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How did this truly crummy movie get made? I have a theory. Co-producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh , who once upon a time could put together a motion picture that was engaging, coherent, entertaining, and even genuinely dazzling, looked at a bag of money that Universal and sundry other sources of capital left on their table and asked themselves, “Can we whiff as badly as the Wachowskis did with ‘Jupiter Ascending,’ only leaving out the fun pansexual campy parts?” And the answer is, absolutely!

Co-written by Jackson and Walsh (you may remember their “ Heavenly Creatures ” and a couple of Tolkien adaptations) with frequent collaborator Philippa Boyens , from a sorta-I-guess-must-have-been YA novel (it was published by Scholastic in the States, I see) by Phillip Reeve, “Mortal Engines” begins with the usual voiceover informing us how “that Ancients” destroyed Earth’s civilization in “only 60 minutes,” using bad and terrible weapons technology, and how now the world itself is unmoored, as predator cities scavenge the globe for what’s left of its resources.

How this translates into visual terms is that whole, or at least partial, world cities now are mobile, going around on giant tank treads. How this engineering feat was achieved is not addressed. Anyway, London, which we still largely think of as genteel, is hauling ass and hunkering down on a much smaller “Romanian mining town,” hoping to steal its salt. On that town is Hester Shaw ( Hera Hilmar ), a teenage girl looking to take revenge on London’s power engineer (or something) Thaddeus Valentine for killing her mom. London’s own Tom Natsworthy ( Robert Sheehan ), a young historian building up a collection of “the Ancients’” weaponry (the Ancients, in case you’re missing it, were us) the better to dispose of it so as to study war no more, is initially a Thaddeus fan. But once Tom gets too close to Hester’s secret, down London’s garbage chute he goes, the better to find love and adventure with the feisty, reticent Hester. This move, among other things, allows Thaddeus access to the weapons storehouse, which will abet him in constructing a Brand New Superweapon.

As for Hester, does she have much to be reticent about. In her orphaned girlhood she was adopted by a member of something called “The Lazarus Brigade,” undead robots with high-level superpowers who always get what they want. Her adoptee, Shrike, played by Stephen Lang with a substantial overlay of CGI, was touched by her promise that she would allow him to turn her into a similar robot (because it sounds like such a great deal, right?). But Hester reneged to seek revenge on Thaddeus, and Shrike went apeshit, or whatever the equivalent of apeshit is for super-powered undead robots. The better to keep Hester at bay, Thaddeus frees the very insistent and very destructive Shrike from a floating prison and off he goes to collect on her promise. He destroys so much in his path it’s a wonder that Hester’s many newfound friends even keep her around, but lucky they do, because, surprise, she holds the key to dismantling Thaddeus’ super weapon. The storyline is just packed with surprising plot developments like that.

Said story’s various components are introduced so haphazardly they can’t help but elicit titters, but even if brought into the picture differently, Shrike, intended as a poignant reminder of What It Is To Be Human, is a terrible idea terribly executed. I know Lang has probably been cooling his heels Down Under waiting for the “ Avatar ” sequels to start shooting long enough that he’s gotten antsy, but I wish he’d found a better way to waste his time. Even by the lower standards of kids’ stuff, this movie is laughably portentous and kitschy, and gets progressively worse, what with the heavy-handed introduction of the ethnically diverse rebel flyer team and the Dalai Lama lookalike leader of the Asian territory Thaddeus intends to bulldoze.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers , a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah. Never mind that the whole concept of the movie is like someone decided to take Terry Gilliam ’s “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” way more seriously than it was ever intended. I did like the near-cavernous tread tracks that Hester and Tom had to run around in on their Way to Love.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Mortal Engines (2018)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of futuristic violence and action.

128 minutes

Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw

Robert Sheehan as Tom Natsworthy

Hugo Weaving as Thaddeus Valentine

Jihae as Anna Fang

Ronan Raftery as Bevis Pod

Leila George as Katherine Valentine

Patrick Malahide as Magnus Crome

Stephen Lang as Shrike

Christian Rivers

Writer (based on the book by)

Philip Reeve
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson

Cinematographer

Amy Hubbard
Liz Mullane

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Mortal Engines Reviews

As much as I wanted to enjoy Mortal Engines, it did very little to move me and keep me captivated.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | May 9, 2024

It's actually a little bit more soulful than it lets on.

Full Review | Jun 16, 2021

It's a beautifully designed world but no real life exists within it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 29, 2021

Mortal Engines is a lifeless fantasy epic that is mildly enjoyable at times, but suffers from several grave afflictions that ultimately incur steep viewing consequences.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2021

Once we dive into the players and the events that have shaped them, Mortal Engines is undeniably derivative of countless Hero's Journey-based stories and hopelessly lacking in creative energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 14, 2020

These Engines have had a false start and broken the fan belt, thank god they are mortal because this one dies a very slow death.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 13, 2020

A missed opportunity.

Full Review | May 20, 2020

It wasn't fun or good or interesting.

There's no reason to see Mortal Engines. It's not 'so bad it's good'. There's no one set piece that is overly impressive.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2020

It borrows from many stories but doesn't have enough of its own to offer.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Feb 14, 2020

Which such promise and thrill at the start, the film caves under its own weight. Hoping that the filmmakers would go bold or go home on this, they've gone, nowhere.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2020

It's got an interesting look, but it's a bloated story.

Full Review | Sep 12, 2019

The film's adventure plot simply rolls over the main thematic content of the book.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2019

As massive and slow as its titular machines, there is a great deal of spectacle but an uneven pace and tone anchor this film and keep it from greatness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 5, 2019

It is rare that we get such a starkly distinct movie in wide release which makes it a shame that so few gave this movie a chance. But, I beg you to watch it if you can and I think you will enjoy it as much as you did ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 24, 2019

Sadly suffers from an ensemble cast who fail to elevate the stereotypical material above expectation.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 4, 2019

One of the biggest box office flops of the year is also everything Ready Player One should have been and much more.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5 | Mar 20, 2019

it's sorta the young adult version of The Road Warrior and Mad Max. A world full of crazy engines and and stories and cities that are moving around. It feels very derivative.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2019

This movie could have benefited more from character development. It is painful to watch talented actors wasted in their roles.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2019

It's the sort of inelegant, poorly edited mish-mash of digital nonsense that makes your eyes glaze over.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Feb 20, 2019

Mortal Engines (2018)

User Reviews
as everyone else mentioned in their reviews: the visuals/CGI. Beautiful scenery and sets, vibrant colors, spectaculars battles, very good cinematography
very dynamic. There is almost non stop action and anticipation. No bathroom time.
strong performance of Hugo Weaving
strong performance of Stephen Lang and CGI team for Shrike character
the concept itself lacks any logic. After a world war destroys the advanced stage of evolution the humanity have reached, the remaining humans build huge mobile islands on land that move on tracks or wheels or legs to scavenge... something. While others build a great city defended by a wall.
as others have mentioned, the movie tries to fit a lot of things from the books in two hours and it fails. The characters have no depth, no complexity and there is no real emotional attachment to them
too much resemblance to Mad Max
there are no big names involved except for Hugo Weaving and of course Peter Jackson as a writer
the plot is predictable, with holes and its main purpose is to justify the action and special effects. Annoying cliches both in characters, lines and story (the wise old Asian, the warrior girl, etc). Oh and yeah, SPOILER ALERT there is a genuine "I am your father" moment...
The story itself has some flaws, it has a weak world building. It's antagonist has weak qualities of a good villain where you could hate him in the entire film. The movie also suffers from the lack of good backstory for the supporting characters and some of its protagonist motivation. Some subplots are not needed in the film , it just make the film longer and dragging.

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Peter Jackson's steampunk Mortal Engines mixes the fantastic and the familiar: EW review

For the first half hour or so, the Peter Jackson-produced steampunk adventure Mortal Engines is beautifully freaky popcorn bliss. It’s like a YA Mad Max as directed by Terry Gilliam during his wiggy Time Bandits / Brazil phase. Without too much fanfare or explanation, we are immediately plopped down in a post-apocalyptic future where what’s left of humanity live on towering moving cities propelled on rusty treads and giant steel wheels. They barrel through the barren wastelands like pirate frigates hunting for rival mobile-cities to blast, overtake, and gobble up in their voracious garbage-truck maws.

That dazzling initial blast of action has the propulsive, world-building creativity we’ve come to expect from the Mad Maestro of Middle-earth — even if it’s Jackson’s longtime protégé Christian Rivers who’s technically the film’s director. But then, once you begin to acclimate to the film’s eye-candy junkyard wonders, it slowly starts to dawn on you that there’s still another hour and a half to go — and that it’s going to be a long ride indeed.

Based on a series of novels by Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines isn’t just about a future of dwindling natural resources and technology jerry-built from used parts, its plot turns out to be second-hand, too. It’s virtually a beat-for-beat remake of George Lucas’ original Star Wars . From its naïve, wannabe flyboy hero Tom (Robert Sheehan), to its tough heroine with mysterious parentage Hester (Hera Hilmar), to its sarcastic, swaggering mercenary with a bounty on her head Anna Fang (South Korea-born musician Jihae), the movie uneasily anchors its shock-of-the-new look with shrug-of-the-old storyline. Even the film’s villain, Hugo Weaving’s charismatically duplicitous Thaddeus Valentine, turns out to be a bad father who’s building a top-secret, world-destroying weapon. The only thing missing is a Wookiee and a pair of bickering droids. At least it cribs from top-shelf source material.

