BEFORE: We're getting down to the wire on award season, my bosses had to submit their choices for Oscar nominations this week, and then the noms will be announced next Monday. That should put an end to the first round of campaigning, during which every film that had even an outside chance of a nomination has been e-mailing both of them about this screening on Monday, and that one on Tuesday, and there's a nice big pile of screeners that's built up, only I'm only interested in two of them this month, then I'll have to try to hit the others hard in March. January and February are already fully programmed.
But the nominations will kick off the second round of campaigning, where the films that got noms will double their publicity efforts to make sure the most Academy members see their films, one way or another, before the final voting. So things still aren't going to be very quiet, but at least there will be fewer films crying for attention, and the others can start going to Netflix or iTunes, if they're not there already.
Meanwhile, I've got another film tonight based on a Y.A. novel. In fact, every film this week for me has been based on a novel, back to "Smilla's Sense of Snow", in fact. Robert Sheehan carries over from "The Borrowers", which was also based on a children's book.
THE PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic world where cities ride on wheels and consume each other to survive, two people meet in London and try to stop a conspiracy.
AFTER: I saw the preview for this film many times when I went to the theater in 2018, because I tend to go out and see those big super-hero and sci-fi movies, and that's the target audience they were trying to reach with this one. And after seeing that trailer, I have to admit that the curiosity factor was very high on this one - but the problem with that is, the big surprise was IN the preview, and I think they really should save a little something for the movie itself. The big shock was seeing the city of London on these giant tank-treads, moving across the landscape with great speed and attacking a smaller town/machine, with all of these recognizable London landmarks stacked on top of each other and somehow Frankensteined together.
That's it, the big reveal of the movie, and it's how the film opens - but guys, I've already seen it. You showed it to me every time I went out to the movies over a six-month period. What else have you got? Was I supposed to extrapolate and draw the conclusion that if that big SFX set-piece was in the preview, geez, imagine what's in the movie that they're NOT showing me in advance. Well, not a whole lot, as it turns out. More of the same, really, again and again, but once the initial shock and awe wears off, there's not a lot going on. I know, I'm spoiled, here you show me a city on wheels moving across a landscape and attacking another city, and I yawn and demand more. But blame the promotions department for that, not me.
Don't get me wrong, it's one hell of an idea. Somebody thought really BIG in the concept department, and a lot of other somebodys backed that up with impressive special effects, but the idea is so big, so out-there that I feel that once I start picking it apart from a logical perspective the whole thing's just going to unravel, and then it becomes a big smart idea that's so wild and crazy that it forgot to stop at big and smart, and kept going until it reached big and stupid. Or perhaps it's so stupid to begin with that's it's easily mistaken for a smart idea, it's kind of hard to distinguish.
Let's start with energy. We're led to believe that in the far future (what, a thousand years in the future, give or take) after recovering from the disaster that befell the earth (umm, we'll get to that later, or maybe we won't) and being all post-apocalyptic for a while, the people are forced to live on these giant moving cities, and roam around in search of energy and materials. But how much energy did it take to stack all those London buildings on top of each other, and how much energy does it take to MOVE that stacked city across the land at that speed? (See, that didn't take long to unravel...). Maybe you wouldn't need to feed the energy beast so much if you just kept that city in one place, right? I know, that's the old-school definition of a city, one that stays in one place, and we're dealing with a different paradigm here, but I stand by my ruling. Expending so much energy just to find more energy seems like a zero-sum game.
So the big city swallows up the little city, and then what, breaks down the city into raw material? That seems woefully inefficient. Why not drain the energy out of the city first, feed that right into the bigger city's storage battery (or whatever) instead of breaking out the giant buzzsaws in the first step? Even melting the city down to use that metal slag would be more efficient than carving it up into little pieces, creating a lot of scrap and waste. Then there's the people, who then somehow become citizens of London, now? I appreciate the fact that the big city is willing to take on more immigrants, but that means more weight, more mouths to feed, and more energy consumption - all that's going to interfere with London's ability to move around and do whatever it needs to do. In other words, it didn't SOLVE the problem by ingesting the smaller city, it just created a larger problem going forward. From everything I've seen, this future just ain't all it's cracked up to be.
