City Lights

The word on the street is that Mortal Engines (2018) is a ridiculous movie that looks pretty great. I guess I agree, but  we found it much better than it needed to be.

The premise is “Mad Max with cities”. After the 6-Minute War, civilization was destroyed, and the very earth has shifted. Now, a thousand years later, huge mobile steampunk cities prowl the land, devouring weaker cities. London has come over the land bridge to the continent to plunder. It’s leader (but not mayor) is Hugo Weaving, looking rather Rip Torn. As they stalk and ingest a small mining town, a mysterious woman (Hera Hilmar), a red scarf covering all but her eyes, stalks London. When she gets onboard, she tries to stab Weaving. But she is distracted by Robert Sheehan, an apprentice in the Museum, who evaluates high-tech artifacts. But the girl gets away.

Weaving corners her at the garbage chute, and we find out that he killed her mother and scarred her face when she was a little girl. He throws her down the chute. When he finds out that Sheehan overheard, he throws him down, too. Yes, Weaving is the villain.

Hilmar and Sheehan start wandering the land together - her a hardened warrior woman, him an annoying city boy. They eventually meet up with Jihae, an aviatrix and member of the Anti-Traction League, the resistance movement to the cities. Since we have steampunk, that means we better get zeppelins and ornithopters, too. And we do.

So far, I’m liking the visuals, but the story is pretty rote. Then Weaving unleashes an ancient zombie robot called Shrike, and it tracks down Hilmar. Although it kills pretty much everyone it meets, it turns out that it raised Hilmar, and is pretty much her father figure. It plans to build a robot body for her, so they can be indestructible together.

That’s when I fell in love with the movie. Robot zombies, in a movie that isn’t just a robot zombie movie, make everything better. I suppose that characters like Shrike - deadly creatures who nonetheless love and protect a protagonist - aren’t unknown in YA literature (which this movie is based on). But it felt fresh here.

Also, Shrike reminds me of the Shrike in Dan Simmons Hyperion novels - a mysterious metal monster who either kills or grants your heart’s desire. It could be a coincidence - the shrike is a bird that impales live lizards on thorns for a later snack, so pretty scary. But Rod Heath thinks it may be deliberate (brag - Rod Heath answers my comments on his blog).

There’s some ham-handed politics in this movie, like characters arguing about leaving Europe ala Brexit. The colonialist attitudes of the Londoners are portrayed as wrong, but understandable. The ending is somewhat appalling. But the steam punk art direction makes it all worthwhile, and the zombie robot father figure pushes it over the top.