Mortal Engines looks like it cost a billion bucks. If only as much originality had gone into its beats-by-Joseph Campbell narrative as its Baron Munchausen -for-teens set design. The actors, apart from the always-dependable Weaving, don’t add much screen presence to their hand-me-down roles. It’s also an oppressively busy film with a drums-of-war score that won’t be happy until it cudgels you into submission.

Forty years after Lucas first whisked us to his galaxy far, far away, there’s no denying that we live in a cinematic universe that’s been largely mapped out by Star Wars . But in Mortal Engines , that debt is too literal. We’ve all seen enough tales about scrappy young rebels sticking it to the big, bad empire and finding their inner hero along the way. Maybe that’s why, despite all of the film’s retro-future eye candy, it never quite sweeps you out of your seat and transports you someplace new. It’s a squeaky salvage job that could have used a fresh dose of oil to make it hum. C+

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‘mortal engines’: film review.

Peter Jackson produced and co-wrote 'Mortal Engines,' a post-apocalyptic story based on the young adult novels by Philip Reeve.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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A fantastical bit of steampunk sci-fi runs to a considerable extent on fumes in Mortal Engines, an action-loaded tale of adventure and combat set in a future that takes its design cues entirely from the past. Based on the initial book in a series of four by British author Philip Reeve, the first of them published in 2001, this new effort by Peter Jackson ‘s Wingnut Films is certainly lavish and expensive looking but never thoroughly locks in to capture the imagination or sweep you off to a new world where you particularly want to spend time. It’s combat-heavy, but not in an especially enthralling way, spelling an uncertain commercial future in the U.S. at least; foreign results could be significantly better.

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Mortal Engines review – Peter Jackson's steampunk Star Wars stalls

Jackson has turned Philip Reeve’s dystopian adventure novel into a tiringly frenetic and derivative fantasy-adventure movie

M ortal Engines was originally a YA dystopian adventure novel from British author Philip Reeve, published in 2001, the first of the “Mortal Engines quartet”. Among its many fans is Peter Jackson , who has now turned it into a tiringly frenetic and derivative fantasy-adventure movie, co-producing and co-writing the adaptation with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Making his directing debut here is Jackson’s former storyboard artist and visual effects supervisor Christian Rivers.

The film is basically a steampunk Star Wars, with a bit of low-octane Gilliam and Gaiman on the side. By the end, in fact, the resemblances to George Lucas’s great creation become so distractingly obvious that it is difficult to credit that it isn’t some kind of intentional homage.

We are in a post-apocalyptic world, the Earth having been ravaged by a “60-minute war”, which has created a devastated landscape. In some places are what are called “static settlements”, but the land is roamed by moving cities, “traction cities”, which have somehow attached tank-track wheels to the soil underneath them, and now clank about in a sinister and predatory way, like Stephenson’s Rockets of evil, swallowing up lesser mobile communities, enslaving their populace, using the buildings for fuel and most importantly of all, scavenging for “low tech”: pre-digital machinery and technology of the sort which, however battered and rusted, can still conceivably be fixed and put to work, specifically for warlike aims. The idea is a little like the aggressive flying island Laputa in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Howl’s Moving Castle, the children’s book by Diana Wynne Jones, which was turned into a Studio Ghibli animation by Hayao Miyazaki.

The scariest traction city is London, or perhaps “London”, because this city is obviously a smaller version of the real thing, and features a Las Vegas-style amalgam of its most famous tourist landmarks dotted about: a replica St Paul’s with red telephone boxes, a couple of the Nelson’s column lions, etc. This is the seat of empire, the kind that has no need to strike back, because no one is strong enough to strike against it in the first place. It is policed by various uniformed groups who look like constables, Beefeaters or droogs. The captain of this quasi-urban warship is effectively Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), though he appears notionally subordinate to the city’s mayor Magnus Crome (Patrick Malahide).

The charming, charismatic but sinister Thaddeus is attacked by a disfigured assassin with a personal grudge against him: this is Hester, played by Hera Hilmar, who is to make common cause with the story’s initially hapless but stout-hearted young hero, Tom (Robert Sheehan), a young apprentice who discovers a dangerous secret about Thaddeus. When both Hester and Tom are expelled from London, a new figure enters the story: Anna Fang, played by South Korean music star Jihae, who is the badass leader of that group which must always crop up in YA dystopias: the “resistance”. The “resistance” is there to create the open-ended narrative possibility of battles won and lost, important for extending the single YA story into a franchise.

There are some lively things about Mortal Engines, and the performances are game enough. Yet in all its effortful steampunkiness, Mortal Engines isn’t a film which is particularly exciting or funny, and the idea of the “traction city” is a stylistic and visual design tic that you just have to take or leave. There is no point in wondering exactly how the colossal engineering feat of putting a city on wheels and moving it about was achieved, especially in an avowedly tech-impoverished age. This film’s engines are spluttering.

Science fiction and fantasy films
Children and teenagers
Film adaptations
Peter Jackson
Hugo Weaving

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Mortal engines, common sense media reviewers.

Inept, derivative, violent sci-fi fantasy based on YA novel.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Main message seems to be "kill or be killed." Even

The characters are so flat that they barely regist

Frequent use of guns, shooting, missiles, explosio

Main young adult characters touch hands, gaze into

Language includes "damn," "bastard," "hell," "idio

Characters eat Twinkies. Sculptures of Minions sho

Positive Messages

Main message seems to be "kill or be killed." Even "good guys" don't hesitate before blowing someone away. The two main characters have destinies that they must fulfill, but these, too, are based on destruction and death.

Positive Role Models

The characters are so flat that they barely register as characters, let alone role models. They spend most of the movie destroying things, running, trying to look cool.

Violence & Scariness

Frequent use of guns, shooting, missiles, explosions. Characters die, sometimes violently. Sharp blades/spikes and stabbing/slicing. Moderate blood from wounds, including bullet wounds. Bloodiness ramps up in final battle. Scary monster-robot creature. Creepy imagery. Lots of chasing/falling/crashing. Punching. Reference to "drinking own urine." Slave market shown; people being sold to cannibals.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Main young adult characters touch hands, gaze into each other's eyes, finally hug. Kiss shown in flashback.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "damn," "bastard," "hell," "idiot," "bloody," and possible use of "for Christ's sake" (too noisy to tell for sure).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Characters eat Twinkies. Sculptures of Minions shown.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Mortal Engines is a sci-fi/fantasy movie based on a young adult novel by Philip Reeve and adapted and produced by Peter Jackson (among others). Big fans of the book and/or steampunk enthusiasts may like it, but others are likely to find it mechanical and derivative. It's too childish for most teens and too brutally violent for most children, especially in the climactic battle. There's frequent gun use and shooting, plus explosions, stabbing, and slicing, with blood. Characters die, sometimes quite violently. Viewers can also expect to see a scary robot-skeleton monster and plenty of other intense, creepy images. Language is on the mild side but includes "damn," "hell," "bastard," etc. There's an extremely tame romance between the main female and male characters; they touch hands, gaze into each other's eyes, and finally hug. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (21)
Kids say (24)

Based on 21 parent reviews

lots of fantasy violence, but nothing too graphic.

What's the story.

In MORTAL ENGINES, it's the distant future, and the world has been ravaged. Cities are now giant roving vehicles that are constantly searching for food and fuel. The biggest is London, where Thaddeus Valentine ( Hugo Weaving ) is collecting old tech to build something in secret. Meanwhile, a girl from the wastelands, Hester Shaw ( Hera Hilmar ), makes her way onboard London and tries to kill Valentine. She's stopped by a historian named Tom ( Robert Sheehan ), who works at the city's museum. Hester and Tom are both dropped into the wastes, where they're rescued by a rebel pilot, Anna Fang ( Jihae ). Unfortunately, a "resurrected" monster ( Stephen Lang ) is after Hester, and Valentine's daughter, Katherine ( Leila George ), discovers what her father is really up to. Can the good guys stop the villains in time?

Is It Any Good?

Simpleminded and mechanical, this movie clumsily borrows from every sci-fi/fantasy movie of the last 40 years, smushing everything together with inept filmmaking and a total lack of logic or emotion. Based on a young adult novel by Philip Reeve and -- shockingly -- adapted by Peter Jackson , Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, Mortal Engines does have some cool costumes and production design, but that only goes so far. The rest is numbingly familiar. The movie doesn't even seem to take any joy in its copying; rather than paying homage to anything, it's a slavish, soulless piece of work, as if done by a computer cut-and-paste application.

It's not even any fun. It's certainly too childish for teen viewers -- but it's also too brutally violent for younger viewers. The sloppily shot and hastily cut action sequences are piled on top of other scenes that don't stick to any kind of character logic or need; everything that happens serves only the plot. The dialogue is wince-inducing, and characters spend most of the movie either scowling (trying to look cool) or staring slack-jawed at some impressive piece of scenery. By the end, it becomes painfully clear that most of the incessant stealing can be traced to the Star Wars movies; Mortal Engines has the dubious honor of making even the worst entries in that series look accomplished and admirable.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Mortal Engines ' violence . How did it make you feel? Is it meant to be thrilling? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

What is "steampunk," and why is it interesting/appealing?

Why do we tell post-apocalyptic stories? What can we learn from them about the present?

