Mortal Engines (2018)

I don't believe any book is "unfilmable" despite how often that word gets thrown around. There are plenty of examples of good movies based on properties people felt couldn't be translated to the screen. However there are also plenty of examples of movies made on difficult to translate to the screen books where the film makers just didn't find a way to make it work as well as it did on the page. Some need more art, more adjustments, more inspiration. I believe Mortal Engines could have been made into a good film. It just wasn't.

The story's premise is a difficult one to put on screen. The idea of large steam punk cities (think Howl's Moving Castle but 1000 times larger) that role around on giant tank wheels yet don't throw all their inhabitants through constant earth quakes is a difficult one to make believable as we watch it. In our heads we might be able to find a way to be okay with that, but onscreen it's one of those things that is just too hard to suspend our belief around.

So the film makers were starting with a difficult task already. But not only do they not tackle that well, they don't tackle the telling of a story part well either. The film's first scenes are all characters explaining in awkwardly unrealistic conversations, the realities of this world. Yes, the film makers needed to find a way to get us, as the audience, up to speed on how this dystopia works, but their way of doing it is clumsy and cheap feeling. It's bad writing.

The bad writing doesn't stop there. The jokes are all fairly groan worthy and the characterization is based on cliches. I don't know if this stems from the source material or from the movie's adapting it.

And it's too bad too because like much of the teen-lit genre is great for examining real world issues. Here the premise is pretty much hitting us over the head with a critique of  colonialism. But it's all symbolism and little substance. I'm not sure most audiences will get it despite the heavy-handedness of it.

Mortal Engines is one of those films that feels like part way through they knew they weren't really going to get anywhere with it so they just finished it as best the could and dumped it hoping it would find some sort of an audience.

Mortal Engines
Starring: Hera Hilmer, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Stephen Lang
Director: Christian Rivers
Writers: Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens