Starring: Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide & Stephen Lang

Directed by Christian Rivers

Universal, out December 8

In a post-apocalyptic future, cities move across the plains on wheels and tracks, the larger devouring the smaller, while the Anti Traction league fights to end them. Young Londoner Tom Natsworthy finds himself caught up in deadly events when he foils an attempt on the life of archaeologist and renowned Londoner Thaddeus Valentine by the heavily scarred Hester Shaw. As London approaches the Great Shield Wall, Tom must choose between his home and his heart.

As a massive fan of Philip Reeve’s ‘Predator Cities’ novels, I have been impatiently waiting to see this movie brought to life for the better part of a decade (announcements were first made that the film was in the works back in 2009). I am sad to report, it does not live up to expectations.

I should clarify that this is not the usual disappointment reserved for an adaptation of a beloved novel that doesn’t quite match whatever vision the reader has in their head. It’s true that there’s a certain quality to Reeve’s novels which is utterly absent here, but that’s not the main reason why Mortal Engines doesn’t light my fire. It’s just a bit generic.

The first issue it has lies with its characters. It’s supremely difficult to care about a single one of them, because the film gives us very little reason to. Everyone here is a trope. Hugo Weaving is your standard Young Adult Movie bad guy – the sort who’s supposedly a good guy as far as those around him are concerned but is fooling literally none of the audience for a second. His motivations – which could have been deeper and more adult even in this movie adaptation – are actually depressingly banal: he wants to build a superweapon and rule the world. That’s basically all it boils down to. There’s no humanity, no sense of a deeper reason driving any of this, he just wants to be the boss of everything, in the best traditions of the very blandest of cartoon villains.

Set against him are our heroes, Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw. Tom is a sort of everyman-from-humble-beginnings-who-will-rise-up-to-be-the-hero-we-need type which is glaringly obvious from the very first shot in which he appears, so it’s unfortunate that between a script which tells us almost nothing about Tom as a character and a performance from Sheehan best described as slightly wooden, that we just don’t really care much about him at all. Opposite him, Hester Shaw is interesting because she has a scar on her face, or so the script would have us believe. The issue here is that the scar really isn’t all that hideous (reminding me of the awful disfigurement of Art3mis in Ready Player One which turned out to be a barely there birthmark) and Hilmar isn’t given much more by the script than Sheehan, her sole direction apparently being ‘make sure you scowl a lot’.

Stealing the show charisma-wise is Jihae as Anna Fang, a cool Asian aviatrix who is literally the archetype of the cool, rebel warrior princess/pirate/anarchist/insert moniker of choice here. Fang appears from nowhere fully formed and the film asks us to like her because she’s good at fighting and looks cool in sunglasses, but doesn’t bother to tell us anything else at all about her save that she knew Hester’s mother. Whereas Jihae’s screen presence is undeniable, and she does get to take part in some nice action set pieces, it’s another character wasted by the script. She has a bunch of sky pirate friends too, and the film asks us to like them because they’re Anna’s friends. That’s it. They’re so undeveloped, I can only distinguish now between them on the basis that one had dreadlocks, one had a Nordic sounding name and one was a young Asian lady.

Perhaps most oddly, in a film based on a central premise of Predator cities, we see very little of the cities themselves. London features fairly heavily but mostly as backdrop to Valentine’s plotting or as a forbidding presence heading towards our heroes, but aside from this we see very little of the cities themselves. There’s a lovely opening sequence of London chasing down a smaller Traction Town which is excellently shot and promises much, but then the film seems to decide it’s done with all that stuff, and turns into a fairly bland, typical YA adventure romp.

It’s bizarre to me that a film so long in development, with a $100million budget and so much talent attached and a two hour run time, feels so rushed. It barrels along, ticking off plot points in the most perfunctory way, and filling so much of its run time with characters just running from one set piece to the next, that it feels almost instantly forgettable. Even Shrike, my personal favourite character and certainly aesthetically well-presented here, I was sure I cared more about because of what I know of the character from seven novels, rather than much of anything we get here.

Verdict: It’ll please youngsters looking for a slice of fast-paced action, but older audiences and/or fans of the novels will find little to engage them here. Between the plot changes that will upset the latter and the lack of any real character or development that will bore the former, I fear this is the last we will see of Reeve’s wonderful worlds on the big screen. 4/10

Greg D. Smith