Mortal Engines

In a piece of meta-textualizing that is as damning as it is ironic, Mortal Engines, about a far-distant dystopian future in which many cities made up of thousands of steampunk spare parts, have become enormous, mobile machines, like giant pirate galleons swooping over the Atlantic, looking for smaller colonies to "ingest" and absorb, is, in of itself, a film painfully patched together from the spare parts of other, far more successfully entertaining films. To suggest the seams and gerryrigging are depressingly obvious deeply undersells just how devoid of original thought it appears to be: In the distant future, everything old is new again, and worn out in the process.

I tried to track the exact moment the film went from being dimly watchable to full-bore tedium, and I'm pretty sure it comes shortly after the lone interesting character subplot -- which, naturally, features a robot -- is dispensed with and a helium-based cloud city comes crashing to the ground engulfed in flames, and just before the evil, power-mad mastermind of mobile London (depressingly played by Hugo Weaving, as a special favor to Peter Jackson, who produced this mess) reinstates his doomsday super weapon with which he intends to decimate the Shield Wall, and finally infiltrate one of the nirvana-like static cities that lies just beyond it. At that point, I knew that what was coming was almost certainly going to be a CGI-lead bacchanalia, and also that it would be interminable.

We are a millennium in the future, where the aforementioned cities are marauding around what used to be Europe, even though people look and act precisely as they would in present-day idiotic young-adult-inspired drivel, and our current electronica is lovingly referred to as "ancient tech" (notably, not a single iPhone or tablet seems functional anymore, but Twinkies are still perfectly edible, one of the few wisps of what passes for cleverness). I desperately don't want to have to spend a lot of time introducing you to a bunch of characters who are utterly dispensable, but I'll try to be brief: There's Hester (Hera Hilmer), a hard-edged young woman, dedicated to killing the evil leader of London, Thaddeus Valentine (Weaving), who killed her mother when she was very young; the young, blitheringly irritating historian, Tom (Robert Sheehan), sporting dewy eyes and a Goo Goo Dolls haircut, who at first mistakenly prevents Hester from killing Thaddeus when she has the chance and then has to go on the run with her, because ... that's precisely the way these narratives always proceed.

There's also Thaddeus's sweet, innocent daughter, Katherine (Leila George), slowly learning the truth about her father; Anna (Jihae), a fierce leader of the anti-tractionists (sigh), who exists just long enough to provide the only amusing action sequence; and, finally, the only actually moving character in the whole misbegotten enterprise, Shrike (Stephen Lang) an old-school robot that at first appears to have a death warrant out for Hester, before we realize his actual place in her life.

All these morons run around chasing each other, often on top of giant spinning wheels and grinding gears, until its revealed that one of them actually has the means to stop the evil Thaddeus from consolidating his fearsome power. Whereupon in a blatant ripoff of the climactic battle over the Deathstar in Star Wars, everyone rallies around the main characters and die in the service of keeping them alive so they can destroy the enemy, make peace with everyone and sail off together on a silky voyage (forgetting all the carnage, and all their friends that just died to get them there in the first place).

To give but one excruciating example of the irritation-quotient of these "heroes," take Tom (and while we're here, the film is populated with a "Thaddeus," a "Pandora," and a "Chudleigh," but we'll just take "Tom" because "Todd" and "Bill" seemed too pedestrian). At the beginning of the film's fiery climax -- a shrieking howling mess of noise and poor effects, but still -- with all the heroes furiously rushing to their airships to tangle with Thaddeus and his doomsday device, Tom takes a long few moments to ogle and then don a fighter pilot's leather jacket, simply because he'd always wanted to be an aviator. No, seriously, no rush, doomsday device is charging up and thousands of people will surely die, but you take all the time you need to fulfill your childhood fantasies. We'll wait.

Did I mention Star Wars before? Because that's only one of the obvious source materials for this dystopian dunderheadedness: Take parts of The Terminator, Mad Max, The Matrix, and, God help us, Divergent, puree them in a food processor, and serve cold in a dirty bowl, like much of the food of the future in this film, which looks either green and slimy, or like a gelatinous tube of gefilte fish drubbed out of a rusty can.

The last third of the film where the filmmakers drop all pretense to coherence and just try to bludgeon you into acceptance (all the dialogue becomes short, declarative commands: "Look after her!", "Prepare to fire!", and "I did what I had to do!") with vastly too many CGI effects, deafening sound, and Jackson's cross-cutting editing style, attempting to mine action out of the swirling chaos on the screen becomes a torture test of your senses. It's the kind of film I imagine big studios kept hoping Terry Gilliam was going to make with their money, but would have made him jump off a bridge in the process.

MovieStyle on 12/14/2018