Mortal Engines

Previously in Danger UXB, I’ve thought quite a lot about questions of risk and acquiring IP. In The 13^th Warrior, the risk appeared low until spiralling costs destroyed any chance of the film making a profit. The IP for John Carter could not find a production company willing to take the plunge until Andrew Stanton persuaded Disney. I have no idea why Disney thought anyone needed a new Lone Ranger adaptation and the market agreed.

Mortal Engines and John Carter have a lot in common. Both were helmed by directors new to live-action movies. Both were based on popular books. Both films cast relative unknowns in the lead roles. Both films were passion projects for the writers who adapted them. Both of them died ugly at the box office.

Mortal Engines is based on the book of the same name, the first in a series published in 2001 and written by Philip Reeve. Back in 2001, Harry Potter was still a huge deal, what with Goblet of Fire being published the year before and Philosopher’s Stone making its cinematic bow the same year. YA was hot, hot, hot! Mortal Engines was written for young readers, much like Harry Potter, but aimed at a higher age group. Its protagonists, Tom and Hester, are 15 years old.

Unlike Harry Potter, Reeve had originally intended to develop his story as sci-fi for adults, until a publisher requested he rewrite it for a younger audience. I haven’t read any of the Mortal Engines quartet myself, but it seems a lot of children did and the book was nominated for, and won, a host of prizes.

One man who did read the book was a certain Peter Jackson and, starting in 2009, he and his collaborators began development of an adaptation, even while Jackson was hurting the entire world with The Hobbit movies. In 2016, the adaptation got greenlit. A long-time associate of Jackson, Christian Rivers, a man with an impressive resume of special effects work at Weta Digital, took the director’s chair. He directed the screenplay written by Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens, the trio who’d adapted Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

The film is set in the future, a thousand years after the Sixty-Minute War ended civilisation using a weapon called MEDUSA. Humanity has since made efforts to recover, going so far as to rebuild cities as giant roving settlements called ‘Traction Cities’. Chief among these is London, which crosses continents in search of smaller towns to consume for their resources.

The story opens with London in hot pursuit of a small town. It succeeds in its hunt, absorbing and destroying the town. Tom (Robert Sheehan), a wannabe pilot turned apprentice historian, is sent to the lower levels of London to oversee the search for ‘Old Tech’, which is greatly valued. While there, he meets head of the Guild of Historians, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving). Valentine greets and welcomes the former residents of the consumed town, except among them is a young woman, Hester (Hera Hilmar), who stabs Valentine in an assassination attempt. She flees, Tom chases after her – I don’t know why and neither does the story – and stops her from escaping. She reveals that Valentine killed her mother before she escapes out of a trash chute. Valentine appears and Tom asks him if what Hester said was true, and Valentine boots him into the chute too.

Hester and Tom find themselves outside the city. Tom pesters Hester and they end up escaping a group of hunting scavengers in a weird vehicle crewed by weird people. These people lock them into a cell and are taking them to be sold as slaves. As they travel, Hester tells Tom Valentine killed Hester’s mother to acquire a piece of Old Tech. Hester managed to escape and has been hunting for Valentine for revenge. Tom tries to help Hester escape, but she refuses and so Tom decides slavery is the life he’s always longed to live, too.

Honestly. Time for a tangent. Have you ever watched Pitch Meeting on Youtube? They’re humorous dissections of big-name movies and their strange or unsettling story choices. There’s a Writer and a Producer. The Writer pitches ideas to the producer, describing the plot, and when the Producer asks the Writer why something stupid, improbable or implausible happens, the Writer says “Unclear!” or “Hey, shut up!” and the Producer is good with it.

Why have cities become tracked monstrosities? Unclear! Why does Tom chase Hester? Unclear! Why is there a vehicle in the exact location to rescue Tom from scavengers? Unclear! Why does Tom choose to follow Hester into slavery? Unclear! Anyway, back to the story.

In the meantime, Valentine has gone off to some oil-rig-based prison to talk to a murderous cyborg called Shrike (Stephen Lang). Shrike really hates Hester because she broke a promise, so Valentine decides to destroy the entire prison to free Shrike so Shrike can go and kill Hester.

Hester and Tom arrive at the slave market. When Hester is put up for sale, infamous Anti-Traction League agent Anna Fang (Jihae) turns up just in time to buy Hester (how did she know where Hester was? Unclear!) but after fighting off the slavers, Shrike also shows up (how did he know where Hester was? Unclear!) and Tom and Hester fight him off to escape with Anna.

While escaping with Anna, Hester reveals that she was saved and raised by Shrike. Shrike is big mad because Hester promised to let Shrike turn her into a cyborg. Anna takes Tom and Hester to the floating city, Airhaven, where Anti-Traction League members interrogate Tom and Hester. Tom realises that Hester’s mother was killed for a piece of Old Tech connected to MEDUSA. Valentine has secretly been rebuilding a MEDUSA system in St Paul’s Cathedral and plans to use it to assault the peaceful realm of Shan Guo and destroy their shield wall to take all their resources.

