Mortal Engines (film): Who the hell greenlit this bizarre mess of a film?

I'm all about post-apocalyptic films. They can be a lot of fun even though they have kind of been overdone and nearly everyone possible scenario has already been covered. I guess that is at least part of the reason why the overall plot of this book adaptation for the big screen is just so "out there."

Steampunk is ok with me as well because it can be fun but at some point I think we have to draw the line from fantasy / sci-fi and admit that we have gone into the land of the completely absurd. That is what Mortal Engines is, in a shell.

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I am briefly going to describe the overall plot to you and I promise you that I am not making this up:

The film is set a thousand years in the future and almost all of what we know of our current times was destroyed in a war that is called the "60 minute war" that saw almost the entire world destroyed. It is not clear if this was nuclear fallout or an attack from aliens, they don't focus on it long enough for us to know what happened. All we know is that most of the world is a desolate and sandy place much like Mad Max world and the most technology has disappeared..... The crazy thing about technology going backwards with things like guns being replaced by swords and what not, is that somehow, with this technological stepping back, we have somehow managed to develop most of the world's cities into cities that are completely mobile. The entire city is like a gigantic transformer that converts the cities of the world into something that moves around wherever it wants to.

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What I just said to you is not a spoiler because it is basically the first thing we see in the movie as a smaller mining city is being chased by London. You read that right, a small city is being pursued by London, the city.

The idea here is that the larger cities pursue these small colonies and their city literally consumes the smaller ones as they "gomp" it through the front. The people in the smaller colonies are then absorbed into the new community and their old mobile small-city outpost is turned into scrap and fuel by the larger city.

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Of course there is an unnecessary love story built in there because I guess they have to do that and if you thought the notion of mobile cities was trivial and dumb, this forced love story is even dumber. Hera Hilmar does a decent job playing the lead role of Hester Shaw but Robert Sheehan's portrayal of Londoner Tom Natsworthy is simply insufferable.

I would go into greater detail about what the plot is but I think you can figure it out. London has become a bit oppressive as they eat up all the smaller cities and their rulers get a bit mad with power. It is the young underdogs in Tom and Hester who have to put an unlikely stop to the global domination plan and obviously they were always going to succeed in doing so. Just like most Hollywood big-budget films all you have to know is who the good guys are and who the bad guys are to realize how it is going to turn out. It isn't an "if" question. It is a "how" or in the case of this film it is "how much longer is this going to take?"

This film was so disappointing to me that I was actually relieved to find out that while they use Peter Jackson's name and fame quite a bit, he actually had very little to do with the making of this film other than allowing the use of his name and being a producer.

It should come as no surprise given the ridiculous concept of this film that is absolutely bombed at the box office and it is estimate that this ended up losing Universal Pictures and estimated $175 million.

Should I watch it?

I think the only real reason to bother with this one is to laugh at the sheer arrogance of Hollywood that they would even dream of sinking and estimated 100 to 150 million dollars into such an insane idea. It took me 3 sittings to get through the movie and when it was finally over I was really pleased that it finally was. I kept hoping that something amazing or at least visually appealing was going to happen but all we really get is a totally predictable movie with annoying characters and things that just don't make any sense. I suppose there is a bit of nostalgia in there because they will handle things like USB drives and desktop computers and view them in museums as relics.

There are a couple of good characters including the best actor in the entire film who is known as "Shrike" and I think the reason why he was the best actor was because he isn't a person at all. That's all I'll say about him because he is the one redeeming quality of this entire slopfest of a movie.

If you enjoy suffering, go ahead and watch this. If not, spend your time on literally anything else and you will be better off because of it.

_{The only way to legally stream this is on AMC+ but it is available to rent or buy on a wide variety of platforms. If I was you I would watch only the trailer and then forget you ever heard about this movie}