Mortal Engines (2018)
Director: Christian Rivers
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
Based on: Mortal Engines (2001) by Philip Reeve
Production Year: 2018
Country: United States / New Zealand
Genre: Post-apocalyptic, Steampunk, Science Fiction
Running Time: 128 minutes
Cast: Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Patrick Malahide, Stephen Lang

I went into Mortal Engines with low expectations and still managed to be disappointed. This is a film that mistakes scale for substance and expense for imagination. It is a useful demonstration of how an interesting premise can be smothered to death by the American film industry.

Peter Jackson began his career making low-budget and genuinely enjoyable horror films. Braindead remains a masterpiece of bad taste done well. From there, he graduated to making Tolkien’s unreadably long novels into unwatchably long films. I did try to watch one of these at Christmas with my grandmother. She survived by falling asleep during the second hour, I by replying to messages Dr Gabb was sending me from his care home for the criminally insane. Either was preferable to the cinematic equivalent of watching paint set.

Mortal Engines is what happens when the habits learned on those bloated Tolkien adaptations are applied to a story that needed restraint and thought. The structural problem is obvious: the film tries to compress far too much material into far too little time. It should probably have been about twelve hours longer. This would not have made it better, but it might at least have allowed its various sub-plots to exist as more than hurried cameos.

The most promising of these concerns the half-robot, half-reanimated corpse who raises one of the female characters. There are moments here of genuine warmth and even pathos. For a few minutes, the film almost pauses long enough to let the audience care. Had this relationship been the centre of a smaller, cheaper film, it might even have worked. Instead, it is rushed past like scenery in a computer game, sacrificed to keep the explosions coming on schedule.

The main plot, unfortunately, is squandered with still greater profligacy. The film is set in a future where London has become a vast mobile fortress, roaming the world on wheels, capturing and devouring smaller and weaker communities. This is called “municipal Darwinism,” and it is an idea with real allegorical potential. London is ruled by a conservative aristocracy that conquers and exploits, but behaves tolerably well to those it conquers and exploits once they submit. This internal balance is then disrupted by an outsider who has wormed his way into the ruling class.

This villain despises the old elite. He sees London’s people and resources as nothing but instruments for his own ambition. He occupies St Paul’s Cathedral and converts it into a laboratory for his own corrupted experiments. His aim is not to continue municipal Darwinism, but to replace it with outright world conquest for the benefit of himself and his faction. If this destroys London, so much the worse for London.

Anyone with half a brain can see what this could have been. It might have served as a sharp allegory for what has happened to England – something that, in an age of paranoid speech codes and harsh penalties for dissidence, is best explained by allegory. Here, it could have been an uncomfortable and effective allegory.

Instead, it is drowned in overblown and garish special effects, and the sort of visual clutter that exists to distract the audience from the fact that nothing of interest is happening. The performances are largely irrelevant, not because the actors are incapable, but because the script gives them nothing coherent to play. Hugo Weaving does what he can, which is to say he growls impressively and looks bored.

The film cost an obscene amount of money and reportedly lost around $150 million. It deserved to lose much more. Financial failure is not always a sign of artistic merit, but in this case it is a small, reassuring proof that there are limits to how much rubbish can be forced down the public’s throat. Mortal Engines is not merely a bad film. It is an instructive one: a monument to artistic incompetence, and the belief that spectacle can substitute for thought.

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