Christian Rivers

(On Cable TV, August 2019) I’m not sure how future movie critics will regard the 2010s, but if I can give hints as an early commentator, I’d suggest poking at the commoditization of wonder. Never have there been as many fantasy movies, and never have they been so unremarkable. We see, on a monthly basis, sights and stories that would have amazed earlier generations of moviegoers limited by a lack of genre awareness and primitive special effects technology. And yet, high-imagination effects-filled movies such as Mortal Engines can come and go without making any significant cultural impact, digested almost instantly by an industry that drives viewers in seats week after week. As someone who read a lot of written Science Fiction, it’s almost incomprehensible how Mortal Engines can be reduced as a mere SFX-heavy movie of the week and be forgotten so soon after. This is, after all, a movie featuring moving cities, running on gigantic threads in a post-apocalyptic landscape and capturing/absorbing/digesting smaller cities along the way. This is a big-scale fantasy adventure, meant to inaugurate a trilogy of movies and wow the socks off its audience. And yet … we’ve been conditioned to watch and move on, looking for the next big thrill. To be fair, let’s not pretend that Mortal Engines is particularly well-packaged. Limited by its literary origins of a script adapted by a book series from Philip Reeve, the film overstuffs its wonders, zig-zags some peculiar paths and doesn’t always make sense once it gets to its cartoonishly evil antagonists. It’s also very YA-flavoured, meaning that it has a hard time distinguishing itself from the YA-dystopia subgenre that crashed so miserably in the mid-2010s (See above for “commodification of wonder”). As a result, Mortal Engines had miserable box-office returns that made it a high-profile failure and cemented that we will never ever get the screen adaptations of the three other books in the series. (Which may be for the better, as a plot summary of those books gets weird in the way that many YA series eventually get.)  Still, if I may be allowed a bit of a contrarian opinion, I really liked maybe half of Mortal Engines. The half that has London-the-city rampaging over the European countryside led by Christian Rivers’s direction. The half with the steampunk inventions coming straight out of the books, the derring-do of the characters, the wall-to-wall special effects, the engaging actors. I suspect that the other half, story-wise, is still too close to the eccentric books to truly flourish as a movie. And that’s really too bad, because generations of filmmakers would have killed to get the means that Mortal Engine squanders to little impact. If the 2020s should head in one direction, it’s calming down with the malleable digital reality of movies and figuring out interesting stories to tell.