Mortal Engines review: a mechanical, soulless dystopian theme park ride to nowhere
Dir: Christian Rivers. Cast: Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, JiHAE, Stephen Lang, Patrick Malahide, Leila George, Frankie Adams. 12A cert, 128 mins
Mortal Engines, a Young Adult steampunk epic from the Lord of the Rings stable, puts London on wheels, advancing voraciously across Europe in a curious inverse-of-Brexit nightmare after global apocalypse has struck. This motorised metropolis, with St Paul’s poking out the top of it and various landmarks jammed into its flanks, rolls clanking and heaving across the continent with a giant maw agape in its front, designed to hoover up other machines for parts, and indeed people.
Society has become neo-Victorian and neo-imperialist, with the dastardly ruling classes concocting various moustache-twirling plans to enslave and weaponise the populace. Patrick Malahide, swooshing about in a red velvet cloak, is about as non-Sadiq-Khan a London mayor as it’s possible to imagine.
Arch-baddie Thaddeus Valentine is played, though, by Hugo Weaving, an actor who has chewed his way through so much green screen as a villain by now, it’s a wonder effects departments are even able to function.
Adapting the 2001 novel by British author Philip Reeve are the trio who tackled Tolkien: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. But directing falls to Christian Rivers, the Middle-earth effects supervisor who has storyboarded all of Jackson’s films since Braindead in 1992.
Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.
As the heroine, a vengeful fugitive called Hester Shaw, Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar has much the most elaborate arc to play. In flashback, we get the full explanation for the long scar diagonally crossing her face, making the character a great corrective, at least on paper, to the habitual blockbuster habit of only giving disfigurements to villains. That chalks up a point for sure in the representation column. It’s all the more frustrating that she never comes to life.
Young Hester, as we discover, was raised by the last survivor of an undead cyborg battalion, a Terminator-ish figure called Shrike (Stephen Lang), who comes back to hunt her down with evil green eyes – chillingly, at first – and then absolutely will not stop until every Arnie cliché has been hammered into the ground.
The problem is that young Hester, and older, hardened Hester as played by Hilmar, somehow don’t meet in the middle: remote, fearsome, and humourless, the latter is more a gestural heroine we’re stuck with than a genuine one we care about. Narrowly failing to assassinate Weaving’s character for murdering her mother, she’s flung out of ambulant London into the barren wastes, along with a low-class apprentice historian called Tom (Robert Sheehan), who has unknowingly and ill-advisedly stepped in.
Bustling through its world-building for a reel or two, the film holds your attention with its colour and scale, but it has a theme-park-y quality closer to Jackson’s cluttered Hobbit flicks than his best work on The Fellowship of the Ring. A quivering terror of travelling on the congested, still-extant London underground is invoked near the start, but when we get down there, it’s not a fraction as hellish as 2018's Victoria at rush hour. Missed tricks like this abound as the film brightly clatters along.
While you wouldn’t expect the brutal, primal motives of a Mad Max: Fury Road – this shares that film’s composer and plenty of design prompts – in something aimed at families, the hush and wonder of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky or Howl’s Moving Castle are never possible under the din. Borrowings from both ends leave this vision untethered, and it’s the human factor that feels wispiest of all.
Characters such as Weaving’s daughter (Leila George) flit in and out of the story, forgotten often enough that we wonder what they’re meant to add; the Korean singer JiHAE has an imposing but impersonal role as a Rogue-Squadron-esque resistance pilot called Anna Fang.
The closest thing to a Han Solo here is Sheehan, who gives handily the film’s most rounded performance, reacting quick-wittedly without hamming things up, and injecting a sense of matinee spirit and fun as often as he can. Wolfishly eager, good at losing his cool, he’s everything Mortal Engines wanted to be. It’s just sad he has no conspirators in this derring-do – as if he’s the only one who figured out his purpose, flung the script sky-high, and came in raring to go.
