Mortal Engines (2018)

Welcome to yet another version of the post-apocalypse. This time around, the post-apocalyptic wastelands are roamed not by new wave biker gangs but by, huh…moving cities who consume each other in what looks to me like a rather dubious use of resources. Well, there is a country with a Chinese name with a rather international population “in the East” that does think the same and guards against the aggressive cities via a big ass armed wall.

Anyway, the film starts in the moving city of London that has made its way to what was once continental Europe to grab resources where only tiny citylets roam. Or that’s the official version, but if you think whatever kindly archaeologist/engineer Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) is building in St. Paul’s isn’t some kind of super weapon, I have something for you to rub on the soft parts of your neck. And indeed, the newest eaten city brings with its influx of newbies – hats off to New London for not murdering the population of the cities they eat - one glowering young adult named Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar). Her manifold kinds of glowers and her tendency of hiding a decorative scar under a fetching red scarf clearly mark her out as our heroine; and her first act of business upon arriving on London is to attempt to kill Valentine who has apparently murdered her mother. Inigo Montoya understands. That murder attempt does of course go pear-shaped (else this would be a rather short movie), not the least thanks to the intervention of one Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), a young historian of the underclass. Tom then proceeds to chase Hester through the innards of London; at the end of the chase, she lets drop some details about Valentine’s evilness before she falls through, well, the literal ass end of London. Which is where Valentine pushes Tom through too, for he can’t have anyone knowing he’s an evil mad scientist.

Fortunately, our young heroes have the survival abilities of cartoon characters, so all is set up for the two first learning to grudgingly respect one another, then to love. All the while, they are traversing the bizarre post-apocalyptic earth. Also appearing are slavers in absurd giant vehicles (because everything in this world is ten times as large as it makes sense for it to be); a spy/revolutionary with awesome anime hair (Jihae), a robot undead named Shrike (Stephen Lang); awesome airships with awesome roguish captains of various races and genders; a base in the clouds; and other goofy yet awesome crap. From time to time, we also pop in to Valentine being evil and scenes of his boring daughter (Leila George) and some equally boring guy (who cares) finding out that the guy the audience know is evil is indeed evil.

If all this sounds to you rather implausible and goofy even for the standards of a big fat blockbuster based on a popular YA novel, you are absolutely right. The film also suffers from an overload of standard big fat blockbuster clichés coming thick, heavy and often rather pointlessly (why is the “I am your father” bit even in there, for example!?), and a script so mechanical, you can hear its clockwork ticking so loudly it is impossible to ignore. It’s a pretty inefficient clockwork too: is it really necessary to cut away from our heroes having awesome adventures and our villain being villainous to Valentine’s daughter so the film can be sure we remember her later on when she has the important plot function of braking a city?

For a film as goofy as it is, Mortal Engines also is surprisingly, often nearly absurdly, po-faced, taking itself so seriously, treating the most obvious dramatic clichés as if they were really clever and hot shit. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a film based on a script by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (and Philippa Boyens), who certainly aren’t afraid of standard tropes and clichés but have quite a bit of experience in selling them convincingly.

Here’s the thing however: seeing all these weaknesses, I found myself enjoying Mortal Engines immensely. In part, the film’s insistence on rote clichés and ultra-traditional plotting told in an overly earnest manner might be stupid and ill-advised, but it is also charming as hell, rather like listening to an overenthusiastic kid telling us all about this awesome adventure story she has just come up with. Consequently, as long the film follows either Weaving’s patented villainy or the likeable couple of Hilmar (who really has an astonishing number of different glowers in her repertoire; I’d recommend her for a role as the masked vigilante of your choice) and Sheehan and their crazy adventures, I found myself grinning about this dumb nonsense like a loon. Only the handful of scenes with Valentine Jr. let down the film here, but there’s not too much of that to suffer through.


Then there’s the film’s other strength. Director Christian River’s was apparently Peter Jackson’s storyboard editor (though he also directed the short film Feeder (see Minutes Past Midnight), and clearly brings with him a great ability to put the film’s impressive, absurd, and clearly anime/manga/French language SF comic inspired production design front and centre. So while few of the contraptions and places we see make much sense once you start thinking about them, they are so impressive and beautiful, realized with so much imaginative detail, their silliness just makes them all the more beautiful. Because that’s what movies are there for too: showing us things we haven’t seen or imagined before just because they are wonderful (in the sense of “full of wonder”) not because they have to make sense. Rivers is also pretty good at actually using all the beautiful stuff in the action sequences, so all of it isn’t just a pretty backdrop but the heart and soul of the action.

In short: Minutes Past Midnight (2016)

Minutes Past Midnight isn’t quite your typical horror anthology but structured rather more like a literary anthology which, curated by Justin McConnell, brings together various short films that weren’t necessarily meant to be parts of a full length movie. I rather like this format, for it certainly helps bring short films to viewers that wouldn’t seek them out as standalones or have no way of seeing them because a surprising amount of shorts isn’t actually online and can mostly be experienced by people who either live near one of the places where a genre film festival takes place or can afford to travel to one.

Unlike with most anthology films I write up, I’m not going to go into every single one of the segments. Let’s just say that most of them are solid to great – except for Ryan Lightbourn’s “Roid Rage” which is pretty much everything I don’t like in a movie condensed into one short – but put out a couple of words for the highlights.

The most obvious highlight is of course Kevin McTurk’s puppet animation “The Mill At Calder’s End”, a wonderful concoction of Gothic mood concerning a family curse in the Victorian age, featuring the voices of the great Barbara Steele and Jason Flemyng (and one puppet that looks rather a lot like Peter Cushing), and making not a single misstep in design, tone, or mood. It’s simply a perfect piece of short cinema.

Also very fine, if not quite as exalted as “The Mill” is Christian Rivers’s “Feeder”, the tale of a struggling musician moving into a rundown house in a rundown part of suburbia where he encounters an entity that trades sacrifice – indicating its wishes through scratched drawings on a wooden floor – for inspiration. As it goes in these matters, the sacrifices required tend to grow and grow. I really like the folkloristic echoes of the trading of sacrifice for inspiration, turning this into a bit of a piece of suburban, Australian folk horror (at least as I would define the word). It’s realized with a solid understanding of how much it needs to show of the sacrifices and their psychological consequences to to be effective. It also ends on a neat little twist that may not come as a complete surprise but fits the tone of the whole piece wonderfully.


Last but not least, I’m going to praise “Ghost Train”, a tale of childhood guilt turning deadly by Lee Cronin, featuring a fantastically creepy looking animatronic ghost train (the kind you find at a carnival, not he sort that makes choo choo), some harsh revenge from the grave by one of the creepier undead children I’ve seen in my long career of watching this stuff. It’s told in a mood that reminded me quite a bit of the stories of Australian writer Terry Dowling, who also often circles comparable thematic concerns and motifs.