In another part of the world, slavery is back, so it's like history's non-greatest hits album. And God knows what people are being sold for, whether it's for sex or sausages, both are implied here. So there's cannabilism, too - and honestly it might make more sense if the people in London ate the people from that small Bavarian city they captured, then they wouldn't have to feed those new citizens, right? Maybe they did, and they only told the Bavarians they were going to be citizens of London so they wouldn't panic on their way to the slaughterhouse. So they're cruel savages, but at least they don't act like dicks in the process.
But even if I take a step back just a bit further, the premise of the film falls apart in another way - some apocalyptic "Sixty Minute War" threw civilization back to the basics, you would think that people would be forced to start over, like with rocks and sticks. Instead they've recovered enough knowledge of technology to stack cities on giant treads and move them around? How was this act so high on the priority list? And over in China, they still somehow had the ability to protect their cities with a giant wall (hmm, wait, that seems kind of familiar...) and in another location, a big floating city was built. So which is it, are they technologically lacking, or are they technologically advanced? There's a massive contradiction here.
Essentially, I'm calling B.S. on the whole premise here, which is all this film really has - the story outside of the premise is just nonsense on top of nonsense. Something about a quantum energy super-weapon that can only be disabled by a secret kill-switch on a crash drive - I couldn't follow it at all, nor did I understand which side I was supposed to be rooting for. I could (sort of) recognize that this could all be some oblique metaphor for that Brexit situation, with London on the loose and steamrolling its way through Continental Europe, but that never really came together in any meaningful way.
Instead, it's all the big little-guy vs. big guy films ever made, rolled up into one - it's "The Empire Strikes Back" meets "Road Warrior" or perhaps "Ready Player One" meets "Lord of the Rings" - only it hasn't got the heart or spirit of any of those. It's so by-the-numbers that there's never any doubt where it's going to end up, with the Death Star going boom after they throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom while the video-game armies fight. Know what I mean? The problem with creating bigger and BIGGER fighting scenes is that we're not necessarily creating BETTER fight scenes. And I'm also kind of pointing the finger at you, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker", only less so. (By the same token, having a character wear a mask over half of her face shouldn't be considered an acceptable substitute for character development.)
Special effects-wise, directors can fill the screen with action, and have 100 planes attacking a giant city on wheels - but having that ability doesn't make it a good idea to do that. It has to be a good story first, and then the effects can come in and make that look real, but if the idea is stupid, then you're just putting lipstick on a pig. It could be a stupid idea that looks great, but where does that get us?
When I was a kid, my mother wanted me to only watch Disney and similar kid-friendly movies, so she tried to convince me that a "G" rating stood for "Great", a "PG" rating stood for "Pretty Good", and an "R" rating stood for "Rotten". Eventually I figured out that she was lying to me, and I discovered R-rated movies on my own. Nice try, Mom. But here, in the case of "Mortal Engines", I'm tempted to give it a similar "R" rating, only the "R" would stand for a word that I'm not supposed to use any more, because it's not P.C.
Also starring Hera Hilmar (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Jihae, Poppy Macleod, Leila George, Ronan Raftery (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Patrick Malahide (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), Colin Salmon (last seen in "Criminal"), Mark Mitchinson (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies"), Regé-Jean Page, Menik Gooneratnee (last seen in "Lion"), Frankie Adams, Kee Chan, Sophie Cox, Caren Pistorius (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Stephen Ure (ditto), Leifur Sigurdarson, Aaron Jackson (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Kahn West, Andrew Lees,
Nathaniel Lees (last seen in "30 Days of Night"), Joel Tobeck (ditto), Terry Norris, Calum Gittins, Paul Yates, and the voice of Stephen Lang (last seen in "Hostiles"), with a cameo from Peter Jackson.
RATING: 3 out of 10 fusion inverter cells
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