Does the movie represent a wide array of cultures? Are the representations positive or negative?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 14, 2018
On DVD or streaming : March 12, 2019
Cast : Hera Hilmar , JiHAE , Hugo Weaving , Robert Sheehan
Director : Christian Rivers
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 128 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sequences of futuristic violence and action
Last updated : May 14, 2024

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Mortal Engines Is a Breath of Fresh Air

The idea of escapism became a hobbyhorse in the years following the September 11, 2001, attacks, right on time for the first of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation, The Fellowship of the Ring , to hit theaters. It seemed to refer as much to genre as to run time — Fellowship clocked in at about three hours, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is 15 minutes shy of that. This fall, I’ve seen more than a few grumbles on Twitter about movies that clear the two-hour mark, and the weight of that ask in the midst of our busy, miserable, Twitter-checking lives, but I remember walking into movies in the early 2000s knowing full well they’d stretch toward the four-hour mark, and feeling not only excited but grateful, and kind of cozy.

We still have long, expensive genre movies, and most of us have become fully disenchanted with Jackson’s brand of stultifying spectacle over the last two decades, so why does something like Mortal Engines feel like such a breath of fresh air? Jackson and fellow Rings producer Fran Walsh’s adaptation of a 2001 YA steampunk novel more than a decade after the release of the ill-advised flop adaptation of The Golden Compass (itself largely blamed for the fall of Rings supposed-powerhouse New Line Cinema) might have seemed craven and misguided even just a few years ago; now it feels preciously, precariously idiosyncratic, a kind of flight of fancy that must be protected at all costs just on principle. But as directed by first-time feature helmer Christian Rivers — who has been working with Jackson since doing storyboard art on 1992’s Braindead — it also happens to be a pretty admirably engineered work of escapism, made all the more astonishing by its ability to stand on its own, independent of a cinematic universe. It’s the increasingly rare multi-million-dollar hero’s-journey spectacle that does feel, improbably, cozy .

To explain the plot of Mortal Engines even in the Cliffiest of CliffsNotes formats would still take up all the rest of my word count, so here are the broad strokes: Earth, some thousand years in the future, has been rendered postapocalyptic by a series of quantum explosions known as the “Sixty Minute War.” The pockets of civilization that were not decimated became “traction cities,” giant mobile cities on tank wheels that roam Europe eating up smaller villages and converting their resources into fuel. Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), a hard-knocked orphan with a mysteriously scarred face, is trying to assassinate her mother’s murderer, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), current captain of the traction city of London (which looks like a kind of London-themed Ace of Cakes project complete with St. Paul’s Cathedral sitting on its top tier). She accidentally teams up with a history buff (Robert Sheehan), and they discover that Valentine is building a new quantum doomsday weapon so that London can shoot down a barrier wall currently preventing it from gobbling up all of Asia.

The idea of the traction cities is truly a wacky, see-it-to-believe-it science-fiction conceit, but if it were merely a game of one-upmanship with, say, fellow gearhead fantasia Mad Max: Fury Road , it wouldn’t ring half as true. It’s abundantly clear that author Philip Reeves’s inventions are just baroque exaggerations of lived phenomena: urban sprawl, rural flight, class hierarchies. A bizarre but strangely touching subplot in Mortal Engines involves the terrifying Shrike, a zombie robot on an unstoppable mission to destroy Hester, who eventually becomes a kind of gonzo metaphor for empty-nest parents. Like all good YA fantasy, it’s rooted in earnest adolescent anxieties, and dresses them up with the same level of earnestness. A more mercenary hand would have cut the Shrike plot line, or the majestic moment where Weaving commands his London crew “prepare to ingest!” It’s all the technically unnecessary, illogical stuff in a big-screen spectacle that makes it feel alive, whether it’s a zombie robot dad, or sending our heroes to a floating balloon city because, well, it looks cool.

I suppose that’s the thing that feels fun about Mortal Engines — it’s well-designed, and not in reference or deference to any other franchise or existing look book. It’s well-designed as a means to transport and entertain effectively. It’s for you . Anna Fang’s badass red suit and Matrix sunglasses are for you . The goofy bug-eye goggles on a random fighter pilot are for you . Watching Mortal Engines got me thinking, by contrast, about how infrequently contemporary franchise films feel like they have been crafted first and foremost for the audience. So much of the lumber and clang of a Transformers or any number of Marvel and DC titles feel weighed down by obligation to some other party other than the one that’s paying $15 for a movie ticket. Certainly as an adult, an awareness of financial obligation leaks into everything, and perhaps it’s the dominance of money in the conversation that makes true escapism feel harder to come by. When even a glimmer of originality rears its head in the form of a blockbuster, the marvel is less “How did they do that?” or “How did they come up with that?” and more “Who did they get to pay for for that?”

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DVD & Streaming

Mortal Engines

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

December 14, 2018
Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw; Robert Sheehan as Tom Natsworthy; Hugo Weaving as Thaddeus Valentine; Jihae as Anna Fang; Ronan Raftery as Bevis Pod; Leila George as Katherine Valentine; Patrick Malahide as Magnus Crome; Stephen Lang as Shrike; Colin Salmon as Chudleigh Pomeroy

Home Release Date

March 12, 2019
Christian Rivers

Distributor

Universal Pictures

Movie Review

London’s on the move.

No, not in some sort of metaphorical, cultural, forward-thinking sort of way: It’s literally moving —gallivanting through the ruins of Europe like a colossal, wildly overpopulated RV.

Lots of cities trawl through the ruins of Eurasia these days, circa the year 3,100 or so. Ever since the 60-Minute War nearly obliterated all of humankind, mobile cities have been all the rage.

Why? Why would someone say, “You know what this metropolis needs? Wheels .” Earthquakes, of course. The cataclysm made the world unstable for a time, and everyone knows the safest place to be in an earthquake is in a gigantic moving vehicle.

So the remnants of humanity stuck the remnants of their cities on some seriously oversized caterpillar tracks. And while terra firma has calmed down somewhat lately, folks living in communities like London never thought to anchor themselves back into solid bedrock. And can you blame them? They can see the world without ever leaving home. Literally.

These movable cities have a downside, of course: They require a ludicrous amount of fuel, and they don’t run on ethanol. So they chase down other, smaller communities and ingest their resources—which seems like a vicious cycle. We need to move to gobble up other cities so that we can keep moving. But never mind. The system has, at least, a catchy label: Municipal Darwinism. Cities must eat … or be eaten.

But former archeologist and current London darling Thaddeus Valentine knows that, eventually, you run out of cities. So in the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral—located at the very tippy top of rolling London—he works on a mysterious technological solution to all their problems.

Tom Natsworthy has lived in London all his life. Now a flunky for the London Museum, he rescues historical items from captured cities before the whole works get ingested. He saves an old toaster here, a cracked iPhone there, and sometimes he even comes across something truly remarkable—a bit of “old tech” that has some relation to the doomsday weapons of the past.

One memorable afternoon, he runs into the great Thaddeus Valentine as a city’s being disassembled, and good thing, too. Before Tom’s done groveling, Valentine’s attacked by a strange, masked woman. Tom saves Valentine and chases the woman through the bowels of London. And when she tries to make a ludicrously chancy leap, Tom tries to save her life, too—grabbing her before she falls to either freedom or death.

The girl (named Hester Shaw, we learn later) is not pleased. She hurriedly tells Tom that Valentine murdered her mother, and that their previous encounter had been her only chance for revenge. Then she falls and is gone.

When Valentine shows up, he expresses gratitude to Tom for saving him. But when Tom lets slip that she accused Valentine of murder, Valentine’s face changes.

“I’m sorry you had to hear that, Tom,” he says. And he pushes Tom off the ledge, into the gaping hole that the girl fell through before—one that leads to the tracked, blighted land underneath the rolling communities.

Tom and Hester survive the fall. But if whole cities can be gobbled up whole in this crazy world, what chance do two small people have?

Positive Elements

Tom seems like a nice chap, saving people as he does. And when Hester is injured (which, admittedly, is Tom’s fault), he refuses to leave her to save his own skin. He’s a loyal friend, even in the face of serious danger.

Hester’s been on her own for a good long while before she meets Tom, and she’s more reluctant to throw her lot in with him. But the two grow evermore fond of each other, and soon neither will leave the other—no matter what sort of scrape they land in.

They’re not the only ones who show a heart for self-sacrifice, though. Dozens of others risk their lives—and sometimes give them—for what they believe to be a better cause. When the dust settles, a few characters face their former rivals and extend a hand of help and friendship. And we learn that a very young Hester had some help surviving as a child from an unexpected hero.

Spiritual Elements

As mentioned, St. Paul’s Cathedral stands on the literal pinnacle of London. While it now serves as a sort of laboratory, it’s still repeatedly referred to as a church. (When someone gets set to invade the place, in fact, she quips that she’s late for it.) And when one man shows a secret passage to St. Paul’s to a couple of infiltrators, he warns them to be careful. “Whatever it is they are doing in that church has nothing to do with God.”

One of London’s most prized exhibits is that of some “American deities”—which turn out to be statues of oversized Minions from the Despicable Me movies.

We learn that the weapons system that brought about the 60-Minute War was called Medusa, obviously a reference to a creature from Greek mythology. We see an image of the original Medusa carved on a wall surrounded by candles, shrine-like, and someone appears to be praying to it.

Hester is being pursued by a robot-like thing called Shrike: He’s referred to as one of the “Resurrected,” the last of what was called the “Lazarus Brigade.” It’s said that “hell” has been unleashed when a massive weapon is fired.

