• Consequence
  • Music
  • Film
  • TV
  • Heavy
Menu Consequence
Menu Shop Search Newsletter
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Live
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Contest
Advertisement
  • Reviews
  • Film Reviews

Film Review: Mortal Engines Roars and Rolls Without Finding a Sense of Purpose

The gears grind endlessly in this ambitious but leadenly presented fantasy epic

D+

Directed by

  • Christian Rivers

Starring

  • Hera Hilmar
  • Robert Sheehan
  • Hugo Weaving

Release Year

  • 2018

Rating

  • PG-13
Advertisement
Dominick Suzanne-Mayer
December 13, 2018 | 4:41pm ET

    The Pitch: After the Ancients destroyed Earth almost instantly in the 60-Minute War, the small pockets of humans who survived find themselves struggling to survive in a landscape which now favors “the great predator cities of the West.” London is now the most powerful of them all, a rolling monstrosity of opulent tiered buildings and destructive mounted weapons. Other, smaller cities tear across the endless deserts, hoping to avoid being “consumed” by London, which tears apart any smaller berg it finds to the cheers of its privileged citizens. Aboard London, Tom (Robert Sheehan) yearns to discover the antiquated tech of the Ancients, but when his stash of wartime military equipment is discovered by London’s governing body, it’s up to he and the mysterious anti-tractionist Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), a scarred hunter with a deep connection to London’s head scientific official Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), to stop the second end of the world. Steampunk ahoy!

    Sputtering Off the Line: Mortal Engines opens with a giant city racing a smaller through the desert, in a visually feverish extension of the ideas outlined by the Mad Max movies, before it’s devoured by the gaping maw of a metropolis-sized tank. Were all of the film able to sustain the eye-popping madness of that opening, Mortal Engines would be a cult sci-fi classic in the making. As it stands, anybody who enjoys the steel-and-steam aesthetics of steampunk are still very likely to fall in love, but most other audiences may well struggle to stay with a movie that veers from wide-scale action to YA melodrama to wordy franchise franchise building with reckless abandon. The early scenes rush along at a pace surely to leave viewers winded, as screenwriting trio Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens sprint through the basics of the film’s world in order to get to the exciting, art direction-heavy stuff as quickly as possible.

    Unfortunately, this leaves too much of the emotion throughout feeling thin, especially when Mortal Engines starts to take bounding leaps in its storytelling while leaving little room for anything other than wordy exchanges being delivered in brief between action setpieces on floating cities and rolling cities and giant cities behind walls. And even as xan action-first piece, Mortal Engines is a mixed bag at best. When it’s operating at its heights, particularly in that opening and in a furious scramble across a burning assemblage of giant balloons, the film achieves a pleasing sense of operatic sci-fi theatricality. However, whenever the action is pulled into close quarters, director Christian Rivers frames most of the exchanges with incoherent shaky-cam photography, as though the film is hiding from its own onscreen violence as it goes along. There’s more than one genuinely unpleasant fight scene throughout the film’s 129 minutes, and that unpleasantness is wholly owed to the visually scattered direction.

    Advertisement
    Related Video

    We (Tried To) Own the Sky: It’s a shame that Mortal Engines never puts its many mismatched pieces together, because the steel skeleton of an entertaining jaunt through a fantastic hellscape is there. Were any of the film’s major dramatic payoffs satisfying (or failing that, at least not cribbed wholesale from Star Wars and the screenwriting trio’s own The Lord of the Rings), the admittedly stunning visuals might be enough to sustain the excessive story. As it stands, however, this feels closer to the Hobbit side of the Jackson think tank than the Rings, a messy patchwork assemblage of leaden world-building, character relationships that either fail to justify the runtime devoted to them or feel entirely false in their resolution, and the kind of big-beyond-big CGI machinations that start as impressive and turn deafening when there’s nothing else of particular note to break them up along the way.

    The Verdict: Mortal Engines deals in a number of familiar stock types, which leaves Hilmar and Sheehan with the thankless job of enlivening protagonists whose backstories are hastily rushed through and yet still relied upon for pathos in the film’s late scenes. They step up to the plate effectively enough, Hilmar’s stoic grit matching amiably with Sheehan’s dweeby enthusiasm, but Mortal Engines is too seldom interested in anything going on beyond the titular gigantic machines. Like so many YA adaptations, the interesting fringe corners of the onscreen universe are there, but they go unexplored in favor of a movie that bellows and roars a great deal without leaving too great an impression.

    Even so, there are small notes that stand out. The effortless cool of Anna Fang (Jihae), a roguish sky captain, offers a welcome lightheartedness that more of the rest of the film could have used. Tom’s enthusiasm for “ancient” distractions leads to a big laugh or two early on, as the film playfully tinkers with the possibilities of its premise in a way its rushed later acts refuse to allow. But as with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

    Advertisement

    Where’s It Playing?: Theaters all over the so-far-unshattered planet, starting December 14th.

