Eh. This was about as bad as I expected, but in some different ways than I would have thought.

Overall, this movie is a heavily softened version of the book. The aesthetics of the world and the loose plot structure are carried over fairly accurately, but the tone of the book is dropped entirely. The world of the book is grim, darkly funny, and cruel. There are few innocents in the story, and even fewer survive until the end, which has little in the way of happiness. The absurdity of the world’s concepts is contrasted to the dark places Philip Reeve pulls the narrative. The movie smooths all of this over into a tight 2 hour action flick. The ambiguous morality of the book flattens down in order to give us a clear bad guy to root against, and a clear heroine to cheer for. The sharp edges of the story, the uncomfortable parts that make it a story worth telling, are sanded down to almost nothing.

On aesthetics.

Still, the aesthetics are there. Even before the plot and characters of the story, the main reason I wanted to see a film adaptation was to see this strange world realized on screen. Seeing the cities in motion is almost reason enough for this movie to exist. London tramples the earth as it moves, leaving hard packed tread marks in its wake. The smaller cities cough up smoke and stumble over the ground, while pieces of their structure lurch precariously and struggle to hold together as the contraptions increase speed. The Jenny Haniver swoops and dives and dodges, and her wings bend and fold as she switches flying modes. It can be hard to impress with CGI these days, but the imaginative designs are truly awesome. The designers somehow made these impossible things seem plausible in their look, scale, and motion. It really is a feat.

Additionally, the environmental design is top notch. The scenes of characters walking through the streets and alleys of London, or the twisting pathways of Airhaven are engrossing, simply because existing in this world feels exciting. The same goes for the costume design, which finds a perfect balance between the absurd and the grounded, the same tension in tone that made the books a joy to read. The various uniforms of the Londoners are highlights, but the hyper slick Anna Fang and her rugged band of fighters are also stunning. Even unnamed minor characters get interesting designs. Two people veiled in laced, white robes stick in my head from the first scene, as does the bulky, scarred man who was bidding on Hester at the slave auction.

Honestly, for me personally, the aesthetic stuff is what the movie needed to nail more than anything else. I knew the plot and characters were always going to be neutered, just due to the nature of the change in medium. That doesn’t excuse it of course, but the visuals were where the movie could outshine the book, and they mostly did exactly that. This is hardly surprising, given the team behind the film. Peter Jackson and his crew, who have been working together since The Lord of the Rings, know how to make a world seem real. The Lord of the Rings movies remain the high watermark for the world and costume design, but even in the lackluster Hobbit movies, the craft was still evident. The visuals on display here, and the craft behind them, prevent me from hating this movie. If they had one job, this was it, and they did it well.

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The overall aesthetics are not perfect, mind you, as despite all the work put into them, the audience hardly has a chance to really appreciate them. This is tied directly to the pacing of the film, as the story moves so fast that we can never really settle into the world. There are very few slow scenes in the movie. This messes with the pacing of the story, which feels too quick and choppy, and keeps the audience as a distance. Many great movies that have visual design as part of their main appeal know how to properly show off the work that was done to realize the world for the screen. Both of the Blade Runner movies, and animated movies like Ghost in the Shell or Castle in the Sky, are great examples of this. In all of these movies, the filmmakers dedicate a lot of time to showing the characters simply existing in the world, without any action or tension to distract us. Slow scenes of characters talking can allow for this (Ghost in the Shell has many scenes that are basically exposition dumps, but are engrossing because they allow the audience to feast on the visuals), as can scenes of investigation and exploration (Blade Runner’s image enhancement scene, and the first arrival on Laputa in Castle in Sky), or characters just going through regular routines (BR 2049 allows us to just follow Joe through a normal evening after work to see the world he lives in, and my favorite scene in Castle in the Sky is following Pazu through his morning routine). Ghost in the Shell even dedicates a several minutes long scene to what is basically just a plotless music video that shows us scenes of this interesting neo-noir world. The visuals are one of the main attractions for all these films, and they make room in their runtime to showcase the work done for the production design.

Notably, in these kinds of scenes, the camera doesn’t move much and there isn’t much motion on screen. I noticed in Mortal Engines that the camera is usually in motion, even in scenes that do not call for it. The panning and swooping and spiraling camera moves really sell the grand establishing shots of London and the Shield Wall and Airhaven, but it is frustrating when even in the smaller scale, more intimate scenes, the camera rarely just sits still. And when the camera is still, there is often a lot of movement in the shot. It became frustrating when I wanted to take in atmosphere of a scene but the screen is filled with motion.

