Mortal Engines

Cast: Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, and Robert Sheehan

Director: Christian Rivers

123 minutes 12 2018

Universal DVD Region 2

[Released 22nd April]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

In a post-apocalypse landscape, centuries after WW3, cities on wheels hunt and consume runabout towns in a steampunk fairy-tale version of Mad Max with epic visuals. ‘London’ rolls across Europe, a pirate metro juggernaut scavenging resources from mega-tractors, while following the doctrines of ‘Municipal Darwinism’. A lowly museum apprentice, young hero Tom (Robert Sheehan), is clearly fated to team-up with failed assassin Hester (Hera Hilmar), after she stabs the London’s elite but corrupt leader Valentine (Hugo Weaving), whose quite sympathetic but rather sheltered daughter Kate (Leila George), eventually uncovers a sinister conspiracy.

Based on a book by Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines marks the directorial debut of artist and visual effects designer Christian Rivers, who worked for WETA on the LOTR trilogy, Hobbit movies, and Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong. Comedy eccentrics populate a vast continental wasteland where the cyborg-zombie Shrike (voiced by Stephen Lang) is freed to find heroine Hester, now on a shut-up-and-run escape from auction to cannibals. Wanted terrorist Anna Fang (Korean singer Jihae, Mars) rescues Hester and Tom, leading them to become outlaws. Top-class Brits like Patrick Malahide (Minder) and Colin Salmon (Krypton) round out the supporting cast. 

As expected, this movie stands or falls because of its startling and impressive creativity in stylised super-mecha effects, and quirky human characters are rarely more than just a curious sideshow, if judged against this lavish production’s undeniably spectacular gothic sci-fi and cleverly enhanced mayhem of stunts. Dramatic SF themes with people dwarfed by mobile machinery, provides neat visual symbolism for capitalism, or even colonialism. Fringe nomadic rebels are confined to the equally mobile sanctuary in an airborne haven for aviators, blimp captains, and balloonists. Now history looks very likely to repeat itself with a new catastrophe, using the WMD of a quantum ‘Medusa’ against the gigantic walls that protect eastern realms. 

Basically, a Star Wars for Earth-bound landlubbers, Mortal Engines includes a suicidal air raid on the former British capital, where various Brexit metaphors are obviously satirical. In the movie’s predictable ending, London is burning and grinds to a halt, so the techno-future of any reformed humanity looks Asian.