Mortal Engines

Cities on Wheels, Hearts in the Rubble

I keep thinking about the sheer nerve of Mortal Engines: a movie that looks at the usual post-apocalyptic wasteland and says, no, not enough motion, not enough appetite — let’s put the whole civilization on wheels and let it eat itself. That image does most of the work. Before anyone says a line, before the plot starts nudging chess pieces around, the movie has already announced its central joke and its central horror: in a future defined by scarcity, even survival becomes a form of predation.

What’s interesting, and what I think gets missed when people reduce this film to “that steampunk YA thing with the big wheels,” is how openly it’s about systems of consumption. It’s adapted from Philip Reeve’s novels, yes, but the 2018 film lands in a very different climate than the books did. By then, pop culture had already gone through its share of dystopian young-adult revolt stories, and this one arrives feeling both late and strangely earnest — as if someone took the usual teen-led rebellion template and bolted it onto a piece of industrial sculpture.

Christian Rivers, making his feature directing debut after years in visual effects and storyboarding, doesn’t come in with the graceful confidence of a veteran auteur. He comes in like an engineer with a head full of mechanism. You can feel that background everywhere: in the clutter, the gears, the vertical density of the cities, the way the movie often seems more interested in how a thing moves than in whether we’re fully attached to the person driving it.

That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s the main attraction. The film’s best passages are built around scale and momentum, especially the early London sequence, where the city rolls across the landscape like a grotesque inheritance from the Industrial Revolution that never stopped mutating.

The architecture is the point. London is not just a setting but a body — layered, armored, hungry, and a little pompous about it. There’s something almost funny in the way the film imagines class hierarchy as literal verticality: the rich and powerful perched above, the labor and grime down below, all of it rumbling forward on enormous treads.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t admire the audacity. I also suspect the movie knows it’s silly. Occasionally.

Maybe.

The central conversation around Mortal Engines has always been whether it’s overdesigned to the point of emotional muffling. That criticism is fair, but incomplete. The film’s problem isn’t simply that it has too many ideas; it’s that it often arranges them like objects in a display case rather than pressures in a dramatic argument.