Written by Tom Moore
Based on the best-selling novel series by Phillip Reeves, Mortal Engines promises to be the next great epic adventure from Peter Jackson. Jackson, who directed iconic films like The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, took on a producing and writing role for Mortal Engines and it can be assumed that many hoped his story-telling and excellent characters could be seen throughout this film.
Unfortunately, Mortal Engines is incredibly far from the word “epic” and falls much more in line with the word “mediocre.” The film starts off strong as it explores the world of moving cities and how this all came to be. There are actually some fun moments when looking into the city of London’s museum and seeing things like Minions be claimed as ancient American artifacts and the iPhone being called a thing of the past is actually pretty funny. I also think that the aesthetic of the film is kind of interesting as it mixes futuristic and apocalyptic quite nicely. Everyone’s clothes and every building have either an older English style or machinery look.
However, once the film starts to follow its main characters, it loses any sort of personality. Every performance feels one-note and everyone is just sidelined into one way of delivering recycled lines. Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) literally feels monotone the entire time and even her backstory of desiring revenge for her mother’s death gets kind of lost in the shuffle. Her new sidekick, Tom (Robert Sheehan), is basically there to not only give Hester a sidekick, but for everyone else to make fun of because he is from London. Hester’s main enemy, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), just has the personality type of evil and doesn’t leave a lasting impression, which doesn’t feel right to say about any character that Weaving plays.
These three get mixed in with the rest of the forgettable characters, which are just made up of adventure film tropes, to create a cast that legitimately leaves a lot to be desired. Really, outside of Weaving, the film has no sort of recognizable names or faces that could at least give audiences a little bit to care about even with the film’s predictable and overused dialogue. Frankly, without having seen the film and having iMDB open next to me, I probably couldn’t even tell you most of these actors’ or characters’ names.
Also something that bugs me, is that apparently Stephan Lang, of Avatar and Don’t Breathe fame, is in Mortal Engines and I frankly had no idea. I probably had no idea because his character, Shrike, feels incredibly unimportant and I was so distracted the whole time by the fact that he looked like Doctor Doom from Fant4stic. It’s worth mentioning because I think it speaks volumes to how the film uses its characters. An actor, that I usually love to see, is totally under-used here and couldn’t even interest me to care.
As a whole, the film is just plain boring and every time it tries to introduce something new to the world or story, I just became less and less interested. The opening literally just feels like on-the-nose introductions for characters you will never care about and the only time the massive size of the film and the CGI action sequences made my jaw drop was when I was yawning.
For fans of Jackson’s work, Mortal Engines captures the size of one of his films, but ultimately lacks the substance of something that Jackson’s name would be associated with. I think the best way to sum up this review, is to end with a quote from a conversation between a husband and wife as I left the theater.
Husband: “That was alright.”
Wife: “You know, I usually like the movies you pick, but that was trash.”
Rating: 3/10
