Mortal Engines: A Major Locomotion Picture

EDIT: I finally got around to adapting this article into a video review of the film, so go check that out for a more up-to-date analysis.

I once spent five years refreshing a Wikipedia page.

Alright, I’m exaggerating for the sake of an engaging hook, but it’s not far from the truth. From late 2011* to October 2016, I returned to a single sentence within an article too many times to retain any dignity. That sentence read:

In December 2009, it was stated that the New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson intended to make a movie based on Mortal Engines.

Each time I returned, I longed for change. A lone wanderer of the internet, hoping for something big to happen to what, at the time, was my own little world. Wondrous visions of a world with more than that one sentence filled my head.

Time slipped forward. Hope faded. I started to believe another sentence would never come. Maybe even that the one sentence lied. I stopped checking the article and found slightly more productive things to do with my life.

Then, on the otherwise unimportant date of 24^th October 2016, this happened.

To say I couldn’t believe it falls so short. Nothing could ever compare. From that moment on, I vowed to remind myself of one fact whenever things seemed depressing or unfair: a Mortal Engines movie was finally definitely officially in production. All was well in the universe.

That didn’t last long.

* Incidentally, the journey towards finding this date so many years later could fill a blog post all by itself: a tale of resurrected laptops, booklets about communism, and a terribly erroneous belief that Chrisopher Paolini’s Inheritance could in any way be better than the subject of this article.

You’re in for a Treat

Those were the approximate words of my school librarian when I came to check out Mortal Engines. They’re also the words I would use to tell new readers what awaits them.

Published in 2001, Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines is the first of four novels in the Mortal Engines Quartet. They (loosely) follow the journey of Tom Natsworthy, an Apprentice Historian in a London museum. But this is no ordinary London – this is London as a mountain-sized tank crashing its way through a post-apocalyptic hellscape in search of other cities on caterpillar tracks to devour. An ecosystem of such “urbivores” covers most of what’s left of the planet. They compete for resources in service of an ideological hegemony dubbed Municipal Darwinism.

Some critics claim this premise is mechanically and economically impossible. These minor nitpicks have one simple counter: the Rule of Cool.

I came to borrow Mortal Engines when my English class had a week or two of silent reading lessons. I’d already finished one book (the aforementioned Inheritance) and the covers of the quartet on the library walls caught my attention. Before the weeks of silent reading ended, I’d finished Mortal Engines and its sequel Predator’s Gold, and ordered the entire set from Amazon out of a furious need to know what happened next.

The quartet remains my favourite book series of all time. Despite deceptively simple prose and a young adult target audience, they hold up. I’ve reread them twice within the last few years. Each time I discover and appreciate even more.

Quirk(e)s of the setting don’t stop with cities on wheels. Traction towns became a necessity thousands of years after the Sixty Minute War, a conflict between the American Empire and Greater China in which nukes, quantum energy beams and sentient orbital superweapons decimated the planet.

Every now and then, Reeve allows a glimpse of the present viewed through eyes of the future. Sometimes this is played for laughs – statues of Mickey and Pluto depict ‘animal-headed gods of lost America’ – but they can be genuinely affecting. Christianity is reduced to a backwater religion. Nobody understands the appeal of a god who got himself nailed to a cross. One character struggles to understand a T.S. Eliot quote in a dilapidated old Christian chapel: ‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’ These later become arc words for the third book.

And I haven’t even touched on all the airships, underwater burglary training facilities and resurrected mechanical warriors.

You might assume all this bizarre world-building leaves no room for an actual story. Hell no. Mobile cities and zombie soldiers are all well and good, but it’s the characters and the balanced intricacy of the plot which shine.

No character is without flaw. All operate in the perfect grey area. Hester Shaw, a teenager from the bare earth, swings between various forms of violent, impulsive outcast. Half her face forever hides behind a colossal scar, and only her desire to find the man who robbed her of her innocence with one sword strike pushes her onward.

Then there’s Shrike. Shrike is an undead gear-stuffed killing machine. Shrike has knives for fingers. Shrike impales his victims like his avian namesake. Shrike is one of my favourite characters in all of literature.

I’m not ashamed to admit I cry every time I read the final chapter of A Darkling Plain. Anyone familiar with the books will know.

As perfect an ending as it is, I always want more. The first time, I went straight to the prequel series, Fever Crumb. It’s alright. Not Star Wars levels of prequel franchisicide by a wide, wide margin, but for me it never lived up to the original series.

I became stuck. What else could there ever be to satiate my desire? What could bring the astounding visions Reeve had implanted in my head to life for even more to enjoy?

The Moment of the Rose

A film was the obvious choice. I found the Wikipedia sentence. Peter Jackson of all people had also seen the light. Unlike me, he had the power to do something about it.

