I’m starting to feel old when I watch big-budget movies like this. There is always a point, usually about an hour into the film, when I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t mean that in a general, snarky way. I mean that I completely forget who the characters are and what they are doing. The exception is superhero movies, because I quickly remember that the hero is trying to get the thing before the evil version of himself gets the thing and uses it to rule the world (really, think about recent superhero movies and how often that summary works). But for everything else, I usually spend a couple of minutes in the middle of the movie just trying to remember what I’ve spent the last hour watching. The problem is usually that computer effects-filled action sequences have completely replaced characters, leaving me with little to latch onto. Mortal Engines is the latest such example. Beyond the very broad strokes, I can’t really tell you what this movie is about. That’s a problem.
It’s sometime in the distant future (somewhere around the year 3,200, from what I can gather) and cities have now become mobilized vehicles that move like tanks. The area outside of the mobile cities is a vacant wasteland. We follow London, now a massive predator tank, as it hunts down smaller cities for resources. Some guy (played by Hugo Weaving) is scheming to take over London and use an ancient weapon to blast into Asia (which is, interestingly, protecting itself with a huge wall). Meanwhile, some girl is planning to stop him because he killed her mom. She’s also being chased by a terminator-like robot. Not sure why.
I have so many questions. How did the world arrive at this point? Who built the mobile cities? Why is that guy hell-bent on waging war on Asia? Why is that terminator so determined to kill her when she has really done nothing against it? Why is that sub-plot even in the movie? Why have Paramount’s lawyers not realized that this movie steals from The Terminator’s musical score? What happened to the other major European cities (Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc.)? When I first saw the trailer for this, I assumed that we would be seeing London fighting those other major cities and the movie would be like a cross between Mad Max and the Twisted Metal video games with inspirations from Howl’s Moving Castle. That sounded cool. I got none of that. Now, I don’t need an entire prequel movie to explain these things. Judging from the Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts movies, that would probably be 12 movies worth of explanation. But I need something. I know nothing about this world or the characters in it. I don’t know what they are doing or why and that makes it damn difficult to pay attention to.
Here is what happened with this movie: Producer and co-writer Peter Jackson bought the rights to the source novel in 2009 and the deal lasted for 10 years. If you put your thinking cap on and glance at the calendar, you will realize that that means that this movie was released about two weeks before the rights expired. The film didn’t go into production until 2016. With a film of this magnitude, there are years’ worth of pre-production that must be done to design the sets, costumes, special effects, etc. Then, once it has been filmed, it takes thousands of hours of work to do the editing and the special effects. For example, all of the big summer movies for next year already wrapped filming months ago and are now in post-production. It takes that long. This is my way of explaining that this movie was rushed as fuck. They spent millions on pre-production work, realized that they needed to start filming it to make the deadline and just made something to avoid wasting all that money spent on the pre-production. They had all of these designs prepped and ready to go and had to use them. You know what can be thrown together much more quickly than designs and effects? A script. The script is the afterthought of this film. It is a ton of computer effects and action setpieces with a script that was poorly thrown together around those elements.
Characters and story are, consequently, secondary in this film because the script was clearly built around the effects. It should be the other way around. There is no world-building here and the characters are completely forgettable. Aside from the plot holes that I mentioned, there is just no compelling reason given for me to give a shit about any of this and there is no sense that this is taking place as part of a broader story. The motives of the characters are incredibly vague and the performances are completely uninteresting as a result. The only actor that I recognized is Hugo Weaving, but I can’t even criticize the performances because the actors had so little to work with. The characters here are just vague caricatures of characters from a million other young adult series (Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, etc.).
What frustrates me about movies like this is that I really want to like them. Every time a film like this bombs (and it fucking bombed hard), the lesson for Hollywood is that audiences will only accept big-budget movies from established brands. It was the same thing with last year’s awful Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. But you know what Mortal Engines and Valerian also both have in common? They are both forgettable, poorly-written, convoluted garbage. It’s isn’t the material that’s necessarily the problem; it’s that film producers (unlike television producers) haven’t caught onto the fact that characters and story are more impactful that $100 million worth of bullshit computer effects. Or maybe I’m just old. Get off my fucking lawn and take your stupid mobile cities with you.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines_(film)#/media/File:Mortal_Engines_teaser_poster.jpg