The quietest scene in the movie is early on, when Tom and Hester are settling down for the first night since leaving London. The dialogue here isn’t great, and Hester softens to Tom far too quickly for my liking, but it still feels nice for the music to die down and allow us to just exist alongside these characters for a bit. The actors here are not ill-suited for these roles, and Tom does have something of the naïve, awkward charm that is conveyed in the book. But, the scene takes place in the middle of nowhere! The characters are just hanging out on some packed dirt and rocks. We visit many incredible locations in the movie, but we never get a slower-paced scene to soak in the setting. We only ever see places in the midst of, or on the cusp of, an action scene, usually with a lot of tense and dramatic music distracting us. We get a handful of intriguing shots on the trading cluster of small towns at the beginning, but the are quickly disrupted by the arrival of London. The slave auction is only given a brief setup before Anna Fang crashes the party. Airhaven and Batmunhk Gompa are the real tragedies, as they appear at points in the film that beg for a break in the action and a bit of time to decompress. Airhaven has an incredible design that we only ever see at a distance or in hurried action shots. There ought to have been more time with Tom walking the streets and appreciating this place he never thought he’d get the chance to visit, and a longer conversation in the restaurant to establish the viewpoints of the anti-tractionists. Unfortunately, the characters hardly get two sentences in before Tom and Fang’s crew begin arguing and confronting each other, and soon Shrike arrives to move us into the next action sequence. Batmuhnk Gompa feels like it should be home to a handful of slower scenes to reflect on the events so far before moving into the big finale. However, even the little time we spend there is shot in a hurried fashion, with a lot of music over laid on the scenes. The movie only slows down to make sure we know Hester has the plot-ending macguffin.

On the book.

I should note, the Mortal Engines Quartet is by no means a masterpiece. The dialogue is stiff and clunky. The books ambitiously try to weave a complex story involving a slew of characters, not all of which feel fully realized. Our main character Tom is a bit useless much of the time, which can be frustrating when it feels like the plot is only happening around the main characters, rather than actively involving them. Even when suspending disbelief regarding the core idea of moving cities, many other aspects of the world and its technology are imperfectly described or glossed over. Despite this, the ideas Reeve presents are impressively creative, and he manages to avoid tropes by subverting the readers’ expectations in satisfying and clever ways. I say all this because I am going to make many comparisons between the book and the movie, usually at the expense of the movie. I want to establish that I believe the books are perfect candidates for adaptation. They have a lot of great elements that would be great to see adapted, but also parts that could be cleaned up, notably the stiff dialogue. And I do not view these books as above any attempt at adaptation. A potential movie adaptation could absolutely do justice to the material, and even improve on it. While reading these books, I loved imagining them as graphic novels or movies, that could realize the parts I loved faithfully, and improving on the parts that bothered me.

My main question going in was: “how much are they going to change or cut in the adaptation process?” Many details regarding the characters and their world were cut or simplified, which is to be expected, and many plot points were cut and streamlined. I was actually surprised by how much they kept in. Katherine and Bevis are here, as is Shrike and Hester’s backstory. I thought these elements would be cut for time in order to focus on the important stuff. Sadly, the film doesn’t really do these side plots justice though.

On Katherine and Bevis.

I thought the B-plot of Katherine Valentine and Bevis Pod would be totally cut, as I saw nothing about them in the promotional material. They partially kept it in though, but at the detriment of the film. There wasn’t enough space to tell that part of the plot, which is a shame. Cutting back to those characters is a bore, and it doesn’t lead to anything. These characters do nothing of importance, ever. Bevis straight up disappears before the final act and is never mentioned again towards the end of the movie. I suspect his death was going to be part of the film, but got cut somewhere late in production. Katherine also dies in book, but is explicitly kept alive in this adaptation, which contributes to the overall lightening of the book’s darker aspects.

In the book, this subplot does 3 things for the story. First, it provides important information to the reader on what is happening in London while the main characters are traveling around. Second, it shows us Katherine’s nature as an innocent and kind-hearted person, in contrast to her father. Her eventual death by the hands of her cruel-natured father is tragic, and in his remorse for her death, Valentine even has a last-minute change of heart. Third, the pure romance between Katherine and Bevis serves as a contrast to the messy romance between Tom and Hester. If the filmmakers didn’t have time to tell this subplot effectively though, it would have been better if they just cut it. The discovery of the mystery of what London is up to is already largely transferred over to the A-story, or shown independently of what Katherine and Bevis are doing. Katherine still kind of serves as the natural foil for Valentine, but that doesn’t matter. She rejects her father after learning what he has done, but that doesn’t cause a change of heart in him or affect the course of events at all. Valentine is evil to the grave, and Katherine lives on without him. And the B-romance is not given enough development to make an interesting contrast to the main romance. Even if they did give it time, this contrast may have been impossible to achieve anyways, due to the restructuring of Hester’s character. I do not know why this B-plot was kept in. It is totally vestigial.

