If the first decade of the 2000s was a critical and commercial path of roses for Peter Jackson, the second would be a via crucis whose maximum exponent was Mortal Engines, beginning of a series of films destined to adapt the literary saga of Philipp Reeve; a collection of novels Young Adult along the lines of other contemporary youth hits like The Hunger Games, Divergent o The Golden Compass. All of them were adapted to the cinema with greater or lesser success, but none received the same disdain as the tape produced by Jackson.
It is true that he had some strong contenders at that time. In the first place, his direct rival was Spider-Man: A New Universe, the animated film produced by Chris Miller y Phil Lord that stunned both fans of the character and those who superheroes were not his thing. In addition to the endearing wall-crawler, Mortal Engines copper had to be beaten with Aquaman, of James Wan, or that magnificent reinvention of the franchise Transformers what was it Bumblebee, of Travis Knight.
But even with strong rivals in such a competitive Christmas season, the failure of Mortal Engines it was thunderous. With an estimated budget of 100 million dollars and expenses of around 60, the film made a measly 15 million dollars in its American premiere. The world box office would help (slightly) to overcome this bad experience, raising almost 70 million dollars. The sum of both 85 million dollars, did not even give to cover the ambitious production supported by Jackson.
Of course, Universal would immediately cancel any possibility of continuing to produce the three sequels that completed the saga. But, coincidences of life, the tape has obtained a second life in Netflix, where it has become one of the summer hits of the streaming platform’s extensive catalogue. Something that helps us to recover a job and reevaluate if its failure was deserved.
Origins of ‘Mortal Engines’: from Peter Jackson to Christian Rivers
the origins of Mortal Engines date back to 2001, with the launch of the first novel in the saga, and end in 2006, the year of publication of its fourth and last installment, until the arrival in 2018 of a fifth (composed of an anthology of short stories) to take advantage of the possible commercial pull of the film adaptation.
The work was not originally intended for a young audience. But the multiple rejections by the publishers made the novelist Philip Reeve accept the proposal of Scholastic to convert it into a fantasy story aimed at a young audience. The result was some fantasy novels that would be successful enough for Peter Jackson, fresh from the grueling filming of his trilogy of The Lord of the rings y King Kong, bought the rights in 2009 with the intention of adapting them to the cinema.
The sudden departure of William of the Bull of the trilogy of The hobbit, which caused Jackson to take charge of his lengthy reinterpretation of the novel by Tolkien, caused the project to be delayed by a decade. When it was already underway, Jackson, exhausted, decided to stay solely as a producer and screenwriter, along with his usual collaborators, Philippa Boyens y Fran Walsh, ceding the performance to Christian Rivers, novice in directing tasks but the New Zealander’s confidence man. Rivers’ professional experience up to that point was in the art direction or special effects departments on Jackson’s films.
That is why the most remarkable of Mortal Engines be its memorable production design and its impeccable digital effects, possibly among the most remarkable of the latest batch of blockbusters coming out of Hollywood. A conjunction between pre-production and post-production that results in one of the most majestic visual experiences seen recently on a movie screen, lavishly and brilliantly transferring the descriptions of the world created by Phillip Reeve.
‘Mortal Engines’ references: between ‘steampunk’ and anime
A world that, like any self-respecting contemporary epic saga, drinks from endless references of popular culture of the 20th century. Of the manners, in its first bars, of the Mad Max: Fury on the road of George Miller, fused with the steampunk aesthetic of the Steamboy of Katsuhiro Otomo, to which should be added the definition in gray scale of the two sides in conflict.
Las monstrous cities/vehicle where the protagonists of Mortal Engines seem to arise from an imagery close to Howl’s Moving Castle of Hayao Miyazaki, while the character of Shriek, a hybrid between undead and cyborg, is reminiscent of a fusion of Metallo, Superman’s cybernetic antagonist, with the soul of Robot Man from the Doom Patrol. Without forgetting a climax that fuses, without blush but with elegance, the tour de force finals of two chapters of the galactic saga of George Lucas: the phantom menace y A new hope.
Other points in the adaptation’s favor lie in its smaller, more intimate moments. In the past life of the protagonist of the story, Hester Shaw, together with her cyborg protector, reverberates the tremendously human and gothic poetics of the best Guillermo del Toro. There are also general shots full of melancholy and stillness of its protagonists looking at the horizon, in the best tradition lucasiana.
Dude, where’s my second act?
But there is a huge elephant in the room. And that is the fragmented narrative of Mortal Engines, its cracked structure; and, without serving as a precedent, the strange decision to have a meager 120 minutes for a story that needed further development to be tasted properly. Almost as if the viewers were witnessing the pilot episode and the season finale of a television season from which each and every one of the central episodes has been stolen from us.
Something curious coming from someone like Peter Jackson, who had the nerve to stretch to infinity a 280-page novel like The hobbit and turn it into a 9-hour tome divided into 3 films solely and exclusively for commercial imperatives. Perhaps for this reason, and after the poor reception of a trilogy that should never have been made, he was tied short in terms of footage, either by himself or by Universal.
The result with Mortal Engines it’s a movie that in its first half, it bombards you with the background of the (otherwise, interesting and rich) post-apocalyptic universe that emerged from the imagination of Philip Reeve. That motorized London, a fusion of countless countries and populations piled up as if it were the nightmare of an architect intoxicated with absinthe from the Industrial Revolution.
His ability to integrate designs that emerged from the dark and baroque imagination of Geoff Darrow from the trilogy is remarkable. Matrix, along with beauty, between heroic fantasy and shojo, of the best Final Fantasy, especially its legendary seventh installment.
a world that cries out for an open world video game and of which we only see the surface of something much bigger and that is weighed down by a footage that only allows two acts, the beginning and the end, leaving the audience orphaned of a knot that serves to develop the protagonists of the story.
‘Mortal Engines’: characters between abandonment and stereotype
Some characters who feel blurred (the one played by Hugo Weaving deserved a development to match, like that of Anna Fang and its sub-universe of pirates and majestic airships) or ignored after presenting them with all the honors, in case of Katherine Valentine (LeilaGeorge); It goes from a fundamental role in the first minutes of the film to being forgotten on the editing table and recovered for a final sequence with Weaving who loses all his gravitas due to the null development of the relationship between the two.
Finally, the curious thing is that, with all its faults, Mortal Engines is a Young Adult adaptation that is infinitely richer, more careful and interesting than blockbuster products such as the franchises of The Hunger Games, Divergent o Twilight.
Perhaps the answer to this mystery is Jackson’s poor judgment in choosing his cast of unknowns, except for Weaving. A risky exercise put into practice for the first time by George Lucas in his Star Wars original and that here falls resoundingly. Not because their young stars -Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Ronan Raferty y Leila George- are wrong, but because perhaps they did not have the charisma that people like Harrison Ford, Jennifer Lawrence o Robert Pattinson.
But the new life Mortal Engines in streaming it may end up turning them into heroes and cult characters of a new generation of fans who end up placing the film in the cult category that other failures of the past have today, such as Flash Gordon of Mike Hodges o Dune of David Lynch.