Mortal Engines is an incredibly bland film from the big-time director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson. Mortal Engines fails as an epic adventure because of the watered-down nature of its delivery. While watching this film, there were certainly times I wanted to take a tip from the main characters and drive myself away from it.
Mortal Engines tells the tale of a dystopian future, where society has been in ruins through nuclear war and giant moving caravans of “cities” travel through the wastelands. London is the powerhouse of it all and roves the land searching for smaller cities to consume. This bizarre world is an interesting concept, but never really delivers the world-building that it deserves.
In all of this chaos, we meet Hester Shaw, the stoic lead of the film. She is a conflicted woman, who is seeking the balance between numbness and revenge while fighting to see her goals come to fruition. All of this may sound intriguing, but in reality, it is never fleshed out properly, and there’s no great arc to her character. The surrounding cast has the same curse. All of them are stereotypes, and typical to the genre. No one really stuck out, even Hugo Weaving, who I was hoping could flesh out the cast.
I’ll speak a bit about the positives of the film. I think the world had a large amount of potential. I don’t think the execution of the film was catastrophic, but it fell right under the line of “opening success”. I think none of the actors bombed terribly, or that the CGI was horrific. I just think that nothing clicked in the way it was supposed to, and it let to an agonizingly mediocre film.
The intentions, passions, and pursuit of each character felt weak, and that there was not enough attention put into them. In a big lush world of interesting scenery, a movie can still feel incredibly hollow. That would be my main critique and critical view of this film.
Mortal Engines is an interesting concept that fell apart at the starting line and never quite recovered. I wanted the best for this movie, but in the end, it delivered such a bland experience I couldn’t enjoy it. I’d say Mortal Engines is maybe worth a watch if free on a streaming service, but I wouldn’t spend the time and money to see this in a theater.