Sexual Content

Spoiler warning: Tom and Hester fall in love eventually, but they never have much time to do anything other than touch hands. Anna Fang, the fearsome leader of London’s opposition, exchanges lovestruck glances with her apparent significant other, Captain Khora.

Violent Content

Teen-oriented dystopias never embrace pacifism, for some reason. Even as the world of Mortal Engines is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the plot propels us straight into another one.

Massive blasts from a doomsday weapon target a city and its surrounding fortifications and, presumably, obliterate many of its inhabitants. We see walls and buildings collapse; flying machines disintegrate, tossed into the air by aftershocks.

A floating city is nearly incinerated (not helped, I’d imagine, by its presumably hydrogen-filled balloons). People plummet from said city to the ground below, as well as riding flaming wreckage to terra firma.

Combatants fight frenetically with each other, getting shot, stabbed, hit, kicked, sliced and strangled while engaged in melees. When someone gets shot in the face, we see a bit of his hair (or wig) fly up in the air. Whole groups of people are mowed down by gunfire. Flying craft are shot from the sky and blown up; they also engage in kamikaze-like feats of derring-do.

Hester and Tom land in a slave market, and a man bids for Hester in order to make her into sausage. On the auction block, a man seems ready to bash someone’s head in before he gets an acceptable bid at the last second. Hester bears a wicked-looking scar across her face—an injury she received (and we see her receive) when she was just 8 years old. Vicious harpoons spear both man and moving city. Someone shoots the leg off a water-bound walking prison, sending the prison (and presumably everyone in it) to the briny deep.

Shrike is unquestionably the movie’s most frightening character: This robot-like being looks part zombie, and he seems unstoppable—tromping after his intended target with immortal, terrifying resolve. We first meet him after he’s been imprisoned, and we learn that he obliterated nearly an entire city and killed a dozen men sent specifically to catch him.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear one use of “b–tard,” one “d–n”, three uses of “h—” and three uses of the British profanity “bloody.” We also hear misuses of God’s name about four times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Other negative elements.

Some characters lie and backstab.

Mortal Engines might be the most telling example of moviemaking in the early 21st century: visually spectacular, dispiritingly dark, narratively vacuous and, of course, a suitable launch point for a hoped-for franchise.

Mortal Engines is dumb, sure, but it’s a fun sort of dumb. The rumbling cities we see here don’t make a lick o’ sense on any level—but man, they look pretty sweet. The storyline deviates significantly from Philip Reeve’s original children’s novel and rumbles into a predictable, paint-by-numbers plot with holes big enough to drive a city through. But the thing grinds forward as assuredly and inexorably as London itself. It’s a carnival ride of a movie: It might not have a lot of depth, but it flings you around rather pleasantly.

The makers (many of whom brought The Lord of the Rings to the screen, including screenplay co-writer Peter Jackson) kept the content relatively restrained, too, in keeping with the book’s original audience. We hear very little language, and sexual content is almost nonexistent.

If I have a concern, it’s that this dystopian tale could’ve been a little more whimsical and a little less grim—more Wizard of Oz and less Mad Max. Mortal Engines can be violent, frightening and even grotesque in places. Shrike is the stuff of many a child’s nightmare, and his moving lair might make you give up dolls forever.

Mortal Engines won’t become an immortal favorite of many, but it is an imaginative romp, if you can navigate our caveats. It, like London, can be quite the ride—if you can avoid the mud.

Sacrificing for the right things is an important concept if your world is on the move or not. For ideas on how to develop a sacrificial attitude in your children, check out these resources:

Teaching Children About Self-Denial

Nurturing a Servant’s Heart in Kids

How to Encourage Your Kids to Do What’s Right

Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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‘Mortal Engines’ Review: Peter Jackson Produces a Huge, Fun, Steampunk Mess

David ehrlich.

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“ Mortal Engines ” might not be a particularly good movie, but it’s a BIG one, and sometimes that can be even more important. Adapted (on steroids) from Philip Reeves’ neo-Victorian steampunk fantasy of the same name, this $100 million holiday-season event starts off like a supersized remake of “Fury Road,” as two mobile cities shoot massive harpoons at each other in a death race through the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Europe as Junkie XL’s bombastic score yowls in the background. Yes, mobile cities . One of them is London, and the other is a quaint mining colony that doesn’t have a name worth remembering; they travel on giant turrets, stretch a mile into the sky, and mulch each other for fuel.

This — viewers are informed via opening narration that sounds like it’s being read by Immortan Joe himself — is the way things have been since a scary fusion weapon of some kind wiped out the “ancient world” of the 21st century more than 1,000 years ago, decimating our civilization in a war that only lasted for 60 seconds. Imagine if Manhattan were mounted on wheels and then rolled across the Hudson river to attack Hoboken; it would look absurd, and be difficult to see clearly, but there’s no doubt that it would be worth watching on IMAX.

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Even at its worst (which is where it often resides), “Mortal Engines” is still a rousing advertisement for the theatrical experience. Unlike “Roma,” however, this would be utterly worthless to watch at home. Watching the film on a television or laptop would be like staring at a stereogram with one eye closed: You’d get the idea, but you wouldn’t be able to see it for yourself. The size of the thing isn’t an added benefit, here: Bigness is the point. This is a movie about the potency of imbalanced proportions, the dominance of the large over the small, and the metastatic need for those in power to grow ever more powerful, and the best thing that can be said about rookie director Christian Rivers is that he suffuses that theme into the very soul of this gargantuan mess.

“Mortal Engines” might be scavenged together from the bones of a zillion better fantasy epics, but the film’s derivative nature is almost part of its charm. If not for the wooden dialogue — and a cast of characters so forgettable that the actors should have been forced to wear name tags — the hodgepodge storytelling might even seem intentional. Thirty-year-old Robert Sheehan stars as 16-year-old Tom Natsworthy, a plucky apprentice historian who works in the Museum of London, and reveres whatever relics he can find of the ancient world (the Museum’s exhibits include a cracked iPhone, a statue of two Minions, and other symbols of a civilization in decline). Part of Tom’s job involves telling his transparently evil boss, Thaddeus Valentine ( Hugo Weaving ), whenever he comes across the rusty old reactors that fueled the doomsday machines that once scorched the Earth. Despite his nostalgia for dead cultures, Tom has apparently never gotten around to watching “ The Matrix ” or “Cloud Atlas” or really any other Hugo Weaving movie, for that matter.

Unfortunately for Tom, he learns that lesson the hard way. When a scarred assassin named Hester Shaw (Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar) sneaks aboard London and tries to kill Thaddeus for murdering her mother, our hero overhears that accusation. Thaddeus, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, drops Hester and Tom into a garbage chute and out into the barren hellscape that stretches between the rolling cities. And so the two bickering exiles begin a journey back to London in order to stop Thaddeus from dooming them all to a repeat history — a journey that will see them ride a house that looks like a rock and moves like a centipede, travel to a hilariously ill-conceived floating market so combustible that it can be destroyed by a single match, and spare a few minutes for a subplot involving some minor characters back in London who are so underwritten they hardly merit a mention.

It all ends with a big, eye-numbing battle and a lot of purple light beams shooting into the skies, as most blockbuster-sized movies do these days. In a story about the perils of history repeating itself, perhaps it’s fitting that Peter Jackson — who first hired Rivers to storyboard “Bad Taste” back in 1987, and serves as a producer and co-writer here, along with usual cohorts Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens — failed to learn any lessons from the CG overkill that consumed his “Hobbit” trilogy. At least this film continues to benefit from the stunning New Zealand locations that Jackson has always known how to capture on camera.

Still, it’s a shame that our time on London is so short, as the mobile metropolis is far and away the film’s most interesting character (and there are some other legitimate contenders for that title, including a deathless foster dad who’s part zombie and part Terminator, and a badass rebel pilot who might as well have escaped from a “Final Fantasy” video game — more on her in a minute).

While CG overload robs the place of its splendor when seen from the outside, it’s a marvel whenever the camera travels indoors. Ignore how illogical it is that the English capital has retained so many of its visual landmarks 1,000 years into a ruined future, and focus instead on how cool they all look when stacked on top of each other. The Tube now runs vertically, spanning the gap between the Blitz-era vibe of the working class sections (“Keep Calm and Keep Moving” boast the signs, appropriate for a film that never stops) and the stately gardens of the rich, who quite literally live above the rest. Hollow, hyper-functional writing isn’t the only thing here that evokes “The Phantom Menace,” as sleek vehicle designs sit alongside rusty baubles that could have been salvaged from the broken dystopia of “ Brazil .” It’s a microcosm of the “Municipal Darwinism” that governs this world, and one of the few examples of when the movie doesn’t just feel like a montage of narrativized concept art — when this hodgepodge of influences coheres into a discernible flavor, instead of losing one altogether.

The other standout is the aforementioned rebel pilot, Anna Fang, a role for which South Korean musician and multimedia artist Jihae has been rather ingeniously cast. Magnetic from the moment she appears on screen, Anna Fang (it’s more fun to say her full name) rolls up in full “Matrix Reloaded” attire, complete with a fierce red jacket and a pair of thin rectangular sunglasses that aren’t even sensible by Morpheus’ low standards. It’s a striking look, sure to be cos-played to infinity in the coming years, but the part is so interesting because of Jihae’s unstudied energy, and the elusiveness it brings to a movie where every other character is completely obvious. On the page, Anna Fang is little more than a cool aesthetic, but Jihae finds some inscrutable life in there, and hints at a depth that “Mortal Engines” has no interest in mining.