    Trailer:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
Advertisement

More on this topic

  • Christian Rivers
  • Hera Hilmar
  • Hugo Weaving
  • Peter Jackson
  • Robert Sheehan
  • Universal

Sign up for updates

Subscribe to our email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.

Advertisement

Popular Stories

lcd soundsystem boygenius steve lacy reset concert series

Music

boygenius, LCD Soundsystem, Steve Lacy to Headline Re:SET Concert Series

borat broke up pamela anderson and kid rock love pamela with love memoir documentary dating

Film

Borat Broke Up Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock

Advertisement

Shop for GWAR's Bud of Gods Delta-8 and Sour OG vape cartridges.

Shop for GWAR's Bud of Gods Delta-8 and Sour OG vape cartridges.

King of the Hill (FOX)

TV

King of the Hill to Air New Episodes on Hulu

noah weiland goodbye good riddance

Heavy Consequence

Noah Weiland Shares Emotional New Single "Good Riddance & Goodbye": Stream

Latest Stories

Sundance 2023 Film Reviews

Sundance 2023 Review Roundup: The Best Films We Saw This Year

January 30, 2023

A-
Infinity Pool Review Alexander Skarsgard

Infinity Pool Sends You Down a Road of Hedonistic Excess (In a Good Way): Review

January 27, 2023

B+
Netflix You people

You People Review: Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill Star in a Funny and Refreshing Update of a Familiar Tale

January 27, 2023

B-
Jamojaya Rich Brian Sundance Review

Rich Brian Juggles Family, Music, and Culture in Jamojaya: Sundance Review

January 25, 2023

B-
Cat Person Review Nicholas Braun

The New Yorker Bad-Date Story Gets Frustratingly Literal in Cat Person: Sundance Review

January 25, 2023

B+
shortcomings review randall park

Randall Park's Shortcomings Playfully Pokes at the Arthouse World: Sundance Review

January 24, 2023

B+
You Hurt My Feelings Review

Sundance Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Learns the Cost of Honesty in the Hilarious You Hurt My Feelings

January 24, 2023

A-
theater camp review

Sundance Review: The Hilarious and Authentic Theater Camp Takes Center Stage

January 23, 2023

Advertisement

News

  • Music
  • New Music
  • Album Streams
  • Upcoming Releases
  • Tours
  • Film
  • TV
  • Pop Culture

Reviews

  • Music Reviews
  • Film Reviews
  • TV Reviews
  • Concert Reviews
  • Festival Reviews

Features

  • Editorials
  • Interviews
  • Cover Stories
  • Lists
  • Guides
  • CoSign
  • Song of the Week

Live

  • Tickets
  • Festival News
  • Tour Dates
  • Photo Galleries
  • Music Instruments & Gear

Heavy

  • News
  • Interviews
  • Concerts

More

  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Wellness
  • Giveaways

Other sites

  • Heavy Consequence
  • Consequence Media
  • Modern Drummer
  • About
  • Privacy policy
  • Advertising
  • Work For Us
  • Terms
  • Contact
  • Copyright
  • Do Not Sell My Personal Information

Download our app

  • Get it on the App Store
  • Get it on Google Play
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitch
  • Tiktok
Consequence
Current story

Film Review: Mortal Engines Roars and Rolls Without Finding a Sense of Purpose

Menu Shop Search Newsletter
Consequence
News
  • News
  • Music
  • New Music
  • Album Streams
  • Upcoming Releases
  • Tours
  • Film
  • TV
  • Pop Culture
Reviews
  • Music Reviews
  • Film Reviews
  • TV Reviews
  • Concert Reviews
  • Festival Reviews
Features
  • All Features
  • Editorials
  • Interviews
  • Cover Stories
  • Lists
  • Guides
  • CoSign
  • Song of the Week
Live
  • Tickets
  • Festival News
  • Tour Dates
  • Photo Galleries
  • Music Instruments & Gear
Podcasts
  • The Opus
  • Kyle Meredith With...
  • Stanning BTS
  • The Story Behind the Song
  • The What
  • Going There with Dr. Mike
  • The Rome and Duddy Show
Videos
  • Interviews
  • Two for the Road
  • First Time I Heard
  • When I Made
  • Battle of the Bandmates
  • Peer 2 Peer
  • Essays
  • Fan Theories
Heavy
  • News
  • Interviews
  • Concerts
  • Premieres
  • Culture
  • Beyond the Boys Club
  • Mining Metal
Shop
  • Shop
  • Giveaways

Follow Consequence

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitch
  • Tiktok
Close
Close