MORTAL ENGINES REVIEW: Hera Hilmar takes the lead in a fight for justice, 1000 years in the future&#

In our current society, we have great filmmakers, collaborators, and minds in the field of fantasy, but in fantasy film-making, We have Mexican, Guillermo Del Toro and the sublime, Kiwi Peter Jackson.

So… Please can we stop calling Mortal Engines a Peter Jackson film?

Sir Peter was one of three scriptwriters, along with longtime friends, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens. And yes, without these influences, the film wouldn’t even exist.

But Mortal Engines isn’t a Jackson movie, more so, his heir-in-witing, his protege. It was directed-on debut-by Christian Rivers. And Rivers brings the quality, style of a fantasy-driven film for all the family.

As the opening voiceover kindly lets the audience knows -somewhat in a Morgan Freeman voice-we are 100 years in the future. Back in the mists of time, ‘the ancients’ (that’s you and me, folks) wrecked the world with a ’60-minute war’. And now humanity mostly lives in giant wheeled cities, rolling across the post-apocalyptic earth in search of resources that are still lying around.

Based on the novels by Philip Reeve, we start with two literal cities chasing each other, spitting up smoke and dirt as the wheeled monstrosities make their slow way across a vast and desolated European countryside.

You’ve never seen a chase scene like the one at the start of “Mortal Engines”: A young woman scans the horizon and sees London, the whole city, rolling towards her on giant tank treads. She races back to another, smaller city and sounds an alarm. All the businesses and residences suddenly retract into a shell, and the smaller city rolls away at top speed.

London shoots massive harpoons at the smaller city, while teeny tiny trees are decimated beneath the giant wheels of the metropolis. The smaller city is gobbled up and ingested into the much larger and hungrier London’s way of life.

After a short but intense opening chase, we meet Tom Natsworthy, a historian-in-training who gets overcome with joy whenever he finds an artifact from the ancient world like a cracked iPhone. Robert Sheehan plays this typical YA-franchise naïve guy who yearns to see the world.

Tom’s work gets the attention of the powerful Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), who doesn’t even try to hide how evil he is, or his complete lack of motivation.

The sinister Thaddeus is attacked by a disfigured assassin with a personal grudge against him: this is Hester, who is to make common cause with the story’s initially hapless but stout-hearted young hero, Tom.

The problem comes… when a scarred assassin named Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar, with a not-really-noticeable scar) sneaks aboard London to avenge her mother’s death and kill Valentine. Hilmar is a perfectly capable lead, doing most of the film’s emotional weightlifting while having half of her face covered with a scarf, but she has zero chemistry with Sheehan, and they spent the entire movie together and eventually more!

The two heroes accidentally team up with a bunch of resistance fighters, the leader played by a fantastic (Jihae) and altogether discover that Valentine is building a new quantum doomsday weapon so that London can shoot down a barrier wall currently preventing it from gobbling up all of Asia.

Their journey leads them through recognizable sci-fi/fantasy tropes, like getting kidnapped and sold to the highest bidder, and dealing with seemingly evil outlaws who turn out to be humanity’s last hope. Underneath all this steampunk wonderment, you’ll find the blueprints for “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars,” cut into pieces and reassembled in slightly different ways.

The ending plays out how a fantasy-driven film should, and sets perfect for a follow-up.

WETA DAZZLES:

The wizards at Weta Workshop clearly cared about getting the details right, specially when it came to the landmarks like Tottenham Court Road and the London Eye.

Speaking of steampunk, the production and costume designs for Mortal Engines are dazzling. From the different cities – including the centipede-looking one — to the characters’ clothes, there’s enough diversity to make the world of the film feel big.

THE FEAR OF SHRIKE:

The design peaks with Shrike, a half-android, half-ghoul who is on the hunt for Hester. Despite having almost no lines or screen-time, Shrike makes the biggest impression in the film, with a surprisingly deep and emotional backstory and a great performance by Stephen Lang, who injects some much-needed humanity into an otherwise fully mechanical film.

VERDICT:

Based on Philip Reeve’s novel about futuristic moving cities doing battle, this thrilling visionary tale is the best kind of bonkers.

There is one storyline that the trailer doesn’t hint at, (so we won’t spoil the surprise for you!) Narratively speaking you might not get enthralled, but with such, styled pace and fantasy driven effects the entire family can enjoy and some wonderful dark deaths, Mortal Engines delivers a great popcorn fodder of a film, and hopefully the start of a tremendous franchise.

STARS: 4/5