The film is too busy to stand still, as the script does its damndest to power through a staggering degree of of world-building without pausing to catch its breath. There’s enough fantasy jargon in these two hours to fill an entire season of “Game of Thrones,” but Rivers doesn’t have the time or patience to let us learn any of it for ourselves. There’s a character named “Bevis Pod,” but odds are you’ll have to Google that after the movie to figure out which guy he was, which is frustrating because any character named “Bevis Pod” should obviously be iconic. Instead, he’s just a cog in an admirably gigantic machine that stretches to the heavens only to spit out a simple message about the dangers of power, and the upside of pacifism. There’s so much to love here, and so little opportunity to enjoy it. But at least it’s big. Huge, even. And sometimes, when you’re competing against Netflix and a night on the couch, that’s all a movie needs to be.

Universal will release “Mortal Engines” in theaters on December 14.

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Mortal Engines Review

14 Dec 2018

Mortal Engines

As visual metaphors for capitalism go, the sight of a towering, mobile London running down and swallowing a smaller town is pretty compelling. The stripped world of Mortal Engines is dying, and humanity on the verge of extinction caused by its own hubris. And yet hubris still dominates, with each city convinced of its own manifest destiny to become the alpha predator in this world of “municipal Darwinism”. It makes a compelling hook for this Peter Jackson -produced epic, but it’s the setting for a fairly conventional adventure story.

The good news is that long-time Jackson collaborator and first-time director Christian Rivers keeps the action beats coming and the pace up. The story, based on Philip Reeve’s book, has been neatly streamlined for the screen, keeping the emotional beats — even adding more for extra heft — but chopping out large swathes of unnecessary back and forth as our heroes struggle to figure out what’s going on and eventually to stop a plot that threatens the whole planet. Someone, it seems, is trying to recover the weapons that once cracked the world’s crust and set cities on the move.

The world-building is as good as you’d expect from a Lord Of The Rings-trained director.

As young London historian Tom Natsworthy, Sheehan is a likeable

lead, though the role is thankless. He’s just a naïf caught up in larger events, giving others the chance to explain things to him and the audience. Far more interesting is Hester (Hilmar), the mysterious and masked girl who stabs a man without obvious provocation almost as soon as we meet her. Why she did so becomes a central plank of the film’s plot. Hera Hilmar’s an engaging presence even when snarling and desperate, and her unusual background and conflicted desires gives her a different feel to the identikit action women of other films.

If Hugo Weaving’s Valentine cuts a largely familiar figure, there is a lot of welcome texture in the supporting cast, from Stephen Lang ’s terrifying Terminator-alike Shrike to Jihae’s outrageously cool Anna Fang. And the world-building is as good as you’d expect from a Lord Of The Rings -trained director. From the metres-deep tracks that each city leaves behind to the Mad Max -esque scavengers who try to survive outside the city structures, there’s a real sense of desperation and decay everywhere. Even in the towering London we spend more time in the rattling bowels of the city than in its towering heights (St Pauls tops the structure, dome and all still standing as it did through the Blitz).

The plot, however, remains a little predictable, and hits some distinctly Star Wars beats as it trundles towards its end. But there are moments of real grace along the way, and more thrilling adventure than you might expect, so it’s a good start for Rivers and an effort worthy of Jackson’s record.

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Mortal Engines (New Zealand/United States, 2018)

Blessed with a well-paced (although sometimes too frenetic) story that has a beginning, middle, and end, Mortal Engines might have been well-placed to start a new franchise had outside factors not conspired against it. One of the common gripes with movies like this – that they sacrifice the “single movie” story concept in order to facilitate a multi-part arc (that, more often than not, is never given the opportunity to play out, as fans of Divergent will attest) – doesn’t apply here. Screenwriters Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, who are no strangers to movie series, ensure that Mortal Engines remains self-contained while still allowing for the possibility of future installments. (Reeve wrote a four-book set with these characters.) Unfortunately, the collapse of the YA motion picture market coupled with Universal’s decision not to aggressively publicize Mortal Engines , has all-but-assured that this will be a one-and-done affair. And, while I would enjoy seeing more adventures with these characters, I left the theater satisfied with the story I had seen and the “world building” that brings it to life.

If Mortal Engines seems at times like Star Wars , it’s not a coincidence. But that’s not because Reeve and the screenwriters were overly influenced by George Lucas’ movies (although it would be naïve to assume there’s not some of that) but because, as has often been discussed when analyzing Lucas’ storytelling, common tropes and mythologies form the basis not only of Star Wars but many epic stories. The film’s look, shaped under the direction of fist-time director (and Jackson protégé) Christian Rivers, draws on various familiar steampunk sources from Mad Max to The City of Lost Children to a few of Terry Gilliam’s adventures, while maintaining its own identity. The special effects are indeed special and deserve to be seen on a big screen (the bigger, the better). This is one of those rare films when wall-to-wall CGI doesn’t result in an overdose.

It’s increasingly rare that new properties are accorded this sort of big, splashy treatment. In today’s climate, nearly every spectacle is either a sequel or a remake. Mortal Engines isn’t revolutionary nor does it “color outside the lines” in terms of its narrative or character interaction. But it succeeds in telling an engaging tale with sufficient flare and drive that it never threatens to overstay its welcome. As shepherded by filmmakers with a penchant for visual storytelling, Mortal Engines is two hours well-spent.

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Mortal Engines Parent Guide

"mortal engines" features breakneck action sequences, a high-speed and unpredictable plot, top quality cgi, and a unique steampunk aesthetic..

In a post-apocalyptic world dominated by predatory rolling cities, a young woman seeking vengeance and a young man fascinated by the past have their fates bound together as they fight to stop a catastrophic war.

Release date December 14, 2018

Run Time: 128 minutes

Official Movie Site

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kirsten hawkes.

Mortal Engines opens with what must be the most unusual chase scene ever filmed: a massive rolling city is chasing a smaller mobile municipality across the countryside in order to “ingest” it, that is, to use its raw materials as fuel. The scene typifies the entire movie – it’s fast moving, exciting, visually interesting, and distinct from other films in the post-apocalyptic teen movie genre.

This film adaptation is set in a dystopic future. The “Ancients” destroyed the world in their Sixty Minute War using a fearsome “quantum energy” weapon named Medusa. The conflict shattered the earth’s crust, rearranging the continents, devastating the environment, and leaving the survivors in a Darwinian struggle for survival. This battle plays out dramatically between predator cities and “static” cities. One of the largest predator cities is London, which has crossed the land bridge and is devouring Europe’s resources.

Their quest moves extremely quickly: the film has breakneck action sequences, a high-speed and unpredictable plot, top quality CGI, and a unique aesthetic. In fact, the movie’s steampunk design is one of its most appealing features, making it easy for audiences to feel completely immersed in the story’s universe. Screen writer Peter Jackson’s youthful fascination with Star Wars also comes through in the film. Star Wars fans will have fun picking out the allusions and will either be entertained or annoyed by Jackson’s homage to the classic sci fi trailbreaker. Some viewers might also be irked by the plot holes (how did a low-tech society manage to invent giant predatory cities?) but the story’s energy and the likability of the cast are strong enough for the audience to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the show.

Parents looking for an action adventure movie for family viewing can be comfortable in taking their teenagers to Mortal Engines. The movie has no sexual content or drug or alcohol use and only a smattering of curse words. It is, however, very violent, with multiple fight scenes, some of which involve firearms or swords. Characters are wounded and some die, although there is no explicit gore. There is, however, one particularly troubling scene where a father and daughter are locked in combat, each trying to kill the other. The movie also features a Stalker (a cross between a zombie and a cyborg) named Shrike (Stephen Lane) who is a genuinely frightening character and could easily alarm children or sensitive viewers. In terms of messages within the film, parents may be disturbed by one character’s desire for murderous vengeance. Fortunately, the film also provides positive messages about courage, loyalty, sacrifice, and justice.

Moviegoers who enjoy Mortal Engines will be pleased to know that the story is based on the first volume of Philip Reeve’s four novel series. This film stands well on its own and viewers are not left hanging, waiting for a future film to resolve the story. But those who want more can head to their local library to sink deeper into this beautifully imagined world.

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Mortal Engines Rating & Content Info

Why is Mortal Engines rated PG-13? Mortal Engines is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for sequences of futuristic violence and action

Violence: A predator city chases, harpoons, and captures a city. Smaller predator cities chase people and harpoon them; one character is injured by a harpoon. A city is seen rolling over human skulls. Some blood is seen. There is a fistfight between a group of extras. A young woman stabs a man in the abdomen; some blood is shown but he recovers. A woman falls a great distance from a platform. A young man is pushed off the same platform. A woman has flashbacks of the murder of her mother: the violence is not detailed. A man slashes a child’s face with a knife. A man orders a plane to fire on a prison so that an external cage will be released. The prison is destroyed and it is shown burning in the distance and sinking into the sea. Prisoners are taken to a market and sold into slavery. A fight takes place in a public place involving guns (a man’s head is shot off), knives, swords, and hand to hand combat. A man shoots and kills the head of his government. A Stalker (zombie cyborg) fights a crowd of people by punching, stabbing and throwing them off a floating city. Gun fights are held in a church and control room as part of an attempted coup. A woman and man shoot each other and then fight with swords. The woman falls from a balcony. Aircraft attack a moving city which fights back with weapons fire. Some pilots crash and die. A man tries to kill his daughter and she stabs him. A city is attacked with a weapon which causes massive destruction. No deaths are shown up close, but we see walls falling and buildings burning. A plane crashes and the man within is crushed by a rolling city – not seen in detail. Sexual Content: A young man and woman embrace. There is a brief glimpse of a man embracing a woman while lying down. Profanity: There are approximately a dozen mild profanities and terms of deity used in this film. Alcohol / Drug Use: None noted.