Around the same time, I did the same for other tantalising franchise extensions. In time, vague stirrings of possibility morphed into concrete plans, then we had both Jurassic World and The Force Awakens on our hands in the same year. The box office has yet to recover.

But Mortal Engines was different. Jurassic Park and Star Wars were already enormous global properties. Extra instalments were inevitable. My beloved books meanwhile amounted to little more than partially forgotten YA cul-de-sacs known only to a handful of British schoolchildren and librarians.

I channelled my yearning for a film into my growing composerly abilities to create this. Nowadays I don’t hold it in high regard, though others still like it. Submitting it to Reddit served as my first interaction with other Mortal Engines fans online. Discussion turned to how much we all desired a film and our resignation at its impossibility.

The announcement crept up on me that fateful day like this:

Was that…oh my God, the URL…could it be…

It was.

A Mortal Engines motion picture had been scheduled for a December 2018 release with Peter Jackson at the production helm and his protégé Christian Rivers directing. The one sentence hadn’t lied.

More recent revelations explain the delay from intentions to produce in 2009 to actually producing in 2016-2018. When Guillermo Del Toro abandoned directing duties for The Hobbit, Jackson stepped in, losing several years of filmmaking under enormous studio pressure. We all know how that went. I recommend this video series as an overview of the films and their production troubles.

Unlike The Hobbit, Mortal Engines had time on its hands. The last time Jackson produced the first directorial project from a VFX specialist understudy, he blessed the world with District 9. Early indications were therefore positive.

News came somewhere around the opposite of thick and fast, but it did keep coming. The hypothetical world of Mortal Engines on the big screen began to fill up with real, physical elements. Strangest of all were the actors masquerading as characters I’d spent years creating my own mental versions of. Tom and Hester were actual people now.

This is surely a feeling familiar to anyone who’s witnessed the adaptation of something they love. You’re forced to come to terms with the fact that a vast majority of people will view this world and its characters in a form alien to what you originally knew.

How to Train Your Dragon springs to mind. Younger me (and to an embarrassing extent, also older me) adored the book series. The film…not so much. This is Toothless. This is not Toothless. Little is retained between book and film, yet I regularly see claims this is a rare case of improvement by adaptation. I will begrudgingly accept this may be true of the first book but, like Mortal Engines, the series gets stronger as it goes. It pains my heart to know filmgoers of this world missed the true story of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third.

While it’s an odd experience, on the whole I’m happy with the casting of Mortal Engines.

The identity of Shrike now belongs to Stephen Lang, one of the few cast members I recognised. You may remember him from such roles as the grizzled guy in the exo-suit from Avatar. Now he’s another grizzled guy in an exo-suit (sort of) in Mortal Engines. Typecasting much?

Perhaps out of an opportunistic idea to ride the hype train of the film, I composed another Mortal Engines theme last year. I tweeted it to Philip Reeve. I didn’t expect him to reply. I certainly didn’t expect Stephen Lang himself to retweet it. So yeah, he’s my favourite actor now. Totally didn’t spend a day in hysterics. Nope, not me. You’re thinking of some other unknown internet musician.

I’d like to point out that this retweet was the first official confirmation that Lang was indeed playing Shrike. Bow down before me, Mortal Engines fanbase.

Speaking of which, somewhere in all this I joined the fan Discord server. Created just after news of the movie, it’s a place for Mortal Engines fans all over the world to come together and discuss the merits of the books and film exchange memes. Here I learnt I was not alone in my quest to survive until the coming of the film version. The Church of Municipal Darwinism had other members.

My time as a lone wanderer had ended. My time as a tiny gear in the enormous internet machine had only just begun.

The Moment of the Yew Tree

My family visited San Diego a few years ago. The hotel overlooked the Convention Centre. Every morning we crossed the red brick paving outside to reach the tram stop.

In the summer of 2016, that red brick paving and the tram stop appeared in a photo adorning the BBC News top story. The Convention Centre stood behind men barrelling into each other. Riot police. A fight had broken out at a political rally for a candidate who shall remain as nameless as they are shameless.

Seeing the red paving in this new, more serious context was surreal. A place I knew suddenly dominated the headlines. I had stood where the cameras now pointed, yet it all looked so different.

I had the same reaction the day the first Mortal Engines trailer landed**.

It’s a matter of intense pride that I was the second person ever to view the trailer on YouTube. I have visual evidence. That one person who beat me is my eternal nemesis.

That trailer now has 4.6 million views. Like the red paving in San Diego, something personal to me suddenly entered the perception of millions.

I watched the trailer on repeat with a grin the size of Peter Jackson’s bank balance. It was everything I’d ever wanted.

