I blogged on the books some time ago, and couldn’t stop myself commenting on Philip Reeve throwing some shade on Philip Pullman, who is either his drinking buddy or his evil nemesis, and I don’t want to find out which. But they’re drawing level now in a way I didn’t expect, since Mortal Engines looks like being another one shot frachise fizzle just the same way that The Golden Compass sank the notion of a franchise built on the Dark Materials trilogy.
I remember seeing the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and feeling a chill; could it be that someone was going to make those books into a movie which would do them justice? Yup. Against the odds, Jackson did just that. Then he made The Hobbit and the less said about that the better. So there I was some months back seeing the trailers for a Peter Jackson production of Mortal Engines and feeling that same hopeful chill. Because once again, he’d got the look right, which is all you can really judge from a trailer.
You have to picture me going into the movie house, muttering “please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up” under my breath. Well, you don’t always get what you want.
Mortal Engines looks like 100 million dollars, to the extent that anything can really be said to look like that kind of money. It’s all up there on the screen, for better and for worse. And it runs along efficiently enough as a movie in which things happen. They happen one after another in a logical kind of way, stringing the big CGI setpieces together from the beginning to the middle to the big fight at the end and then the coda.
What it’s not is a GOOD story, or a new story, or a faithful adaptation of the book. It catches some of the look and feel of the world which Reeve created, but then it carves back a more complex story to something that winds up feeling like a shot by shot remake of Star Wars. The rebels are holding out in a fortress. A vast machine is bringing a death ray to blow them up. A rag tag fleet of aircraft have to try to stop it. There’s a key point of vulnerability in the vast machine which has to be flown into by a novice who has weirdly great talent. Gah. There’s even a moment when the big bad is standing on a gantry over a huge drop and tells a key character that he’s her father, and then she’s rescued by a passing aircraft. That was the point when I cracked and said “Hester, I AM your father.”
What’s vexing about this is that most of the action had to be run in CGI, which means that they could have literally made the action whatever the hell they wanted it to be. It wasn’t one of those deals where the original book had come up with stuff you couldn’t match in the real world. None of this was happening in the real world anyhow. So what they chose to put on the screen is just what they thought would work dramatically as a reflection of the book. I can’t quite see how they could get it that wrong. They had to cut things from the text, obviously, because there’s a lot of incident in the book and there’s only so much of that which you can fit in. But they didn’t have to get the back half of the narrative so jarringly off, and they didn’t have to drop the ball so damn hard in serving the characters. Hester Shaw is a remarkable character in the books, but in the movie they’ve taken all the rough edges off her face and her character. Tom Natsworthy is an idiot in the books, and Robert Sheehan can’t quite sell Tom as an idiot, because he’s not given enough space to do it properly. There’s all that CGI world building to show off, and the running in between the action bits, and then the action bits, and there just isn’t the room for, you know, acting. Perhaps the poorest served character is Anna Fang, who has a great arc in the books for all that she’s often a plot engine, but here she’s just a kick ass martial arts wizard who has two expressions; sunglasses on, and sunglasses off.
So, there could have been three more movies, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe Netflix will take a run at it in five years time.
