Mortal Engines arrived in 2018 with Peter Jackson’s name on the script and a first-time director at the helm. It left as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
The film grossed $84 million against a production budget of $100–150 million, losing Universal an estimated $175 million. That number is the story now. The movie itself is a different problem: a post-apocalyptic steampunk adventure that spends 128 minutes explaining a world it never makes you care about.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
A City That Eats Other Cities
Mortal Engines adapts Philip Reeve’s 2001 novel. The setting is more than a thousand years after a cataclysmic conflict called the Sixty Minute War. Survivors regroup and build mobile settlements known as “Traction Cities.”
The guiding philosophy is “Municipal Darwinism.” Bigger “predator” cities chase down and absorb smaller ones across the “Great Hunting Ground,” a territory covering Great Britain and Continental Europe. London, under Lord Mayor Magnus Crome, swallows a small Bavarian mining town called Salzhaken and takes its people and resources.
That is the film’s best idea, and it burns out early. A city that eats other cities is a genuine image. The film treats it as a premise to be explained rather than a horror to be felt.
Tom Natsworthy and the Gut
Tom Natsworthy is an apprentice historian. He goes to London’s “Gut” to collect Salzhaken’s Old-Tech for the city’s Museum. Relics of 21st-century technology — toasters, computers, smartphones — are prized by historians as “Old-Tech.”
Robert Sheehan plays Tom, a low-class Apprentice Historian thrown out of London and forced to ally with Hester and the resistance as an aviator. Sheehan has the thankless job of being the audience’s eyes in a world that keeps stopping to lecture him.
Hester Shaw, masked and in her twenties, hides among the Salzhakens and tries to kill Thaddeus Valentine, Head of the Guild of Historians. Tom steps in and chases her to a chute. She gets away, but not before telling him Valentine murdered her mother and scarred her face. When Tom brings this to Valentine, Valentine shoves him down the chute.
That is the engine of the plot: a boy pushed off his own city for knowing too much, chained to a girl who came to kill a man. It should work.
Hester Shaw and the Mask
Hera Hilmar plays Hester Shaw, a scarred, mask-wearing fugitive assassin with a personal vendetta against Thaddeus Valentine. She was raised by the cyborg Shrike. The tagline is “Some scars never heal.”
Hilmar has the film’s most interesting role and the least room to play it. Hester’s history — her archaeologist mother Pandora killed by Valentine after he stole a piece of Old-Tech she found on a dig — arrives as information. The film tells us Hester is wounded. It rarely lets us sit with the wound.
Hugo Weaving plays Valentine, Deputy Lord Mayor, obsessed archeologist and power-hungry head of the Historians’ Guild. Weaving is a strong actor in a role that gives him little to do but stand at a lectern and announce his own ambition. The script by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson knows Valentine is the villain. It never finds a reason he is interesting.
Shrike and the Anti-Traction League
Stephen Lang plays Shrike, a cyborg and the last of an undead battalion of soldiers called Stalkers — war casualties re-animated with machine parts — who serves as Hester’s guardian. Shrike is the film’s one genuine creation. A machine that raised a child and cannot let her go is a better monster than anything the plot builds.
Jihae plays Anna Fang, a pilot, warrior, and leader of the Anti-Traction League, a resistance group banding against the moving cities devouring Earth’s resources. Against the predator cities, the League has built an alternative civilization of “static settlements” in Asia led by Shan Guo, protected by the “Shield Wall.”
This is the political spine of Reeve’s book: two ways of living, one that eats and one that holds still. The film states the conflict and then abandons it for chase scenes.
A Cast Doing What It Can
The supporting cast is deep and mostly wasted. Ronan Raftery plays Bevis Pod, an Apprentice Engineer whom Katherine befriends. Leila George plays Katherine Valentine, the villain’s daughter and one of London’s elite. Patrick Malahide plays Magnus Crome, the Lord Mayor. Colin Salmon plays Chudleigh Pomeroy, Tom’s historian boss. Mark Mitchinson plays Vambrace, Valentine’s henchman.
Regé-Jean Page plays Captain Khora, a Ruh-Shan member and Anti-Traction League aviator. Menik Gooneratne plays Sathya, Frankie Adams plays Yasmina Rashid, Leifur Sigurdarson plays Nils Lindstrom, and Kahn West plays Toa Heke — all Ruh-Shan members and League aviators. Andrew Lees plays Herbert Melliphant, an Apprentice Historian and Tom’s rival. Sophie Cox plays Clytie Potts, another key Historian. Sarah Peirse plays Dr. Twix. Caren Pistorius plays Pandora Shaw, Hester’s mother.
That is a full ensemble. Almost none of them get a scene that belongs to them.
The Long Road to Release
Jackson bought the rights to Reeve’s book in 2009. The project then sat for years before an official announcement in 2016. Jackson chose Rivers — an Academy Award winner for Best Visual Effects on Jackson’s King Kong — to make his feature-length directorial debut, and he brought over several crew members from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
Shooting ran from April to July 2017 in New Zealand. The world premiere was November 27, 2018, in London. New Zealand got the film on December 6, 2018, and the United States on December 14, 2018.
Reviews were generally negative. Metacritic put it at 44/100, matching the 4.4/10 published critical score — and matching what is on screen.
What Actually Went Wrong
Mortal Engines fails at the level of feeling, not spectacle. In this paper’s view the visual effects are competent. The world is built. The problem is that the film never decides what it is about.
Is it about Tom, a boy who learns his city is a predator? Is it about Hester, a girl who lost her face and her mother to the same man? Is it about the Anti-Traction League and the argument that people can live without devouring each other? The film gestures at all three and commits to none.
The middle section strands Tom and Hester in the Hunting Ground. They survive Southies and Scavs on a night hunt, and find refuge in a vehicle called Scuttlebug, but the owners lock them in a cell, intending to sell them as slaves. Hester confides the truth about her mother. It is the closest the film comes to a real scene between its two leads, and it arrives late and passes fast.
Some scars never heal
The tagline promises damage that lasts. The film delivers a plot that moves.
Jackson’s production teams worked on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, and in this paper’s judgement those films carried a weight and history that Mortal Engines lacks. The same craftspeople, none of the patience. Cities on wheels should feel enormous. Here they feel like sets.
The box office result is not a mystery to be solved. A $100–150 million budget on an unproven property and a first-time director is a hard bet. Losing an estimated $175 million is the outcome of that bet, not a verdict on its quality. But the two are related. The film could not promise a feeling, and it could not supply one.
What matters here is not that Mortal Engines lost money. Plenty of good films lose money. What matters is that the film had a real idea — Municipal Darwinism, cities that hunt, a world divided between those who move and those who stand — and treated it as set dressing.
The cast deserved better. Weaving, Hilmar, Lang, and Jihae are working with material that gives them types instead of people. Rivers, making his debut, handles the scale and loses the intimacy. The script, from three writers who worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, mistakes explanation for world-building.
Mortal Engines is not a disaster. It is a waste. The bones of a strange, angry, original story are visible under the machinery, and the film never lets them breathe.
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