Page last updated February 11, 2021

Mortal Engines Parents' Guide

Valentine doesn’t learn from the destruction wrought by the Ancients’ powerful weapon. Why do people so often fail to learn from their history ? What can we do to learn from history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

Valentine describes the predatory cities as practicing “municipal Darwinism”. What do you think that means? Do you agree that Darwinism can be used to apply to human societies? Do you think that social Darwinism remains part of our culture? What are the risks of embracing social Darwinism as a philosophy?

Loved this movie? Try these books…

This movie is based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve. It is the first in a seven novel series so if you enjoy the film, there are a lot of books to look forward to reading.

Did you enjoy the steampunk aesthetic in Mortal Engines ? Heather Dixon’s Illusionarium has a similar feel along with a floating city, a dangerous new drug, and an appealing protagonist.

Kira has grown up in a world devastated by drought. When she discovers the ability to draw water from the ground, Kira finds herself entangled in a battle for power. Dry Souls by Denise Getsen is suitable for teen readers.

In Trail of Lightning, the first book of her Sixth World series, Rebecca Roanhorse introduces readers to Maggie Hoskie, a monster hunter on the Navajo reservation. Ecological disaster has devastated most of the world and Maggie is forced to fight the monsters that stalk her people.

The most recent home video release of Mortal Engines movie is March 12, 2019. Here are some details…

Related news about Mortal Engines

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How much money suicide squad: kill the justice league lost compared to the biggest movie flops.

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What Happened Between Batman: Arkham Knight And Suicide Squad: KTJL?

Suicide squad: kill the justice league review - "not enough to save the day", starfield's best update yet is finally live for all players.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League cost Warner Bros Discovery $200 million.
The game's financial loss is on par with some of the biggest movie flops of all time.
Issues with Suicide Squad: KTJL highlight the risks of banking on live-service revenue streams.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League hasn't been the most resounding success of the year, to put it lightly, and a new report of financial losses from the game puts into perspective just how much of a disappointment it was. Profitability concerns are rife in the video game industry at large, as seen by rounds of recent layoffs that have impacted even the developers behind games that were successful by any normal metric. Even while efforts that can be best described as AA are getting punished, it's the blockbuster AAA titles that are losing the larger investments.

Concerns surrounding Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were established well ahead of its release, as the fanbase built up by developer Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham games never seemed particularly receptive to the new DC venture. Despite awkward assurances that Suicide Squad: KTJL wasn't a live-service title , it very much came across as one, raising concerns about monetization and how much bespoke content would really be there at launch . When it finally came out, things only got worse, with key issues taking the always-online title offline twice within its first few days of early access availability.

A lot has changed in the Arkhamverse in the five years between Batman: Arkham Knight and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Lost $200 Million

Rocksteady's newest game cost warner bros discovery a lot.

As reported by Business Insider based on the first-quarter 2024 earnings of Warner Bros. Discovery, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League racked up a $200 million loss for the company . There's no way to sugarcoat that kind of news, as it's an absolutely enormous sum by any metric. This kind of loss could only come as a consequence of the increasingly Hollywood-like approach to the gaming industry, where major IPs receive lengthy development cycles and massive investments in hopes of profits at a similar scale.

How Suicide Squad: KTJL's Loss Compares To Movie Flops

Kill the justice league is playing with the big boys.

Even in Hollywood itself, however, a failure of this magnitude isn't exactly common. Box office duds come and go with distressing frequency, but the vast majority of films don't cost $200 million to begin with, and anything that does usually has good reason to believe it can make money back. Without taking inflation into account, only three of the biggest box office bombs would fully qualify as equivalent catastrophes, although adjusting for it significantly expands the array.

The performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ultimately fits right in with the biggest financial losses from blockbuster films , occupying a spot right around the middle of the top ten. As the failure of The Marvels earns it the only superhero movie spot on the list, Suicide Squad: KTJL easily nabs the spot of the second-biggest loss from a major release in that field. Considering how poorly some DC films performed in the past year or so, it's noteworthy that none from the brand even come all that close to the game's disaster.

A multiplayer game about killing the Justice League from the creators of the Batman Arkham trilogy fails to revolutionize an oversaturated genre.

Financial success and quality obviously aren't always directly tied, although tepid or outright negative reception rarely helps matters. It's not hard to make an argument that John Carter and The Lone Ranger , which hold the esteemed ranks of the biggest box office flop ever and the direct runner-up, are more interesting ventures than some other Disney properties that were profitable. In the realm of Suicide Squad media, the more recent James Gunn film garnered both significantly better reviews and significantly worse monetary returns than David Ayer's earlier take.

All the same, it's hard to deny that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League suffered from a lack of what made the Batman: Arkham series so beloved . Despite some fluid combat and effective banter, the live-service campaign hasn't proven as compelling as the atmospheric and dynamic stories that previous games boasted . Game companies just keep making big bets on titles that are supposed to deliver continual profits and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an example of how horribly wrong this method can go.

Source: Business Insider

Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League

‘Furiosa’ Review: George Miller’s Latest High Octane Opera Is Supercharged With Lunatic Intensity

“I don’t understand two things,” said the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh of Mad Max: Fury Road in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter . “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” Whether it’s more or less impressive to pull off an impossible feat for a second time — you’ve got the benefit of experience, but the probability of lightning striking the same place twice is even slimmer — George Miller has brought us another comprehension-defying work of high octane opera. Like some kind of madman Moses with nitroglycerine pumping through his veins, he led his people back into the desert and everyone emerged with all their fingers and toes intact, along with the footage containing the most virtuosic action committed to film since the last time he started his engines.

Nine years ago, Fury Road roared into the monoculture with the force of a post-apocalyptic tanker truck for its element of surprise, nobody expecting a consistent yet long-dormant IP fossil to be exhumed and shocked back to life using the technologies of the 21st century. Starting with its clunky clause-swapping title, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga arrives with a clearer mandate, feeling less like the fifth Mad Max installment and more like the second Fury Road . (On streaming channels, the thumbnail art for the first three pictures has also been tweaked to fall in line with Fury Road ’s bright-yellow branding.) The lean-and-mean minimalism of its 2015 predecessor has given way to more expansive ambitions for Furiosa , and the extra half-hour of lore results in some mild bloat. But the core of the series remains the set pieces supercharged with lunatic intensity, incomparable syntheses of intricate choreography, obsessive production design, and death-baiting stuntwork in brash violation of all we know about both modern studio filmmaking and basic physics.

Though most scripting will seem involved in comparison to Fury Road ’s plotline of “they drive over there, then drive back the way they came,” Furiosa mounts a conspicuously vast canvas with multiple chapter cards spanning decades of our grease-streaked heroine’s life. Orphaned and abducted in girlhood by the biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, his curled mustache suggesting the steampunk version of a villain who’d tie a lady to train tracks), Furiosa spends her formative years in captivity, caught in the crossfire between her captor and the equally megalomaniacal Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) as she grows into the steely, taciturn adult originated by Charlize Theron. With her glower set to maximum hardness, Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t play the character so differently, the accomplishments of her performance more physical rather than conceptual. It was never too difficult to surmise the path through the Malthusian dystopia of resource deprivation and male oppression that deposited the character at the beginning of Fury Road , the precise endpoint of Furiosa ‘s preambling, and those wondering about the purpose of laying out her origin won’t find a better answer than getting the backstory on her severed arm.

The impulse to give fans more of the world-building they so crave smacks of corporate cajoling, an air that dissipates during the high-speed raids Miller lives to stage. In the biggest departure from his past exploits, he orients more of the major showstoppers around sniping, a complicated gambit that requires him to maintain spatial coherence between several points of focus as far as a mile away from one another. He orchestrates organized pandemonium in such a way that makes comprehension easy while revealing how hard the crew labored to hold it all together; in pulse-raising crane shots (some of which surely necessitated transferring the camera from one crane to another), we soar over vehicles in motion with judicious precision, the exact opposite of the let’s-just-see-what-we-get attitude prevalent in today’s coverage-style cinematography. All the praise heaped upon Miller the last time around — that he realizes the pure kinetic potential of the medium with more expertise and unbridled glee than anyone alive — still applies.

Miller and his team haven’t stopped playing for love of the game, a passion visible in every fine-tuned facet of production. To pick one, consider the wardrobe department; hundreds of extras in richly and imaginatively detailed costumes, and I don’t think I saw any two wearing the same thing. The willingness to go the extra mile (at lethal ramming speed) sets the property apart from the rest of the popcorn pack, and turns every wide shot into a banquet of little delights. Dementus, for no other reason than it looks cool, travels by several lashed-together motorcycles joined with a single steering rack to resemble a Roman chariot of horses. A disarmingly poignant grace note shows us one War Boy (played by kid amateur Quaden Bayles, previously tapped by Miller for Three Thousand Years of Longing in the wake of news stories about getting bullied for his dwarfism) protecting a supply of fresh produce. Urine plays a more significant role in these proceedings than most of what’ll screen at your neighborhood multiplex this summer.

