Mortal Engines

Mortal Engines is the fever dream of some slob in a basement who shut himself off from society and the company of others and listened only to Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus. Night after night, he sewed rotary phone dials into burlap to make the ultimate steampunk suit. He endlessly added rusty old wires and moved blown fuses into the lapel, so that it would surely be the grandest, most ornate steampunk suit ever. My god, he even got baby doll heads embedded in the military boots.

He would go to ComiCon at the Oklahoma City convention center, his first appearance in public in eight years and it would be an entrance so grand that a world that had previously ignored him would finally see him. Everyone would be so overwhelmed by his creativity and vision that the furries, superheros and Instagram cosplay-for-money girls would bend to his will. He would be king. Finally.

He never made it. He collapsed into a sugar coma as a result of his diet consisting entirely of Mountain Dew Baja Blast and Doritos Tacos Locos. His last words to his mother while the paramedics hoisted him up the stairs was to have a friend wear his masterpiece. Also, do not ever, EVER, open the cabinet under Lord Nightrian the Bearded Dragon’s terrarium. IT’S PRIVATE!

The problem, though, is that the lonely fat man-child had no friends, nobody to dissuade him from his bad choices. Even if he had, none would have worn the suit. Sure, it was detailed, and sure it looked like it took a shitload of time. That didn’t keep it from being ridiculously bloated and supremely fucking stupid. Just like Mortal Engines. This thing is an overworked shitload of CGI and contraptions in search of a reason to exist. It looks to be exactly what somebody dreamed of, but why?

Mortal Engines is based on a moderately successful but not best-selling Scholastic book--you know, the company grade-schoolers order books from in school classrooms, like books of mazes and jokes and biographies of gymnasts. The movie’s basic premise is a giant what the fuck. Maybe it works in a paperback geared toward twelve-year-olds, but it sure as hell fails as a blockbuster.

In a post-apocalyptic world (of course), cities are mobile, like giant hillbilly motor homes that rumble across the countryside. Skyscrapers and church steeples, roads and parks, all mounted on tank treads and powered by cloud-belching mechanical engines. Big cities attack and devour small cities in something the movie calls “municipal darwinism.” If you can’t buy into this diea, you’re fucked, because Mortal Engines takes it deadly serious.

London is a bigger RV than all the others and it’s running out of tiny towns to devour, so its sneering bad guy (Hugo Weaving) decides to build a superweapon inside the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. A superweapon that will make them capable of obliterating anyone who crosses them. It’s sort of like, say, if some imperialist thug in space built a massive megalaser to demolish planets.

Only a rag tag band of rebels, which includes Weaving’s own offspring (Hera Hilmer) (who doesn’t know until she gets the “I am your father” speech at the end) can save humanity. One of them rebels is a lad (Robert Natsworthy) with dreams of being a space ace. He must fly a ship through heavy fire right into the core of the megaweapon so he can launch a single blast that to destroy the mobile megacity before it destroys the world.

Does the plot sound a bit familiar? Only if you’ve ever been to the movies. Hilmer and Natsworthy meet up with the ragtag band of rebels in a city in the sky. These rebels are led by a wisecracking hotshot (Jihae) with a cool ship, but no wookie. The plot similarities don’t end with space operas, though. Mortal Engines has no new ideas, just shit stolen from better movies. There is a relentless, unkillable cyborg hunting the young heroine. There is a remote prison for the dangerously insane. Weaving’s bad guy doesn’t die at the end, just sort of disappears, because the dipshits who made this thought maybe there’d be a sequel. Underpinning it all is a by-the-book young-adult-novel romance approximately. The two protagonists are enemies bound together by fate who quickly learn to respect each other.

Despite the shameless thievery, Mortal Engine’s plot awkwardly clunks along like a teenager in her first platform heels, turning on predictable moments. Part of the problem is the movie demands that we root for fucking morons who haven’t already seen every plot twist they attempt. We are told two things early on: Only an ancient key can halt the megaweapon; and our heroine’s mother was an archeologist who gave her a special locket as she lay dying. Guess what’s inside it! The filmmakers think we can’t.

The young lad in the movie is secretly hiding a treasure trove of old technology that could destroy the world. Well, it was secret until ten minutes into the movie he shows it all to someone he just met because... I have no fucking idea why. A slew of minor characters pop in and shit out a little exposition diarrhea to keep the movie moving.

Every bad guy is clearly bad from the moment you meet them. Weaving, in particular, is able to fool other characters in the movie but not the audience. Seriously, the only other time I ever saw someone sneer this much it was because the guy had had a stroke and half his face drooped. Nobody should ever be this intentionally cheesy. The humanity in need of saving has its goodness defined as believing in some hogslop of eastern philosophies; it’s lazy thinking to believe that just because it’s exotic it must be more profound. If that were true, nobody with a Free Tibet bumper sticker could ever ben an asshole. And they are. All the God damn time.

The movie is directed by a newcomer (Christian Rivers) and a cast of mostly unknowns who probably ought to remain unknown. Each chooses a facial expression early on and sticks with it. Hilmer and Natsworthy as the young heroes in love, are dull as hell, like they’re concentrating so hard on their lines that they forgot to act. The minor characters are given the thankless task of showing up, making it clear which side they’re on and then disappearing until they’re needed to move the plot along. Nobody is having fun, and nobody does more than a workmanlike job.

And that’s the fucking tragedy here. It seems like a hell of a lot of energy and effort were spent without anyone really understanding why. Mortal Engines is makes no sense, is in no way a pleasure, and there’s no reward in trying to figure that out. One Finger.