Mortal Engines ★★★★
WHAT an opening to Mortal Engines. I don’t think i’ve seen a better one since Mad Max: Fury Road.
The first 15 minutes had me thinking this might be the best blockbuster of 2018.
Ultimately, Mission Impossible: Fallout still has that title covered, but Mortal Engines almost manages to remain at full-throttle for its entire running time.
Imagine the city of London as a massive vehicle, lumbering across a wasteland terrain on the look-out for other populations on wheels to conquer.
After spying a smaller, also mobile, African city, London gathers steam and momentum, setting off in pursuit. The smaller vehicle, still even the size of a skyscraper, is more nimble and evasive, but is simply delaying the inevitable capture.
At the same time, a lone assassin leaps from one moving city to the other, intent on tracking down and murdering her arch-nemesis.
After you’ve taken a breath, the credits appear and you can settle into some exposition and character development. But only for a time, as Peter Jackson protoge Christian Rivers constantly keep the action moving and your eyes riveted to the screen.
Mortal Engines is set in a post-apolayptic world a thousand years into the future, decimated by nuclear weapons used in a ‘Sixty Minute War’ that left the Earth’s crust forever altered and mankind vowing to eschew all technology that could be misused to repeat these mistakes.
The world is broadly divided in two: the West is dominated by huge cities on wheels, the ‘Mortal Engines’, that must hunt down and tear apart other cities to feed their constant need for fuel and human resources; in the East, protected by a massive wall, are the populations that have chosen to remain static populations living in close proximity and relative harmony.
London is the greatest of Mortal Engines and, at the behest of one of its leaders, Thaddeus Valentine, has moved away from its traditional grounds. Opposed to London are members of the ‘Anti-Traction League’ determined to stop the encroachment of the vociferous, all-destroying machines.
Valentine has far more sinister reasons for pushing London into new and unknown lands, hidden from the rest of the population in St Paul’s Cathedral high atop the mammoth city. He is opposed by the head of the Anti-Traction League, Anna Fang, and the mysterios loner, Hester Shaw, who has personal reasons for targeting Valentine, and naive Londoner Tom Natsworthy, who finds himself an unwitting ally after his own encounter with Valentine.
Lord of the Rings and Hobbit director Peter Jackson may not be at the helm of Mortal Engines, but his stamp is all over it. He helped produce and write the film, annointed Rivers as director and marshalled the full creative force of his many New Zealand collaborators and the entire Weta Digital team.
The result is a visual feast with a camera that swirls, ducks and weaves amongst massive sets with astonishingly seamless intergration of live actors and a thundering music score and sound effects. There is literally something to capture your eye in every scene, courtesy of set decoration and costume design and every cent of the $100 million budget is up on the screen.
The film features an international trio of actors who never appear over-awed by the experience of performring admist a mammoth, digital fantasy – Icelander Hera Hilmar as Heather, Irishman Robert Sheehan as Tom and American Jihae as Fang – while Australia’s Hugo Weaving is Valentine.
Of course, the original story is credit to author Phillip Reeve who wrote the series of four novels upon which the film is based. At my screening I overhead a couple of book readers saying they were disappointed that the film was rushed, had tried to pack too much into one film and missed many elements.
Fair points, but what the film will also achieve I think is a desire among many to read the books, such is the level of imagination and wonder in the visuals.
A final word of warning. There are some fairly violent sequences making the film unsuitable for some younger children.