In this instance, however, the welcome sense of novel idiosyncrasy grinds against an attachment to what worked for Fury Road . Furiosa gains a sidekick to serve the same stoically assistive function as Tom Hardy’s Max in identical turncoat Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the clever inversion of demoting the title character to a supporting player in his own story now gone. Taylor-Joy gets the chance to replay a lot of Theron’s greatest hits as if doing hardship karaoke: same power walk that betrays modeling experience in the hips, same primal scream with the same symbolic significance of gendered pain, same slow-mo close-up as she picks herself up off the ground and shakes out the sand. At a glance, the surest way to tell this film apart from the last would be the occasionally wonky digital compositing in some fight sequences, given away by the telltale muddled lighting heretofore skillfully avoided.

“Do you have it in you to make it epic?” goes a taunt from Dementus, challenging Furiosa not just to take her revenge but to claim her place in legend. The mechanics of mythmaking sculpt the most overtly sequel-minded extension of the Max-iad, the hopelessness of a wasteland without a future leaving her with no choice but to find inspiration in the narrative she’s plotted for herself. Furiosa has nothing to believe in but her own will to survive, the lone rider’s self-sufficiency rooted in the Westerns that have always provided a template for Miller to push against and break. Miller and Taylor-Joy succeed in building her up to be larger than life while staying in touch with her mortal frailties, even if the fixation on her leads them to retread some familiar dunes. To whatever extent this gums up the interstitial works between fume-snorting displays of technical excellence, it can’t slow down a Hollywood anomaly of big-budget artisanship leaving the rest of the pack in its dust. High on exhaust and the limitless capabilities of cinema, this no-brakes franchise keeps careening onward as if it could run forever.

Charles Bramesco ( @intothecrevassse ) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

‘Furiosa’ Review: George Miller’s Latest High Octane Opera Is Supercharged With Lunatic Intensity

‘Mortal Kombat 2’ Lands October 2025 Release Date

By Katcy Stephan

Katcy Stephan

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Warner Bros. is aiming for a flawless victory, dating “ Mortal Kombat 2″ for an IMAX release on Oct. 24, 2025.

The New Line sequel, first announced in January 2022, will be written by Jeremy Slater, best known for the Disney Plus Marvel series “Moon Knight.” Simon McQuoid, who directed “Mortal Kombat,” returns to direct the follow-up. Karl Urban , Adeline Rudolph, Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Tadanobu Asano, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Damon Herriman, Tati Gabrielle Martyn Ford, Max Huang and Ana Thu Nguyen star, with Chin Han, Joe Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada. Todd Garner, James Wan, Simon McQuoid, E. Bennett Walsh and Toby Emmerich are producing.

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In a 2021 interview with Variety , McQuoid hinted at characters he’d be interested in including in a potential sequel. “The reason [Johnny Cage] is not in this original film is he’s such a giant personality that he almost has his own gravitational field. The feeling was that he would throw it out of balance slightly. I get asked about Kitana just as much as Johnny Cage. There’s a lot of interesting characters, story and material to work with.”

Warner. Bros. also revealed a Jan. 10, 2025 IMAX release date for New Line’s “ Companion ,” the sci-fi thriller starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén and Rupert Friend. Drew Hancock will make his feature directorial debut with the feature, for which he also penned the script. Raphael Margules, J.D. Lifshitz, Roy Lee and “Barbarian” filmmaker Zach Cregger will produce.

Another feature written and directed by Cregger, “ Weapons ,” landed a Jan. 16, 2026 release. The New Line project will star Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams and Cary Christopher, with Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan. Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules and Cregger will produce.

Warner Bros. also added several untitled properties to the release calendar today, including a New Line horror film on March 27, 2026, a Warner Bros. family event film on Dec. 18, 2026, a Warner Bros./New Line event film moved to Christmas day 2026 from Dec. 18, 2026 and a Warner Bros. Pictures Animation/Locksmith film on March 26, 2027.

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A Pithy YouTube Celebrity’s Plea: Buy This Video Game

After a decade of humorously reviewing games, the man known as Dunkey began a publishing company to support indie projects, starting with the mazelike Animal Well.

In a video game screenshot, a peacock stands on top of shelves that contain about a dozen colored eggs.

By Zachary Small

Freewheeling assessments of the gaming industry have attracted millions of fans to the YouTube reviews of the personality nicknamed Dunkey , whose self-deprecating humor sweetens his critiques of popular video games.

“Kirby is a lot like me,” he said while reviewing the pink puffball’s latest adventure . “He is a big fat guy that sucks up all the food.”

“I’m just a referee on this one so you cannot get mad,” he explained in a middling review of Spider-Man 2 , aware of the game’s rabid fan base.

“This is an evil game made by an evil man,” he proclaimed about Elden Ring’s difficulty . “And whoever’s job it was to balance the damage-scaling on enemies did not show up for work.”

Now Dunkey, whose real name is Jason Gastrow, is hoping to parlay his 14-year rise as an entertaining critic into a serious business publishing indie games, something few influencers have attempted.

On Thursday, his publishing company, Bigmode, released its first game, Animal Well, in which a mysterious blob explores a complex labyrinth while encountering animals that might help or hinder its journey. Billy Basso spent seven years making the game, which relies on well-designed puzzles and hidden secrets to motivate players and has generated extra attention because of Dunkey.

A few days before the game released on the PC, PlayStation 5 and Switch, Gastrow posted a YouTube video in which he encourages players within Counter-Strike and VRChat to put Animal Well on their wish list.

“He has a specific taste,” said Leah Gastrow, his wife and business partner, who answered questions on behalf of her husband, describing him as press shy. “It has happened time and again where he picks up a game before it has found mainstream success.”

(He gave the 2018 game Celeste, now considered an indie classic, an early rave .)

Game reviewing on YouTube and Twitch is a thriving subculture, with influencers often sponsored by companies to promote their titles in exchange for money.

“The issue comes when influencers are not necessarily adhering to journalistic ethics,” said Ash Parrish, a staff writer at The Verge who covers games. “Dunkey gets around that because he is unafraid to say something is bad; in fact, people like hearing him say that.”

Jason Gastrow says he does not take sponsorship deals to review games. His ability to criticize without scorching the earth behind him has resulted in nearly 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube, where his logo is a donkey wearing sunglasses and smoking a large cigar.

He has also become an unassuming luminary in the gaming industry — someone elected as Wisconsin’s top celebrity in a public vote held by The Milwaukee Record, beating the football coach Curly Lambeau and the actor Gene Wilder.

Animal Well, part of the Metroidvania genre known for its mazelike structures, caught the attention of the Gastrows at the industry event Summer Game Fest in 2022, about the time the couple were discussing plans for their company. Bigmode, which is also publishing Star of Providence, a retro top-down shooter, wants to raise the profile of indie games that reflect the founders’ tastes but not necessarily the dominant trends of larger studios.

For Animal Well, Basso worked alone for nearly 80 hours each week to design its game engine, animations, music and more, relying on savings he earned at large studios like NetherRealm, the developer behind the Mortal Kombat series. He said Bigmode’s feedback improved the gameplay experience.

“Every time that I update the game, they play through from scratch,” Basso said. “The big beats of the game don’t really change that much. Maybe it’s the order you do things or adding visual clues to let players know that certain things are possible.”

Bigmode made only one major request during the development cycle, Leah Gastrow said: Put more animals into the well.

Basso agreed, adding dozens of animals with distinctive animations and interactions. A kangaroo stomps the ground, a sea horse creates helpful platforms with bubbles, and a rabbit seems to guide the player’s way.

The marketing for Animal Well began in earnest when Jason Gastrow introduced himself as “funny man Videogamedunkey” during last year’s Nintendo showcase for independent developers . As Basso spoke about his game, one “filled with puzzles that you would want to keep coming back to over and over again,” Gastrow intentionally stumbled into a pond of quacking ducks behind him.

A thriving Discord channel soon emerged in which players tried to decipher any subliminal content behind each frame of promotional videos. The mysteriousness was part of the publicity strategy by Dan Adelman, who is leading Animal Well’s business development.

“It is a difficult game to market because you cannot communicate its secrets,” Adelman said. “You cannot communicate how good it feels to play.”

The deepest secrets are encrypted. In an interview with Game File , Basso explained that a hacker would need “quantum computers” to access the information without playing Animal Well as intended.

“It is very artistically handled from start to finish,” Leah Gastrow said. “And we will put whatever we can into producing to get this game out to more people.”

Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology. More about Zachary Small

Inside the World of Video Games

What to Play Next?: For inspiration, read what our critics thought about the newest titles , as well as which games our journalists have been enjoying .

Eclectic Influences: The mysterious estate in the puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has its roots in Resident Evil and the French New Wave.

Building on Success: Hades II pursues a tantalizing past , our critic writes. The small studio behind the game was once considered anti-sequel .

Influencers Dying to Go Viral: The horror video game Content Warning lets players microdose as momentary celebrities on the fictional website SpookTube.

Difficult but Accessible: Games like Another Crab’s Treasure are questioning whether fiendish challenges are an intrinsic feature of the Soulslike genre.