Still, there were changes. There were always going to be changes. What had once been malleable figments of my imagination now had definitive versions. Someone in CGI had set these visions in stone.

This is a concept called reification. Imagine the song The Winner Takes it All by ABBA. You imagined the album version, didn’t you? Not a live version, nor any cover. The recorded, thoroughly produced original is what we consider the true version of The Winner Takes it All. Take Harry Potter – these days, nobody imagines a Harry Potter who isn’t Daniel Radcliffe. This will happen to my beloved wheeled cities, Hester and Shrike, maybe even the narrative itself. This is what all us Mortal Engines fans will have to contend with. Already, Google image results for ‘mortal engines’ are filling up with trailer stills rather than the book and fan art which sustained us for so many years.

Even worse, the moment the trailer hit YouTube, I became obsessed with other people’s opinions. My world was under scrutiny. And it was a weird Frankenstein version of my world at that. What would everyone think? Would it give the wrong impressions?

I’m used to having things I love torn apart on the internet. Being a Coldplay fan will do that to you. Even personal things, such as Thrive, I’ve seen repeatedly defamed by people I’ll never meet.

Mortal Engines though was thrust into the faces of millions in one instant. Such watershed moments, where one event breeds a kaleidoscope of uncountable thoughts, fascinate me. The day of the Brexit vote inspired my current in-production novel for instance.

I scoured comments and Twitter mentions and news articles. The prevailing thought resembled, ‘Heh, it’s like Mad Max mixed with Howl’s Moving Castle,’ dressed in the tone of someone smug enough to think they alone had thought of it. Some people liked it. Some people didn’t. Overall though, opinion was positive – an intriguing teaser with great visuals and a far-out concept with the potential to put bodies in cinema seats.

The actual moment of the yew tree, and the reason I’m writing this whole article no one will ever read in the first place, was the second trailer.

Oh boy.

I loved the second trailer on first viewing. I watched in a guffawing frenzy of disbelief knowing the years of refreshing Wikipedia had not been in vain. I laughed maniacally when each character and location I recognised appeared in a guise that, while not quite what I’d imagined, still seemed faithful or even better. Giant rolling settlements came to life on screen. I mean, just look at the image heading this article – it’s freaking amazing. Only Shrike’s absence annoyed me.

Well, and the scar. Hester’s scar, such a crucial motivator in the books, resembled a strand of oddly placed hair. It could have been worse, I reminded myself.

When I left my trailer-induced haze, I dared to seek out reactions. Hmm. A million voices shouting into the void telling you what to think about something you’ve already made you mind up about is not good for your soul. It’s testament to the manipulative power of the internet that by the end of the day, I felt little more than meh about something that had given me such joy.

Arguments came from two sides. Book fans were livid at the scar’s demotion. Book strangers labelled the dialogue clunky, the story cliché, and Jackson a Hobbit­-ruining hack.

In earlier times I’d stumbled across armchair pundits discussing the film’s box office potential. In a crowded December with better-known properties, they’d struggled to predict its fortune.

Now everywhere I look, pundits use one word. The most feared word in Hollywood. And, because I long for others to know the brilliance of my favourite franchise, now my most feared word too.

Flop.

** What complicates this story somewhat is the fact a leaked trailer landed one day prior. That was the one I spent hours re-watching in a fit of glee. Let’s ignore that.

The Winner Takes it All

The film industry and Municipal Darwinism are quite similar.

Enormous conglomerates roll around gobbling up resources, leaving poorly performing projects to die. This threatens the livelihoods of thousands who’ve pinned their hopes on success. Dominant entities pass on their genes via new films or bigger cities. They are the victors in evolution by natural selection.

In the film industry, the singular resource is money. Movies make money. Money makes more movies.

This is why foresight of a flop hurts. If Mortal Engines performs poorly, regardless of its quality, we’ll never see anything else. The rest of the quartet will never join it in silver screen glory. I’ll never sit in a cinema in tears during the final scene of A Darkling Plain.

My favourite TV show of all time is Avatar: The Last Airbender. I only realised this recently. So when M. Night Shyamalan cocked up the film adaptation to a level even Satan couldn’t manage, I barely noticed. Now I’m heartbroken. Avatar could have been one of the great franchises. Being mistaken for blue people Avatar would be a thing of the past.

I hope Mortal Engines doesn’t suffer the same fate. Whether the film is good or not, global perceptions have already suffered at the hands of a marketing department who don’t really know what to do with it. Is it Mad Max? Is it The Hunger Games? Is it Generic Teen Drama IN SPACE WITH GIANT TANKS?

The second trailer is a mess. I’ve accepted that. Near the end of its release day I was a broken man.