On Shrike.

Shrike’s story also fails to land properly. It is given a lot of screen time, yet it still feels inconsequential. A lot of time is dedicated to setting Shrike up as a threat, showing him pursuing Hester, and portraying his death. His death is meant to be a big emotional climax before the movie moves into its final act, but it doesn’t land at all.

Shrike couldn’t really be cut, since he is critical to understanding Hester, and since he and other Stalkers figure heavily into sequels. Still, the filmmakers actually give Shrike proportionally more time than he gets in the book. Shrike is out of the picture by the end of Part 1 in the book, but in the movie, his scenes form much of the emotional core of Hester’s story. This isn’t the worst idea. Shrike was always a heavy-handed metaphor for Hester’s trauma and emotional baggage, a literal monster following her everywhere she goes that threatens to transform her into an unfeeling zombie. Amplifying his role in the story, and cutting out much of what happens after his death, gives Hester a neater character arc. The death of Shrike is directly tied to Shrike realizing Hester is capable of being happy, and connects with Hester realizing her feelings for Tom. The intent is fine, but of course, execution is everything and the execution is bad.

It almost works though, at points. The movie preserves the reveal that Shrike actually has something of a compassionate relationship to Hester. Before that point, the movie sells how intimidating he is, and how unstoppable he can be. Even when the rest of the scene isn’t working, Shrike’s animation is consistently impressive. The industrial-zombie terminator looks great on film. The glowing green eyes are a bit over the top, but I love it anyway. It’s the kind of ridiculousness I wish the movie did more of. The Hester-Shrike flashbacks are kind of great too. The animation and acting of Shrike is wonderful throughout the movie, and it gets to shine in the flashbacks. Seeing him attempting to care for little Hester, and working on his strange automatons, strikes a nice chord of cute, paternal, and creepy. Of course, this just makes it even more disappointing when Shrike’s final scene is a mess.

The scene itself is terribly overwrought. The swelling music and forced dialogue about ‘heart’ and ‘love’ result in a total dud of a scene. Shrike’s final flashbacks of Hester being smiley and playful are not only goofy, but also contradict what the movie establishes earlier - that Hester was always sad when she was with Shrike, which is why he wants to remake her as a Stalker. The arc ends with Shrike somehow dying because he realizes Hester now loves Tom, which for some reason he and Hester need to say aloud. This is followed by a painfully drawn out slow motion sequence of Hester mourning his death, filled with overwrought dramatic music, all in an attempt to sell the emotion to the audience. None of this works, and it ruins all the good groundwork done leading up to this.

And beyond the laborious execution, the tone of this scene is all wrong. This scene is told as a tragic moment, when it shouldn’t be. Yes, there ought to be some melancholy with Shrike’s death, but overall, this is a cathartic moment of release. Hester is freed of the demon of her past that has been pursuing her, and is now emotionally free. She accepts Tom as a partner and possible lover, and will work with Anna Fang to stop London, not only for selfish personal reasons, but to save others. This scene should feel like an exhilarating release of tension, but it just feels like a melodramatic drag.

One last note regarding Shrike: like most things in this movie, the dramatic changes to Hester’s character and arc contribute to Shrike not working here.

On Hester.

I knew just from the early trailers and promotional material for this movie that it was going to be a disappointment, and that is almost entirely because of the changes made to Hester. Hester is portrayed by a lovely and attractive young woman with only a relatively small mark on her cheek. This is stark contrast to the huge scar described in the books, that disfigure Hester’s mouth, cut off part of her nose, and ruined one of her eyes. This visual change alone was a travesty, particularly because the second book in the series makes fun of such a potential change to the story. But having accepted this change to Hester prior to seeing the movie, I went in hoping that at least her character might remain intact. Of course, the mindset that led the filmmakers to soften up Hester’s appearance, led them to do the same to her personality.

