The lions are adorable!
Mortal Engines (2017) took a fascinating concept and made it … mundane. In this post-apocalyptic world, mobile cities prey on each other, rolling along on their monstrous treads, looking for anything to feed their mysterious and never explained power source at their hearts. Smaller cities, burgs, and towns are meat and potatoes to the big ones, and London, having crossed the dried up channel after cleaning out England, is now on the prowl, under the guidance of the Lord Mayor and his deputy, Thaddeus Valentine.
While prey are mostly sought for incineration into energy, old tech they may carry is also of interest. We’re on the downside of the technology mountain now, and some of those old-time gizmos can be salvaged and made useful by the inhabitants of these parasitical cities.
Even into useful, but forbidden, quantum energy weapons.
Valentine collects old tech in secret hope of building a weapon that’ll make London the master of the world, but his insatiable lust leads to an assassination attempt by the citizen of a recently ingested town, a knife attack that -ahem- barely phases him. In the subsequent chase, Tom Natsworthy, a young tech salvage worker, nearly catches the assassin, but on the edge of a city precipice, the assassin says something to him, which he mindlessly repeats to Valentine –
And over he goes, out of London and into the outlands, at the hand of Valentine. He awakes to find himself being scavenged by none other than the assassin.
Between Tom’s need to get back to London, and discovering the assassin’s motivations, we’re exposed to the brutal depths to which mankind has sunk. It turns out Municipal Darwinism[1] doesn’t have a long-term future, as the prey reproduce, if at all, abnormally slowly, and the appetites of the bigger cities are voracious. It would seem these mobile cities are doomed.
But London must go on, and Valentine’s weapon from the old, genocidal times is the one thing that can let London find new hunting grounds, because the wall shielding the land of Shan Gou has been impenetrable for centuries. Indeed, the wreckage of failed assaults by other cities is a theme of the era. But the riches of Shan Gou are legendary, and London is so, so hungry…
And so, as Tom and the assassin scramble to survive the slavers, Shan Gou agents, and the assassin’s murderous stepfather, London closes in on Shan Gou and municipal anarchy.
Even this light plot overview sounds exciting, and yet, it’s not. The problem lies in the characters, none of which are particularly well-developed or even particularly logical. Valentine may be power-hungry, or a super-patriot, or simply insane, but we can’t tell, and he’s a little dull. Another problem is a reliance on national stereotypes. Tom, for example, is almost iconic in his British blundering, while the primary Shan Gou agent, Anna Fang, of Asian heritage, has admirable fighting skills reminiscent of certain Chinese fighting styles. And then there was this Brit slaving crew who just had to have their tea…
A big, gauche monster of a flying city, awaiting its butterfly.
But balancing these negatives are the visual effects. This is classic steampunk, through and through. A mobile city may sound and look like madness, but off it roars, full of grime, people, treads, and spikes used to capture the prey. Then there’s the city in the sky, Airhaven, deliciously beautiful and ugly at the same time, impractical, a doomed flower of the air. The airplanes docked at it, too, creaking, groaning, it’s almost impossible that they can fly, but who cares? They’re gorgeously imaginative, dirty, groaning in their clashes with reality.
But speaking of, what are we to make of this stepfather of the assassin? Those glowing green eyes and creepy need for affection may have a certain ambiance, but in the end he feels like a barnacle stuck on this creaking hulk of a plot. In fact, far too much of this plot’s elements are more like barnacles snatched off the shelf, rather than organic elements that hold hidden meanings.
In the end, perhaps the biggest problem in this movie is the allocation of resources by the producers. The graphics people must have received the gargantuan portion of the funds, while the writers were the mice looking for crumbs in the pantry.
It’s too bad. It could have been so much better.
1 Municipal Darwinism is a lovely phrase, but I fear it lacks a future, too.
