Mortal Engines is out today and people don’t like it

Mortal Engines is a movie I want to like. It’s about a post-apocalyptic future where the great cities of the world are mobile. They crawl over the Earth and absorb smaller towns to use as fuel to feed their hungry engines. That’s bonkers, and I like bonkers. Also, it’s written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the same writers who worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The director is Christian Rivers, a longtime collaborator of Jackson’s. Basically, it’s the new project from The Lord of the Rings people, and since those movies have a special place in my heart, I want their successor to succeed.

At a glance, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, at least if the critics are right about it. “The story is bloated and, despite flashes of imagination, overly familiar,” writes Michael O’Sullivan of The Washington Post. “And the dialogue, peppered with well-worn catchphrases like ‘We didn’t start this, but we will finish it,’ is an assault on the brain, by way of the ear.”

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A lot of critics went after the movie for feeling derivative, with a post-apocalyptic wasteland pulled from Mad Max, a rebels-vs-powers-that-be plotline yanked from Star Wars, and the epic sweep of Jackson’s own Lord of the Rings. “Nearly every time the film was focused on its world, I was riveted,” wrote Evan Saathoff of Birth.Movies.Death. “Whenever it returned to the story, I lost interest..

"The film’s visuals and design far exceeded my expectations, and some of the action staging really works. These strengths and the script’s weaknesses ultimately come crashing together in the film’s last big visual blast. The climax’s setups are so obvious – and so numerous – you can predict most of the last half hour beat by beat. Watching it play out feels tedious as a result, leaving you exhausted rather than exhilarated.”"

Even the harsh reviews agree that the movie has some redeeming values, but not enough to make it worth watching. “Mortal Engines is bursting with everything you’d want except compelling emotional intelligence,” writes Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. According to him, the whiz-bang adventure plot may “sound involving on paper, but on screen Mortal Engines manages to be largely devoid of dramatic energy. Yet it’s a measure of how captivating its visuals are that I wouldn’t hesitate to see it again if only to try and pin down just what went wrong.”

Hey, a movie that gets you into the theater to watch it crash and burn is still a movie that gets you into the theater.

Obviously, Universal spent a lot of money on this movie. I applaud them for the risk, Chris Bumbray of JoBlo’s Movie Emporium doesn’t think it’s going to pay off:

"If Universal was hoping this would be a new franchise, they need to think again, as despite some arresting eye candy, this is as generic a sci-fi/steampunk thriller as they come, made all the worse by a silly premise and so much-world building that it feels like a ten episode season of a TV show cut-down to two hours."

That was another consistent complaint: that the movie is overstuffed. Wrote O’Sullivan: “[T]he movie isn’t something you savor so much as swallow whole, without tasting it.” But according to Alissa Wilkinson of Vox, that can also be part of the appeal: [Mortal Engines is] filled to the point of overflowing with stories, challenges, mysteries, and spectacle — some of which make for a more compelling film than others,” she writes. “But it may be Mortal Engines’ very maximalism that makes it watchable: You’re never quite sure what wild new contraption will show up next.”

But she seemed to be in the minority. While a lot of critics agree that the world-building aspect of the movie is interesting, Katie Rife of The A.V. Club thinks it misses the forest for the trees:

"[Jackson, Walsh and Boyens do] add some appealingly granular details—yes, that includes maps, as well as obscure forms of currency and tossed-off references to long-ago wars—to enhance the world-building, by far the best aspect of the film. But in their passion for detail, they’ve glossed over some big questions about the “how”s and “why”s of this wacky retro-future. They’ve also wholly neglected the already flimsy characters, who don’t have coherent motivations or even consistent accents. To be fair, though, that last bit is more on director Christian Rivers, who similarly imagines mobile cities that are impressive and imaginative when sitting still but blur into ugly nonsense every time they move."

The visuals, too, seemed divisive. I’m picking up that they’re interesting at the least, but critics describe them as everything from “spectacular” to inconsistent.

Glenn Kerry of RogerEbert.com summed his opinion up with a question: “How did this truly crummy movie get made?”

Not everybody is down on the movie, at least not directly. Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times took a holistic view. Yes, the movie is kind of silly and cliched, he argues, but so are a lot of the movies it draws from. Don’t think too hard and Mortal Engines “offers a fair amount of fun.”

Is that enough to go see it? Somehow I doubt it, but we’ll see how it does against fare like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Critics like that one a whole lot more, if you’re wondering.

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