Hester is the main problem with this movie. Every other significant problem is directly connected to the way the filmmakers handled her character. See, while Tom is our protagonist and the point-of-view character, in both the book and the film, Hester is the main character. Her journey and character arc define the story. If the visual aspects were the first thing the movie had to get right, Hester was the second. The problem is Hester has been neutered to the point of unrecognizability. Although aspects of the book version of Hester are not entirely gone, they are considerably softened, making for an overall lighter tone in the story.

Book Hester is frequently and accurately described as feral, not just for her appearance, but for her behavior. She doesn’t care about social norms or other people, and will do anything to survive. Hester does begin as cold towards Tom, but she warms to him far quicker than she ought to. She acts more like an anime tsundere pretending not to be that interested in her crush, instead of bitter woman who has shut off her heart from the world and is slowly learning to trust someone again.

Additionally, Hester is a vicious fighter with no qualms about killing anyone who stands in the way of her goals. I do not believe we see her kill a single person in this movie, at least not directly. She even hesitates at several moments in her big fight with Valentine, and ultimately opts to let him die indirectly.

Curiously, the movie also imbues Hester with something of a ‘chosen one’ narrative. Somehow, Anna Fang seems to know that she will be the key to stopping London, and is intent on finding her, which works out because Hester manages to get her hands on the macguffin and figure out its purpose just in time.

All of this works against the core appeal of Hester as a main character. Book Hester is wonderful character precisely because she defies most of the expectations of a leading lady in an action fantasy setting. She is powerful and cruel, and truly needs nobody’s protection. She is far from pretty, a truly disfigured person, with a toughened body from surviving harsh living conditions most of her life. She has terrible trauma from having witnessed her mother die, and her only motivation to even keep living is to take revenge on Valentine. She is basically suicidal, nearly allowing Shrike to kill and resurrect her.

Hester’s relationship with Tom is so interesting because they make such an unconventional couple. Their sole point of connection is that they have both lost their parents. But while Tom has faced people with kindness and developed a stable life afterwards, Hester has shut herself away. Tom and Hester do not like each other for much of the book, and the eventual development of their love takes time, and shared trauma. Tom accepts Hester only after he too has lost everything else in his life, from his friends, his hometown, and his first love.

See, Tom, through most of the first book, is in love with Katherine, who is everything Hester is not. She has had a good life, she is beautiful, and she is deeply compassionate for everyone she meets. Tom dreams of Katherine while he is swept away on his adventure with Hester, and he longs to return to London to be with her. While Tom is away, Katherine meets Bevis Pod, and they begin a parallel plot to Tom and Hester’s adventure that contrasts in some interesting ways. Katherine and Bevis is set up as the ideal love story. Katherine is a perfect girl, coming from a high class family with everything, while Bevis is a lowly urchin boy. They quickly develop a rapport, and as they investigate the mysterious goings-on in London, they develop a pure love that overrides their different backgrounds. It is easy to imagine a happy ending for them: they use their combined knowledge to stop the evil plan and Bevis can come to live with Katherine in the higher class, perhaps even working to reduce class divides together. However, they both die sudden, horrible, and cruel deaths. Meanwhile, Tom and Hester survive the events of the story, and develop a strange relationship defined by trauma. They can be together because Tom falls to Hester’s level, by losing any home, family, or friends he had, just as she did. They do not choose to be together, they are forced together by unlucky circumstance.

Philip Reeve very intentionally crafts a non-traditional love story, so it is bizarre to see it transformed into a Hollywood-style traditional one. Hester is no longer as mean, or ugly, or cold. She and Tom warm to each other quickly. Their ending is joyous. Rather than finding comfort in the only other person left beside them, Hester and Tom are completed by each other and choose to stay together.

The movie could work just fine if the filmmakers committed to making Hester a softer character, and to making her and Tom’s romance sweeter. But they don’t alter peripheral elements to make this change work. There many are small examples of this failure to account for what changing Hester means, moments when the movie seems to forget that Movie Hester is not Book Hester. At the slave auction, people are unwilling to bid on Hester, calling her ugly, despite her being an obviously attractive young lady with somewhat messy hair and a small scar. [There are many more examples: Hester still hides the lower half of her face as though ashamed by her scar, Tom is disgusted when he sees Hester drinking dirty water.]