Then I read deeper. Universal had sent press releases to every outlet under the sun, locked from publishing until the trailer hit. The first thing to revitalise my hope in this film, at least in quality if not profitability, was rather unexpected. I’m talking, of course, about Minions.

Remember I mentioned the book features Mickey and Pluto as archeologically misidentified gods? Universal didn’t want to pay Disney for the rights. So someone had the bright idea to replace statues of the Disney icons in the London museum with the yellow henchmen from Despicable Me.

Some will argue, but to me, this is pure genius. What could stand as a better portrait of modern society’s sordid decadence than a bunch of oversaturated jokes milked for all their worth by corporate greed? God is dead and we replaced him with oversized tictacs. Perfection I tell you.

Ok, maybe putting Minions in this film is itself corporate self-indulgence. There’s other evidence of a great film hiding behind marketing incompetence.

For one, director Christian Rivers says Mortal Engines is his son’s favourite book series. Personal connection to the source material often results in better adaptations – take Marvel’s current boon, spearheaded by people who grew up swimming in comic books. Jackson too is a fan. This exchange single-handedly undid all the bad work of that damned trailer.

Well, it’s an idea that you’ve been with you since 2008.  What about this story has kept you, you know, hooked for so long in wanting to continue bring it to the world in film?

PJ:  Well, it’s–I mean, have you ever read the book?

Yeah.

PJ:  Have you read all the books, all four books?

No.

PJ:  Two.  No.  You should because they actually get better and better.  It’s–this is one movie where I hope is successful enough that we get to do the other stories because the other books are really–I mean, it just gets–you know, this story mushrooms in such unexpected ways in the future books.  So, I really hope we get to make those films.

I’m going to make a difficult admission here. I didn’t much care for Hester’s scar when I read the books. Sure, it was an original plot point and drove her motivations, but at the time a muted version in the film adaptation wouldn’t have bothered me. A year spent in the company of other fans has changed my opinion, but the point still stands.

For me, the scar isn’t Mortal Engines. You may have guessed already that, to me, Mortal Engines is and always will be Shrike.

We’re yet to see Shrike anywhere except a tantalising reflection of green eyes in one trailer shot (the one with concerned-looking aviators). I’m hoping the final major trailer puts him front and centre, because it just might fix the damage. Why? In this article, we find Stephen Lang’s words on his new persona:

Lang was drawn to the character of Shrike, whom he likens to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, by the many contradictions within him. “For a character that’s been emptied out, he’s really full,” he says. “For a character who detests memory or has no use for memory, he’s completely obsessed with memory. For a character who is absolutely heartless, he’s got the biggest heart in the world. So, how do you play that? How do you justify? What does all that mean?”

This is the Shrike I know and love.

I care little for his appearance so long as it’s horrifying. I care little for his movement so the revelation that it will be inspired by Russian ballet strikes me as genius. I care only that he has the tragic persona I’ve always wanted him to have. This might not be confirmation of that per se, but it shows passion and thought and all the good things which have to be there for success to come.

So, will success come? Despite everything, I’m still cautiously optimistic. In six months, I’ll return to this article and either laugh away my worries or berate myself for being so naïvely positive.

General audiences won’t have read these articles. To them, Mortal Engines may well have been reified as yet another romance-driven teen dystopia. A flop may be irreversible. Still, the film’s budget is a relatively small $100 million. Return on investment is possible. Sequels are possible. The final chapter of A Darkling Plain on screen is possible.

Perhaps this post is premature, but the moment of not knowing whether it’s a rose or a yew tree you’re looking at is just as valuable as the moment of either by itself. Watching someone manhandle something personal to you with unknown results is difficult. God knows how Philip Reeve feels. For the record, he’s not bothered by the scar either.

Creative adaptation is strange. You work within boundaries set by one audience and have to fit the requirements of another. Bringing a quintessentially British children’s book to the world’s stage must be daunting. Much as my first act upon achieving any sort of fame would have been to get a Mortal Engines adaptation made, I don’t envy Christian Rivers.

I’ve come a long way from the halcyon days of refreshing a Wikipedia page. Now things are real, and with reality comes imperfection. I’m sure younger me would be shocked to learn I could feel anything other than spiritual enlightenment in a world with a Mortal Engines loco-motion picture fast approaching. But he would also have been shocked to know there’s a film in production in the first place. Nearly two years on, that realisation remains as potent as it ever was.

If the film is good, I’ll shout to the heavens telling everyone to see it. We live in a world of cut-throat business. Without cinemas filled, franchise extinction is inevitable. Business cares nought for sentimentality.

If the film is bad, well…I guess I’ll still have the books?

By December we’ll know. I’ll do my best not to die before then.