Trailer available here

With it leaving Netflix at the end of the month, I politely got reminded by the algorithm that this was on my list and now would be a good time to sit down for a couple of hours and give it a watch.

This is one of those moments where I watch the trailer, read the description but that’s about it. I know there are some people that do extra research before sitting down to watch something because as the time since we could start recording and producing moving images continues to grow and it becomes more affordable to create things the vast expanse of content we could potentially consume gets overwhelming; We live in an era now where we will simply never be able to watch everything ever created.

Mortal Engines immediately caught my attention and I’m a little surprised it flew under my radar when it first came out in 2018. It was adapted from a 2001 Philip Reeve book that had been turned into a screenplay by a collection of people including Peter Jackson to be directed by Christian Rivers. Taking a look at it afterwards though to grab things like the trailer link it turns out it went under the radar for a lot of people due to a bit of lacklustre marketing and negative critic reviews hindering it to the degree that it is amongst one of the biggest ($175mil) box office failures of all time. It certainly isn’t an award winning production and is perhaps a bit of a not mass market style production or content, especially after things like Hunger Games absolutely trashed the market and peoples thoughts on what this sort of genre should look like, but even with the mediocre acting it seems to have been treated a bit harshly (it is certainly no worse than Hunger Games, probably better but that’s because I put Hunger Games in the “it’s trash” bucket alongside Twilight and Fifty Shades etc).

Set in the future, after the destruction of the world as we know it, a few historic items and buildings of London continue to survive and these items become treasured by a few collectors and historians but also by a few people with questionable motives wanting to use it all to make a machine. It is this desire, combined with some of the outfits, that give this a very steampunk vibe. The destruction of the world has essentially brought London back to the Victorian times with a political, social and cultural divide to go with it and poverty vs wealth to go with it. Yet there is also another collection of people with another way of life, some very fancy planes and outfits and the odd piece of technology that doesn’t exactly see the two nations at war with each other but very clearly with super strong tensions and clashes that add to the destruction and a slave trade too.

If anything the biggest personal let down for me was that the acting just seemed to be lacking a little spark of something and it felt like a few of them were there purely because it was a job rather than truly transforming themselves into a character. This comes as a surprise given the lead character Tom Natsworthy was played by Robert Sheehan (Klaus in The Umbrella Academy) and despite the completely different role and setting he still had a bit of that vacant far away-ness that works so well for him in the TUA; For some reason watching him in TUA I thought he might have had a little more versatility of acting and expression.

Mortal Engines isn’t amazing but I do think it is worth a watch and if you happen to get the chance to watch it before it does disappear from Netflix before the end of the month then it would be worth it.