Mortal Engines

RATING: B-

It's been a while since we've heard from Peter Jackson. When we last saw a project of his, he was going through a George Lucas-esque stage (this makes two reviews in a row I've referenced this now!) and making a pretty poor prequel trilogy out of one book--aka the Hobbit trilogy. Now it seems he's moving on to a different book series--Mortal Engines, a steampunk/sci-fi/adventure series. Of course, now it looks like we'll never get a sequel to this because the movie bombed so badly during the theatrical run. Oh yeah, and although this is really Jackson's project, he did not direct this--Christian Rivers did in his directorial debut. 

Mortal Engines takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the cities that weren't destroyed by weapons of mass destruction are now surviving... by rolling around on wheels. Or even flying, in one case. And in order to survive, these cities consume each other for supplies and fuel. This may sound like a ludicrous premise, but they mostly make it work--though I'm still unsure on how the destruction of one city fuels another. 

This one mostly takes place on the mobile city of London, where a young scarred girl named Hester attempts to assassinate a high-ranking important person in London--Thaddeus Valentine. One down-on-his-luck apprentice named Tom foils the assassination, and through a series of events, both Tom and Hester end up in basically no-man's-land outside of London. And now they'll have to work together to get back to London and prevent a conspiracy from occurring, which centers around Valentine. 

This was yet another recent film that was unfortunately kind of hurt by its marketing. The film marketed itself as a crazy CGI-fest and also kind of as part of the young adult niche. With regards to the former... that doesn't really happen until the final act (more on that later). As for the latter... I really don't see it. There's some mild similarities here and there (there is a resistance group, for one) but the final film really does not target a limited audience of young adults in my estimate. And really, are we just going to start dismissing every book-to-movie adaptation that's post-apocalyptic as young-adult-only fodder? 

Unfortunately, the film did less emphasizing of some of the cooler stuff in the marketing. Namely, the resurrected cyborg "Stalker" Shrike (who you might have known as Grike, depending upon which version of the book you read--if you read it at all). His design is excellent and he's played quite well by Stephen Lang, and in general he's one of the cooler things about this movie. This is another reason why it's kind of unfortunate there will never be sequels, because there would've been plenty more of those Stalkers. Also, there's the character Anna Fang, who has a few pretty nice fight scenes that are almost Matrix-esque. 

The biggest problems with the movie do crop up in the final act--and unfortunately, some of the problems extend from the book here. The final act deals with an old superweapon called MEDUSA with vaguely defined power--other than that it's destructive. This is where the crazy CGI-fest comes into play. The problem is, the book wasn't really any better at explaining what exactly MEDUSA did either other than destroy things. The final act is also changed quite a bit from the book; some of the changes are negligible and a couple are even welcomed (one likable character who died in the book not dying here), but one decision made very late by Hester seems to go against her character--the character the movie established early on, and also the character that she's supposed to evolve into in future books. (It should also be noted that Hester is quite less scarred in the movie version than in the book version--something that will likely be a point of contention for book purists.) 

Despite having a pretty decent budget, it seems they blew a lot of it on the special effects because the cast surprisingly isn't that high-profile. Besides Lang, the only other actor one may recognize is Hugo Weaving, who we haven't seen much of lately--and it's good to see him in a big role again, and he does quite well with it. Hera Hilmer is also pretty good as Hester. 

Mortal Engines' biggest problem is pretty much the final act, which descends into CGI madness and goes on for quite a while. There's other problems too. The antagonist's motivations aren't really developed as well as they should be. There's also an ill-advised reference early on to Minions, of all things--which is probably not going to age very well. 

Still, it's kind of unfortunate that we're only going to ever get one movie out of this. Because it's a unique and interesting premise, and even if the film is a little more lackluster down the stretch, I would've liked to see how the book sequels would've turned out in film format. Heaven knows we need more book-to-movie adaptations to be successful anyway... instead of Hollywood continuing to produce utterly pointless remakes of old movies.