Movie Review: "Mortal Engines" Won't Get Motors Running

Ten years in the making, Mortal Engines doesn’t lumber into cinemas; it sputters.

Mortal Engines is based on Philip Reeve’s 2001 book of the same name, in which entire cities of the future traverse Earth’s broken-up continents on giant wheels.

Look, coming up with dystopias is hard.

Peter Jackson co-produces and co-writes this adaptation with regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Christian Rivers, a long-time special-effects craftsman, directs. And the audience merely tolerates the result, which displays imagination and detail orientation, yet lacks some cinematic gusto. For a movie about uprooted societies on monster trucks, it’s a bit flat.

Mortal Engines begins with London—now an almighty behemoth rolling across Europe—hunting down a smaller city and engulfing it, absorbing citizens and burning their homes for fuel. I guess you call that the 'reverse Brexit'.

Inside the city-mover, Tom (Robert Sheehan) collects relics from the 'Ancient' era (AKA the era we’re living in right now) for the London Museum. That’s where curators keep statues of America’s old gods. The camera pans and reveals them to be Despicable Me’s Minions, which is a decent joke, bringing the film’s total of 'jokes that land' to 'one'.

Meanwhile, the sinister Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) seeks out the old weaponry of the Ancients, used by us to wipe out our 21st century civilisation. (Whoops.) However, he’s repeatedly foiled by Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), a mysterious, masked assassin with a personal vendetta. She’s unexpectedly swept into a wider revolution by resistance leader Anna Fang (Jihae). As if this wasn’t all hard enough to follow or take seriously, there is a zombie-robot named Shrike hunting Hester, and when anyone refers to him, it sounds like they’re saying 'Shrek', which is additionally unhelpful.

Mortal Engines looks like Mad Max: Fury Road, except it lacks that flick's essential tactility; which is to say, there’s a lot of green screen, with almost every sequence quite clearly shot on a soundstage (there has never been less wind or external elements in outdoor sequences). And, to that point, there’s no sense of scale either. I mean, Mortal Engines doesn’t just feature car chases; it features city chases. Except, when everything looks big, nothing looks big, including oversized Minions.

The cast struggles valiantly with the script, and Hugo Weaving—an old hand at delivering naff dialogue—fares best. But the film just never quite gets going, despite being about cities that literally can’t stop.

2.5/5

In Australian cinemas 6 December. Rated M for science fiction themes and violence.

Header Image: Universal Pictures