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Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis & Philippa Boyens Explain Why They’re Returning To Middle-Earth For ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum’ 23 Years After Cannes Saved The Billion-Dollar Franchise

By Mike Fleming Jr

Mike Fleming Jr

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Film

Andy Serkis To Direct, Star In New ‘Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum’ Set For 2026 Release – Update

Dominic Monaghan, Elijah Wood, Billy Boyd, and Sean Astin in 'The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring'

‘The Lord Of The Rings’ Trilogy: A Look Back At A Breathtaking Gamble 20 Years Later

Go back 23 years, and the road was far more perilous when New Line founder Bob Shaye greenlit three LOTR movies that Jackson shot one after the other in New Zealand. One of the biggest gambles in film history, Shaye’s bet looked to be facing longer odds as bad buzz spread that LOTR would fail and it would not only doom New Line, but its offshore distribution partners. That was until Shaye had the idea to bring 25 minutes to Cannes for a premiere, and fly in the sets to replicate Middle-earth haunts like The Shire for a blowout bash at a nearby castle. Both Shaye gambles paid off: the bad buzz on the movie dissipated, and the question became, just how successful would these movies be? The principals revisited those moments several years ago for a Deadline Disruptors Magazine article to commemorate the 20 th year of the release of The Fellowship of the Rings .

And so the choice for another movie became Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum . And the other surprise was that Andy Serkis , the actor who turned in those breathtaking Gollum performances, would helm the film. With every chance that cast members from the original will drop in, as Bloom’s Legolas did in The Hobbit .

Not only was Serkis eager to reprise his role as the malevolent, tragic creature, but he also sparked to step up to his biggest challenge, as the film’s director. While Gollum’s backstory was dished in small doses during LOTR , Jackson told Deadline that there is much more ground to cover. Especially in the periods when Gollum was off the grid.

“The Gollum/Sméagol character has always fascinated me because Gollum reflects the worst of human nature, whilst his Sméagol side is, arguably, quite sympathetic,” Jackson told Deadline. “I think he connects with readers and film audiences alike, because there’s a little bit of both of them in all of us. We really want to explore his backstory and delve into those parts of his journey we didn’t have time to cover in the earlier films. It’s too soon to know who will cross his path, but suffice to say we will take our lead from Professor Tolkien.”

After Jackson undertook the arduous task of directing three LOTR rings in one big shoot, he tapped Guillermo del Toro to take the helm of The Hobbit trilogy. When that didn’t work out, Jackson stepped in and warmed to the challenge of the prequel story of Bilbo Baggins. It would have been a lot to ask him to direct another trio, and to him, the easiest part of the decision to dive back into Tolkien’s Middle-earth was to hand the baton to Serkis.

Serkis has been steadily building toward a career move like this. After he distinguished himself as second unit director for Jackson’s The Hobbit films, Serkis has helmed increasingly ambitious films — Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle — after starting with the touching love story Breathe . He’s wrapped his first animated film, an adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm . Serkis has also continued to immerse himself in the technical aspects and performances of motion capture that made Gollum so breathtaking in the LOTR films. That included playing Caesar in the Matt Reeves-directed Planet of the Apes trilogy, and serving as Visual Effects Motion Capture EP on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.

To Jackson and Philippa Boyens – who wrote the first six films with Fran Walsh – giving Serkis the job was the easiest decision they had to make.

“Andy was a joy to work with directing Second Unit on The Hobbit ,” Jackson said. “He has the energy and imagination and, most importantly, an inherent understanding of the world of the story that is needed to step back into Middle-earth.

“We have collaborated on eight films together and each time it has been a fantastic experience. There’s no one in this earth better equipped to tackle Gollum’s story than Andy.”

“Gollum’s story is one of the most compelling to us in terms of a character that we couldn’t go as deeply into as we wanted to before, which sounds strange when you say that, given how familiar he is to everybody,” Boyens told Deadline. “Gollum’s life span takes place in such an interesting period of Middle-earth. When the question was first asked, this was the first story we thought of. Because I can tell you, and people might not believe this, but we had zero expectations of going back to this. It wasn’t something we were looking to do, particularly. So when the question was asked, it was, what would draw you back? And it was about working with the people we we’re working with. It was also about the chance to work with Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy at the studio. Alan Horn is now back at the studio. It just felt right.”

That included the elevation of Serkis to the director’s chair.

“Pete has always admired Andy’s abilities as a director,” she said. “That’s why he asked him to shoot his second unit. It was kind of a no brainer. It was never about, why Andy? It was like, please, God, let Andy say yes. We wanted him to tell the story of Gollum and the hunt for Gollum as soon as we decided, okay, that’s the story. And Pete knew he didn’t want to direct go back into the world of Middle-earth again. [Peter] really enjoyed working with Kenji Kamiyama, who directed War of the Rohirrim . As soon as Pete decided, okay, I’m not going to direct it myself, and it’s going to be Gollum’s story, I swear to God, there was no one else but Andy Serkis.

“There’s nobody else you can think of who knows what goes into that character and we know what he brings to it and brings to the whole world of Middle-earth. Andy is going to have a really interesting take. It’s going to be his own take, because what we don’t want this film to be is just the fourth film in the trilogy. This film has to work in its own way. And that’s our job. That’s what we are going to have to be able to do. I know there’s plenty of people out there who will be like, oh no, why are they doing this? Why are they going back in? Well, that’s our job, to prove why we think that it’s a good idea.”

To Serkis, the opportunity brings his career full circle from when his Gollum portrayal put on the map a highly physical but difficult to characterize actor. Many recall that moment, sitting in the theater watching the second LOTR installment The Two Towers , when Gollum is having a bitter fight with himself over whether to obey Frodo and guide him to Mordor, or kill him and his sidekick Sam and take back the ring. It was a seminal moment for motion capture, in its way as much a seminal screen moment as the coffee shop scene in Heat between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Serkis has been part of the continued development of bringing creatures to life through acting performance and VFX, and he’s eager to put his own stamp on it over two decades after The Two Towers .

It turns out that Serkis never really ventured that far from the character that most defines him.

“Gollum has always stuck with me throughout all of these years,” he said. “I’ve read audio books of the trilogy and the Silmarillion and The Hobbit , so Tolkien’s world has never left me in all of that time since we did the first films. And the character particularly has remained such an enormous part of my life. So it’s absolutely thrilling to be able to go back and do a deep dive into his world again, and specifically into Gollum’s psychology. I know we’re all interested in investigating on a deeper level who that character is, and on top of that, to be able to direct and hopefully create a film which has its place within the canon, but also something that’s fresh and new and a different approach.”

That includes taking advantage of the technological enhancements made in the last two decades.

“Mike, the thing is, at that time, the motion capture technology back then was pretty much restricted to interior sets and it was just motion capture at that time,” Serkis said. “And throughout the course of the evolution of the technology through the Apes movies, it changed. For instance, we were able to untether it from a volume and allow real performance capture, because in those three films, the first three films, the facial was all animated, copying my facial expressions. But it wasn’t driven by a performance capture, the delicacy and the nuance that was then able to be caught using head-mounted cameras. During the Apes movies is when the real experimentation began with going outdoors and shooting on location. And those are the big movies. And obviously Jim Cameron was working on his Avatar movies alongside Weta. They were pushing the nuances of facial performance with facial capture as well. Weta has been at the forefront of it particularly. And so it really has now reached a level where the authorship of the performances … allows you to actually internalize more without any sense of overacting, or the closeup is the detail within a closeup when you’re being very still. This is something that is clearly working at a much greater and a deeper level now.”

While it’s early going, Serkis sounded optimistic about working in appearances from some of the actors who brought LOTR and The Hobbit trilogies to life.

“That’s a difficult question to answer right at this moment in time, because we’re really in the nascent stages of what it is exactly where we’re doing, and where the story’s going to take us,” he said. “So I don’t want to commit anything right now. I mean, because it’s so raw and so raw and wriggling, and we are just literally having very early state script discussions and ideas of exactly where and how we’re going to drop anchor with the character and his journey and how he is or comes into contact with other characters, and the characters that we know and don’t know. So still, I would hate to say anything that’s going to commit us at this point, because it’s literally all up for grabs.”

Jackson, Serkis and cohorts also understand that Middle-earth has gotten crowded, what with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power completing its first strong season at a reported $450 million investment by Amazon.

“We have the right to the Lord of the Rings and the appendices, and that’s it,” Boyens said. “I would love to see that expand if there was the opportunity to do so, but there is so much that is in those three books. I know that especially hardcore fans of Professor Tolkien, they always get nervous that there’s only so much story. But look at War of the Rohirrim . It’s a page and a half at first glance in the books. But there are lots of threads throughout the book.

“ War of the Rohirrim sits 200 years before the events of the ring, and it really is a standalone story,” Boyens said. “It was one of the reasons that I came to that story when we were looking to do something that would fit with anime. We wanted to do something that really had nothing to do with rings of power or Sauron or the Dark Tower or wizards, even. It’s a story about a people who are tearing themselves apart. So that felt like a really good fit, not only for anime, but to go into a new art form which anime is, and try and tell a story based in Middle-earth without touching really upon the live action films, if that makes sense. What it did do for us though was re-ignite that passion for the world and for the work of Professor Tolkien. It absolutely has done that, and I think it surprised us. We fell back into the world really easily and it just felt like a natural fit. It also showed us, it certainly showed me, how deep that mythology runs and how much story is left to be told.

“This is something that Professor Tolkien did himself and it is what worked so well,” she said. “He drew upon existing mythologies to create this world.”

Tolkien also gave permission for others to pivot.

“He wrote a letter to Milton Waldman in 1951 that said, ‘I would draw some of the great tales in fullness and leave … scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.”

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