Mortal Engines (2018)
Directed by Christian Rivera
Written by Fran Walsh, Phillippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
Starring Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Lang
Release Date December 14th, 2018
Published December 14th, 2018
Mortal Engines are a pretty big mess. It’s not terrible but this Peter Jackson produced CGI epic is lacking in numerous ways. Aside from a grand ambition, it definitely has that, Mortal Engines lacking in the kind of engaging, compelling characters that are needed to compete with the massive and rather uninteresting CGI machinery on display. The stars of Mortal Engines are not the actors but the massive machines and those machines, though impressively rendered, aren’t nearly engaging enough to make a good movie.
Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar stars in The Mortal Engines as Hester Shaw. Hester is seeking revenge against the man who murdered her mother, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), chief weapons manufacturer for the roving city of London. What do I mean by ‘roving city’ you ask? In this universe, cities are not stuck in one place. Following a massive, apocalyptic event cities became mobile, rebuilding themselves atop massive wheels and running down other cities to steal their resources.
Hester is aboard a small mining city when London attacks it and takes hold of it. Getting on board London, Hester gets her chance to kill Valentine right away and manages to stab him before a kid named Tom (Robert Sheehan) tackles her and then chases her off the edge of the city. Before she goes, Hester tells Tom her secret about Valentine and when Tom tells Valentine what he knows, he kicks Tom off the edge of London.
Forced into the wild, Hester and Tom team up in their attempt to stay alive while Valentine survives his stabbing and sets off after someone who wants Hester dead as much as he does. Shrike is a CGI character with an incredible back story and a far more interesting storyline as a reanimated warrior machine, like a steampunk Terminator. Hester had made Shrike a promise after he saved her life and now he wants to kill her to collect on her debt
Had Mortal Engines settled on the story of Shrike and Hester, it would be one hell of a movie. Shrike is the most interesting and well built character in the movie. He’s incredibly dangerous and volatile but he has this shred of a memory that keeps him tethered to his former humanity. It was that shred that led him to keep Hester alive when he found her near death following the murder of her mother and to raise her from the age of 8 until London arrived on former European shores and she set out for revenge.
The flashbacks we see to young Hester and Shrike are more compelling than anything remotely related to Hugo Weaving’s quest for power or the neutered romance between Tom and Hester which couldn’t be more perfunctory if the studio had announced the romantic plot in a press release. Hilmar and Sheehan have the chemistry of a brother and sister who don’t particularly know or care for each other.
Make a movie about Shrike and Hester that is part Leon The Professional and part steampunk Terminator Judgment Day and you’ve got yourself quite a movie. Unfortunately, the movie we get isn’t nearly as interesting. The characters do grow on you a little as you get closer to the end of Mortal Engine but there is never a moment where they stand apart from or above the monstrous and inhuman CGI.
Even the most skillful computer generated image cannot compete with our connection to another human being. Say what you will about the creation of Gollum in Lord of the Rings or Caesar in the modern Planet of the Apes, they are nothing without the humanity of Andy Serkis behind them. We’re supposed to be impressed by the massive moving cities and the bizarre airships and weapons of mass destruction but without characters we care about around them, it’s like watching a very expensive live action cartoon, minus the laughs.
I have nothing against the young actors in Mortal Engines, they do what they can with these thin characters. The problem is director Christian Rivers who assumes we care about these characters without giving us a reason to care. Rivers has a habit of introducing characters as if their faces matter to the moment. When we meet Tom and we meet Hester, we get reveals of their faces as if we are supposed to recognize them but we don’t.
It’s not the actors fault, they are just not known to most of us watching this movie. Perhaps audiences in Iceland will cheer when Ms Hilmar’s face is revealed for the first time but most Americans will be trying to place her. Sheehan has the bland good looks of an English Justin Long but he lacks any of that actor's modest charisma and likability. One actor, who I can’t even find in the IMDB cast list, is given a reveal as if we are absolutely supposed to recognize him, the camera lingers on his face and he kind of looks like actors we’ve seen before but he isn’t and we're left to wonder.
I don’t understand many of the choices made regarding Mortal Engines but most especially, I don’t understand the title. I have seen the entire movie and I assumed at some point the title would come to make a semblance of sense. But no, at no point does anyone bother to give a reason for the movie to be called Mortal Engines. I could make something up perhaps but I honestly don’t care enough about this movie to try that hard.
Mortal Engines are far from terrible. It’s competent and passes by well enough. It’s expensive and the expense is all on the screen in the high end CGI but there isn’t anything compelling enough to recommend you spend money on it. The characters are thin and dull, the romance is DOA and the action is of a kind you could get in any of a dozen movies you might actually enjoy and connect with.
The biggest sin of Mortal Engines however, is creating a better movie within their bad movie and leaving us so unsatisfied as we dream of what could have been. No joke, that Shrike and Hester movie had so much potential. Shrike is the best character in Mortal Engines and he’s not even real. He’s given more human qualities and dimension than the male romantic lead and his tragic backstory combined with Hester’s has a depth and complexity the rest of Mortal Engines can’t begin to evoke. I hate Mortal Engines for not being about Shrike and Hester.