Alarms ring out across Airhaven. Shrike has tracked them down (how? Unclear!) and managed to get aboard (how? Unclear!). He beats the snot out of Anna’s gang and Airhaven starts exploding (why? Unclear!) and Shrike is about to kill Tom until Hester begs him not to. Shrike relents, because Hester loves Tom (why? Unclear!) and dies from his wounds.

Hester and Tom go with Anna and her gang of sky pirates to the Shield Wall, which has a city built into it (why? Unclear!) and prepare to defend it from London, now a fully armed and operational battle station. Hester realises her mother’s amulet, bestowed upon her by Shrike before he died, in fact contains the exact crash drive device needed to deactivate and destroy MEDUSA. Valentine uses MEDUSA to attack and damage the wall and the sky pirate gang heroically attack London to buy time for Hester to shut down MEDUSA and confront Valentine who is…her father! Then Tom attacks and destroys London’s core just in time to prevent London from crashing into the wall, crushing Valentine in the process.

So. Let’s be upfront and honest. Why did this film, with a total budget for production and marketing of around $150 million, only take $83 million worldwide? Easy. It’s boring, illogical and derivative shit.

Alright, I’ll take a breath. I’ll say what I know I’ll be saying in every single one of these articles: there are things to enjoy in this movie. The special effects are really rather good, and that is due to the fact Weta Digital did them, alongside some incredible production design. This film always looks wonderful. London, as a traction engine, is remarkable. There’s a funky insectoid crawler, the Scuttlebug, which is so cool I’d watch a whole movie based on its adventures. Such vision, such detail. Rivers’ background in SFX was of great benefit. Praise is due and duly given.

Rivers also does a decent job as a director of actors. Nobody gives a bad performance. Hera Hilmar is fine as Hester and Robert Sheeran fine as Tom. Hugo Weaving has a jolly old time chewing the scenery as Valentine and Korean singer-actress Jihae plays Anna as quite the bad-ass. Stephen Lang is entirely wasted under all the CG which coats him to create Shrike, sad to say.

The action, and this is a movie rich in action, is a mixed bag. The opening fifteen minutes are pretty damn cool and some of the fight sequences are solid. The ending battle is visually attractive but utterly unoriginal. Imagine, if you will, the opening phase of the Battle of Yavin from A New Hope and you have the opening phase of the end battle here, outnumbered fliers attacking a huge death machine, you know the score. The sequence where Hester has her climactic fight with Valentine and discovers – DUN DUN DUN! – Hester, he is your father, rips off Luke and Vader’s fight at the end of Empire Strikes Back. The sequence when Tom flies his aircraft into the heart of London stinks of Lando Calrissian attacking the heart of the unfinished Death Star at the end of Return of the Jedi. The Mortal Engines version of all three sequences are dull and obvious. Homage and pastiche are all well and good, but the onus is on the imitator to do something new or exciting with the source material and Mortal Engines fails.

I’m not going to blame Rivers for this. I hope he goes on to make more movies. I’m not going to blame Reeve for the source material. It is full of interesting ideas. Nope. I blame Jackson, Boyens and Walsh for the mess they made of the screenplay.

In my summary of the plot, I made the comment “Unclear!” eleven times. When there are eleven instances of plot-critical moments missing the required narrative logic, something very very wrong has happened in the writing process. Either nobody on the production team cared that most of the connective tissue was missing from the plot, or there’s 30 minutes of essential material left on the cutting room floor. The result is Mortal Engines feels half-assed in the worst way.

It extends to weak and lazy characterization. I don’t particularly mind that Valentine is cartoonishly evil. He’s the bad guy. It’s fine. He’s well-defined. I understand his terrible motives. I care that I can’t tell you who Hester is. And here I go again: in many good stories, the protagonist will have more than just a clearly-defined story goal. They’ll also have a deeper psychological need. Hester’s goal is clear – revenge – but she doesn’t appear to have a need. The story never bothers to give her one. Tom’s character is worse. He doesn’t even get a want and so lumbers around after Hester, being tediously verbose and totally useless, until he delivers his nugget of exposition about the crash drive.

I think Mortal Engines could have gotten away with its narrative flaws, but for two things. The first is the lack of star power. When the biggest name in your production is Hugo Weaving, you’d better pray your movie is some kind of small budget comedy drama, because Weaving alone cannot carry a $100 million sci-fi extravaganza with a shit story. No offence meant to the rest of the cast, but nobody, outside of friends and family, is dropping a pile of cash on tickets and popcorn to see them in an adaptation of a book many people have never heard of, based on a thoroughly ridiculous concept. The moment you abandon name recognition, you will have to depend on your film being an absolute banger word-of-mouth smash to make money.

A bigger problem was its release date. Mortal Engines was released in December of 2018, on the same weekend as Eastwood’s The Mule and…Spiderman: Enter the Spider Verse. Bohemian Rapsody was still on release. There was the Mary Poppins sequel. Aquaman came out the following week, along with Bumblebee. I am sure there’s a market for this IP. It’s got so much potential. But into this competition? Was there someone at Universal Pictures who enjoyed losing money?

To conclude: weak characters, shoddy story and patchy action do not make for box-office success. Mortal Engines was not sunk by poor marketing – it was sunk by the fatal flaws in its own execution.