge structure, and get there before any of the dozen uninjured guards can. And, in that chase, Hester and Tom are racing haphazardly through a place where giant machines are crushing things indiscriminately. None of that relies on skill and daring. It's only dumb luck that they survive it. This happens repeatedly and there's no accounting for how they always survive. At least in Star Wars, they can use The Force as an excuse.

This is a sloppy movie. I didn't believe the world it created. It took shortcuts on all the character development, and none of the cast has the natural charisma to overcome the lack of writing. The narrative has no appreciation for the unlikelihood of what is playing out. You can tell that this was filmed with sequels in mind but edited with the understanding that sequel was never going to happen. I respect the gamble that MRC and Universal took on this. I wish nothing but the best for all the actors - I wouldn't be surprised to see Hilmar show up in another big franchise in the next couple years. This is just a mess of a movie that worked only enough to be frustrating that it wasn't better.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend