There have been far too many movies out there that could’ve been amazing if they worked on their visuals, but this movie isn’t that at all. If there’s one thing that Mortal Engines should be applauded for, it’s the fact that they went ham on the visuals. You’ll actually enjoy watching this movie, but after the flashiness of the visuals sets in, the rest of it is pretty much a filmmaking disaster.
To get into that, let’s just dive into what Mortal Engines is about.
Mortal Engines was a movie based on the YA series by Philip Reeve. Those books have an insane cult following and for a good reason. Each of the books in the series, and even in the prequel series, were incredibly detailed. There were tons of characters people connected with, and overall, the series was a big hit!
But the movie seems to have gone in a totally other direction here.
Mortal Engines goes in a new direction
The movie starts off in the post-apocalyptic world, where a 60-second war had wiped out most of the Earth, and the only cities still standing are those on wheels. Yup, that was the only explanation here. Cities are on tank wheels and eat other smaller cities that just can’t compete and use their resources as fuel.
After all of that is out of the way, we get to know the main characters, Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), Katherine Valentine (Leila George), and Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar).
The main storyline is all about how Hester wants to get revenge on Thaddeus for killing her mother. Tom gets caught in the net while trying to save Thaddeus and gets thrown into the literal garbage shute for it. It seems like that’s where the planning of the overall movie went, too, because it just fell flat.
They had an insane amount of source material to go through, and in a movie, there’s only so much you can squeeze in. They were running through plotline after plotline so fast that the viewers that hadn’t read the original books just wouldn’t be able to keep up. Even those that had read the books were struggling. All that made it so even the plotlines they did go with couldn’t be executed well because they just didn’t get the time to do so!
Too much, too fast – yet not enough
Had this been a mini-series, they would’ve had a lot more time to work their way through the storylines, but as a movie, this one serves as the perfect example of how you can ruin an entire movie simply by doing too much in it.
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