These are small examples of the filmmaker’s treating movie Hester like book Hester, but there are larger structural problems. I’ve already talked about how Katherine and Bevis’s story is made redundant by the changes to Hester and Tom’s romance, and the little of it that is left is pointless and vestigial. The softening of Hester also makes Shrike less compelling. Hester ought to feel that this bizarre half-man is the only person capable of loving her, and is nearly prepared to accept his death wish. This suicidal nature doesn’t match with the overall well-adjusted and normal Hester in the movie. And why would Tom and Hester even fall for each other in this scenario? Yes, movie Hester is pretty and kind of cool, and Tom is nice and polite to her, and they had both survived some crazy stuff together, but they are leaving behind London and Batmunhk Gompa to go adventuring alone. That is a crazy level of commitment for a person you have only known for a short amount of time.

On the Tractionist/Anti-Tractionist conflict.

The Anti-Tractionists in the movie are made overwhelmingly sympathetic. The scene with Tom arguing against the head of the Anti-Tractionist League is comical. The head is so kind and compassionate, that the conflict becomes entirely one-sided. And the movie ends with the surviving Londoners being given refuge by Batmuhnk Gompa. This is all part of the simplification and softening of the original story, in which most of London dies when MEDUSA explodes, and the ATL captures the survivors of London’s wreck and makes then into slaves. The conflict in the book goes both ways, with both tractionists and anti-tractionists committing atrocities upon each other. The movie’s softening in this case is confusing, as there appears to be no consideration for the possibility of a sequel. The ATL is the unlikely ally of the main characters in the first book, but they become the main antagonists and do terrible things in future books as they wage war on cities.

Even London is made less antagonistic in this version. Valentine is positioned as the sole architect of London’s devious plans in the movie. Crome and Trix are shown to be resistant, or at least hesitant to go along with his plans, which he forces through with violence. In the book, the entirety of London’s leadership is on board, with only some historians being resistant. This widespread cruelty makes sense in the book, in which London is a relatively small city on the hunting grounds, and is desperate to avoid being eaten, which they manage through the creation of MEDUSA. In the movie, despite Valentine being seemingly the sole mastermind, the general London population still cheers as they charge towards the Shield Wall. And this same population, apparently blood-thirsty to see the ATL fall, willingly seek refuge after London falls? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for these Londoners or not?

The book navigates the moral ambiguity of this conflict far better. London is an old and established city, but is being outpaced on the hunting grounds by newer cities that have banded together into larger “conurbations”. Throughout much of the book, the enormous Panzerstadt-Bayreuth is pursuing London. This need to compete is what drives London to develop the MEDUSA weapon, which is first fired upon to destroy Panzerstadt-Bayreuth. In this conflict, the terror of unleashing a weapon of mass destruction is somewhat justified by London as a need to survive in an increasingly cruel environment. With the victory over Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, London is inspired to attack Batmunkh Gompa next, the longtime enemy of cities that bars the way to the uncontested land of anti-tractionists. Without all this conflict, the movie simply has London go along with Valentine’s obviously evil plot to attack a largely peaceful nation when the city seems to be surviving fine otherwise. The conflict is simply bad v. good, rather than the tragedy of a needless conflict that is in the book.

To Conclude.

This movie bombed hard at the box office. It’s hard out there for big budget fantasy fare. Established and well-known properties can get by on brand recognition, like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but it is hard to get to an audience to commit to out-there premises. Studios are hoping to find the next Avatar, but are putting out flops like Jupiter Ascending, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and John Carter. Mortal Engines fits right into this trend of failures. Even at a relatively low budget of 100 million USD, commonly doubled to ~200 million to account for advertising costs, the movie made a mere 83.7 million internationally, making it one of the largest failures ever.

There is a near zero percent chance of a sequel. It is so terribly disappointing to me. I learnt about this movie way back in 2009, around when Peter Jackson got the rights for a movie. I excitedly imagined the realization on film of these great novels at the hand of the mastermind behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Jackson got pulled away on other projects and in 2016 handed the reins to his protégé, Christian Rivers, for him to make his directorial debut. The result is a lifeless husk of a thing.

The driving theme of the book is desperation. Fittingly, much of the story is structured as a chase. London is on the run from a larger city, which informs the dark actions the city’s leadership take. Meanwhile, Hester and Tom are on the run from many players, mostly Shrike, but also slave traders and pirates. In this hostile environment in which there is no good side to ally oneself with, Tom and Hester turn to each other to find solace in the world.

In the movie, the general plot structure and aesthetics are translated onto a simple action-adventure romp. Friends are made, battles are won, lovers met, and the good guys are victorious. It is vapid, and painful to see the clever and subversive aspects of the book boiled away to bland popcorn cinema. Nobody wanted this, and the box office result proves it.